“The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
–William Makepeace Thackeray
If we smile into a mirror, the image will smile back. If we frown, the frown will be returned. The same is pretty much true of the world. If we go through life sowing the seeds of hatred, we will reap our share of what we have sown. Similarly, if we attempt to spread love throughout life’s journey, we will find a lot more love along the way than we anticipate.
If we expect the world to be a dangerous and unfriendly place, we will most likely find it so. If we look for good in the world, we won’t always find it, but we will find it far more often than if we were not looking for it. In short, as we journey through life, we will tend to reap much of what we sow.
The preceding statements tend to be true if we always focus on the big picture, because there are a lot of loving people in the world just as there is an abundance of hatred. However, in individual relationships with some people, we will not always find that the more love we give the more we will receive in return. Those of us who are loving and optimistic about life may find ourselves in a marriage relationship or a parent-child relationship in which the more love we give, the more hostility we experience.
Some of us are so loving that we can’t imagine anybody not being loving. We tend to gauge the expected response from the other person in the relationship to our loving actions on the basis of how we would react under the same circumstances. We can’t possibly see that the other person may see our love as a weakness and attempt to take advantage of it. Nevertheless, a small percentage of the population does exactly that. Many good books have been written in recent years raising public awareness to the problem that Dr. Susan Forward calls “emotional blackmail” in her excellent book of the same title.
Dr. Forward describes emotional blackmail as: “…a powerful force of manipulation in which people close to us threaten to punish us for not doing what they want. Emotional blackmailers know how much we value our relationships with them. They know our vulnerabilities and our deepest secrets. They can be our parents or partners, bosses or coworkers, friends or lovers. And no matter how much they care about us, they use this intimate knowledge to win the payoff they want: our compliance.”
We need to be aware that some individuals cannot be pleased no matter what we do, and the harder we try to please them, the more determined they are to gain complete control over our lives through emotional blackmail. Fortunately, such people represent a small percentage of the total population, so we can still count on love winning out over hatred in the big picture of life. Generally speaking, if we want the world to smile at us we must smile at it.
Think about it.
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Copyright 2024
Allen W. Smith
