Safe enviroment

Hi

I am thinking of what is the most precious thing one can achieve in life. Something you cannot buy with money.  I think it is a cliche to say friendship and love are the most valuable things you can find in life. Maybe they are some of the right answers but they are so vague and broad that everyone has a different understanding of them. Maybe that is why they are so valuable. Because they are two things that can be understood in different depths and it takes experience and time to go deep into them. 

You probably have a similar experience that when you were a kid, kids in the next grade looked so superior to you. They looked like titans as someone said. But now, if you are over 20, when you look back at people who are younger than 16-17 you do not feel like that about them. You have gone through a lot of emotional experiences that make you think they have to spend a lot of time to understand life. The same thing happens when someone goes through emotional turmoil at any point in life. 

I think this kind of understanding happens in understanding the depth of darkness in human emotions. People get a lot more life experience in dark experiences like a breakup or a mental breakdown than in happy experiences like partying. 

So the depth is what matters. That is because the purest form of effort which is suffering is spent on it. One thing you value the most is what you have gone through. You can compare yourself with someone else based on their judgment about a certain situation based on their opinions. When someone gives naive or shallow opinions about a point, you can understand the wrongness about them. Someone in this position gives me a feeling of an adult-child relationship. You cannot right their wrong because they do not have enough experience and one of the hard parts of being an adult is to tolerate the naivety of the child. Of course, this is a relative relationship and you can be an adult in front of someone and a child in front of someone else. So if you do not like tolerating childishness, be a good kid in front of an adult. It is hard to say the type of relationship when you have the lower hand so my practice is just accepting everyone as my teachers until they bring themselves down to a child.

It is hard to be a teacher. A teacher must be able to open up a channel with the kid to teach what needs to be taught. The hard part of it is being able to gain the trust of the other person. Some people need to see calmness, some people need to see the power, some people want to see the beauty, some people want to see wisdom, etc. One of the qualifications of a teacher is to be able to satisfy the mental need of the student naturally. A student may challenge the teacher to find out their depth and if the teacher does not have deep roots in the subject, the test will be failed, and either their role will swap or they both have to find a better person. That is why I try to stay on the student side till another role is asked of me. It is a peaceful approach: To not try to prove anything to anyone until they ask for it.

Time will shuffle the cards and everyone will find their role. Some games are challenging and different people have different levels of power. Some can hurt you seriously and that adds to your depth of experience in the darkness. I see a win in losing a battle or getting seriously injured. It is a mental game and the only thing which can happen is to understand more and more. In all cases pain is real and real pain hurts. The question is will you accept to be hurt.