Points of failure: Avoid the second arrow.

At the urging of multiple close friends, I went to see Sinners last month. 

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have. I have a long track record of finding modern mainstream movies horrible; over-explained, overly packaged, and with nothing left to the imagination. 

Afterward, one of those friends and I got into it. He loved the film. I couldn’t understand how. 

“Not everything needs to be deep and drawn out,” he said.

Fair. Entertainment is valid on its own. But I pushed back hard, then felt like an asshole:

• Had I been too aggressive?

• Did I come across as snobby?

Later In the month another friend asked if I would host a concert for him while he was in town. I turned him down. 

“I was kinda counting on you to help out,” he said. I heard the disappointment in his voice.

I explained that I was consciously trying to take things off my plate. That I’d already decided to take a break from promoting to focus on creating. I knew I made the right call, but I still felt like a lousy friend. 

I’ve been noticing how easily I carry guilt around. 

As if not meeting someone’s expectations makes me a bad person. My mind is quick to self-punish, instead of just recognizing it for what it is: 

• Sometimes plans don’t align.

• Sometimes opinions differ.

Recently, I came across the same Buddhist parable in two different books. It explains how the discomfort we feel when a negative event occurs, get’s compounded by our emotional reaction to it. 

“When touched by a painful event, the uninstructed sorrows, grieves, and laments; he weeps, beating his breast and becomes distraught. He feels two pains, physical and mental. It is as if he were shot with one arrow, and then, because of his reaction, he is shot with a second arrow.”

Put simply: 

• The first arrow is what happens: an accident, a disagreement, a rejection.

• The second arrow is the story we make up about it: The self-blame, the guilt, the anger.

When I spoke to both of my friends again, neither remembered the conversation in the way I did. I realized I’d been shooting myself for no reason. Not because I did anything wrong, but because I’d imagined that I had.  

So I’m trying to drop the guilt. 

There will always be first arrows; life guarantees them. But I can spare myself the extra bruising if I learn to hold off on shooting the second.