The Wolf You Feed

To be honest, this story does not flow very well, as its beginning sits in my mind. Mostly, I think, it is because I have no neat and bow-tied ending for it that I can see. It just sits there, and just IS. Bear with me?

Unverified internet knowledge accredits the Cherokee for the story about The Wolf You Feed. I came across it years ago and it has resonated with me immediately, despite me at the time still wearing SteelCaps.

An elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. Inside every single person, every day. He said, 

“My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, and compassion.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The elder simply replied, “The one you feed.”

It is such a good depiction of humanity’s hearts and minds, how else do you explain the variety of people both hardships and privilege produce.

Then there is the science of the human brain and the long established conclusion that the better part of our brain cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, explaining why stories make us cry and laugh just as much whether they are true or fictional.

The perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions. That’s why emotions don’t just motivate us to act in certain ways but force us to interpret the world differently.

Which is the solution to the paradox of fiction, and why telling ourselves, “It’s only a movie,” can only partially attenuate the feelings we have about it. Our brains can’t help but believe.

Jim Davies

So today I find myself pondering; if both of them hold true, shouldn’t I be so much more careful with the stories I consume and even the ones I create?

If my mind, most of it at least, cannot help but believe any story I feed it, would then not also both wolves be fed by all of them? By every bit of information and story I look at? Every news story, every fiction and prose, every movie and TV show, everything I pay attention to, really?

Does payment in form of my attention towards something actually buy it, meaning it will be consumed by one wolf or the other no matter what, consciously or otherwise?

Throughout the last couple of days, I find myself gazing at the nightly skyline, city alight with tiny dots of lit windows, each representing all the humans out there, and I yearn. My heart is heavy with longing and nostalgia. In less fancy words: I am feeling lonely and I am craving human connection. 

So in good old fashioned avoidance, I chose to eat some more dinner than I needed, paired that with watching a cute romantic TV show and added a beer for good measure.

Do I feel less lonely now? No, of course not, I was practicing avoidance, not dealing or acceptance.

But what caught my attention, was the shift in my longing. Before, I was craving human connection indiscriminate of the kind of connection. Now, there is a biased wishing for a white knight in shining armour, a saviour, to appear.

You know the feeling, the one where you really want to find “the One”, where the focus of your thoughts zones into “everything would be so much better, so much more, so much easier, so much … everything, if I found my destined soulmate”.

Going back through my life, I have had many such moments, many such cravings, and in decades past, I would fall, no, run actually, down a rabbit hole of rom-coms, swoon-worthy TV shows, and romance novels, growing more and more fixated, frustrated and depressed. Because, you know, according to all theses ingested stories, true love cannot be found, it has to find you. “The One” has to find you. Thus putting the solution to your increasingly bad feelings squarely outside your own realm of influence. And oh!, isn’t impotence one of the most potent agents of desperation?

And desperation leads to? Yes, poor life choices. All of them involved projecting these pent-up feelings, hopes, and expectations onto the very next person of the opposite gender that paid any sort of attention to me, turning them into the mirage of my white knight in shining armour. Which, of course, solved all my problems for exactly as long as it took for reality to crash the party. Not long, that is to say.

So I am now officially taking a moment here to celebrate that today’s me pulled up short, aware of my feelings, and made the decision to switch off the TV and grab a notebook and pen. Hooray me, well done!

Looking at it, writing it out, the only difference between the longing earlier this week for connection and tonight’s obsession with “I need a relationship” is the story I paid attention to. The cutesy TV show that neatly fed my wolves lines such as:

• “Happiness can be found outside yourself in another person”
• “The right person will save you from yourself and all the right changes will happen by magic”
• “True happiness can only be obtained in pairs”
• “The right person will reveal your purpose in life”

It is not the right wolf that was fed here, I don’t think. Not at all. 

Simply by consuming such innocent fairytale messages, my thoughts were redirected, as I did not crave a white knight at the beginning. I was longing for connection, any and all. Which is, by the way, a thing much more inside my own sphere of influence.

I have met truly joyful people, that, independent of their relationship status, are feeling that every single connection made throughout every day with all people, from cashier to colleagues to friends, is filling up their connection-meter, bringing joy and purpose. It is at the core of so many philosophies, that I am sure I am neither the first nor the only one to truly believe this, whilst struggling with the application.

I have heard members of minorities find words around the thought of a fundamental sense of one’s own wrongness if one cannot find oneself represented in one’s clan/village/community. That includes TV, movies, novels, stories. 

It makes sense, if everyone is green and I am the only blue one, my sense of survival tells me I’m the first one eaten by a tiger because I stand out.

How often do we come across stories that do not involve finding your destined soulmate? Even political thrillers and action movies now always have a subplot of that kind involved, which they did not, some decades ago.

Yes, there are documentaries about yogis, priests, philosophers and such, but those only serve to highlight their rarity, not their commonness. 

Those documentaries suggest that there is nothing wrong with me per se, but the utter lack of representation in any other form of common stories in this age makes it hard to feel my place in this here world. It is hard to feed the right wolf and very, very easy to feed the wrong one. There is a lack of stories around and about people like us.

So maybe this is why this writing now sits on a page and not just in my head anymore – so that there is one more story about connection over fairytales. So that maybe you find it, and see yourself and know that there is more than just you.

With love, Uggs