Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘“Most people do make accommodations. You look at this from a very special point of view. You have an unusual purity of intention. You’re extremely intelligent, absolutely logical. You demand that everyone else live up to this standard.”

I said I didn’t live up to it myself.

“Always being right doesn’t necessarily make you feel good about yourself.”

I said I supposed he was saying that I wasn’t always right.

“I’m saying you can’t let yourself not be. You can’t let yourself make mistakes, be human. Having to be right is like the Midas touch. You think it would be wonderful if everything you touched turned to gold, then you find you’ve turned to gold yourself, stopped being human.”

I said this discussion was kind of striking, because every fight you and I ever had came down to your thinking I was holding myself up as always right. I said I always had trouble understanding this, because I didn’t feel right.

“Of course you don’t feel right. You could never be right enough to make you feel good about yourself. There’s a certain kind of family that encourages the kind of personality you are. Children in that kind of family think if they’re right they’ll be loved. Then they get to be adults, and they don’t understand why being right doesn’t make other people love them. And it doesn’t. It isolates them. They can’t accept other people’s mistakes, because they can’t accept their own. What’s interesting here is that we’re talking about the same thing now that we were talking about when you came in. About feeling fragile, threatened by other people, threatened by a world you can’t control. What happened to you when you fell is that you lost control. That’s the one thing you’re most afraid of losing. You don’t understand living without control. Which is another way of saying you don’t understand not having to be right.”’ (from What We Knew Without Knowing, quoted in the New Yorker)