Warding against the perils of denial and cynicism

“Guard your heart with everything you have in you,” is one way to interpret Proverbs 4:23, “for out of it is the spring of life.”  This is the narrow way that Jesus spoke about, and the road less travelled, according to M. Scott Peck.

Yet, inevitably, life will take us on some perilous journeys where we’ll dabble in denial on the one hand and cynicism on the other.

Cynicism says, “Life is a crock, there’s nothing and nobody to trust other than those who agree with me, there are conspiracies at every turn, and let’s make everything as complex as we can, unless of course we find a thing ludicrous—which is an easy way of rejecting what might possibly be good (to others).”

Those who end up cynical are seething scorners who constantly brood looking for the bad.

Denial is the trap on the other side.  Those that are here cannot contemplate venturing out into life.  “Life is all too hard, situations everywhere are too scary, it’s easier to hide away and anesthetise oneself, safe and comfortable to dream about what won’t be dared and won.”

Both cynicism and denial are tragedies.  Burned by life is the former, the latter has been buried.  One scoffs at hope, the other doesn’t dare to hope.

The narrow way of neither going into cynicism nor denial requires the protecting of one’s heart.

Life is tough, just as there are tough situations and tough people, and conflict will damage us, as will loss, if we let them.

When we fail, we need to go easy on ourselves, learning humbly what we can, without saying to ourselves that we’re useless, worthless, or stupid.  It takes a lot of humility and courage to accept the temporary shame of having failed.  Such shame is connected to self-condemnation, so we must resist that inner voice saying, “How could you do such a thing?”

When we find ourselves in conflict, we must hold the moment sufficiently so that we don’t react and make the moment worse, especially because our biases and self-defence come to the fore.  Giving ourselves a few moments, hours, and even a day or two to weigh matters is wisdom.

Realistically, we can only negotiate conflict from a position of having seen OUR contribution.  It’s both peace and freedom to enter into dialogue knowing what WE could have done better.  If it’s all about the other person and what they did wrong, we’ve got nothing, and reconciliation has no hope.

There’s just no peace unless we contribute peace.

BUT when we find ourselves treated unjustly, we protect our heart when we attribute the other person’s attack or snub as something going on for them; we resist feeling like it’s all our fault.

When we suffer loss we WILL enter grief—and so we need to give ourselves permission to grieve well, rather than sink into denial or rage against the pain in cynicism.

This is an allowance that grief takes time, and it’s the maturity to accept that a life we didn’t want to say goodbye to is now gone.  Typically, it takes months even years to come to terms with such confounding concepts.

In our overload and overwhelm, where there’s just no time for us to be us, it’s so easy to become jaded.  Life feels so unjust when there are so many demands on us.  We go from one thing to another to another to another.  There seems to be no peace and no opportunity to empty our minds and let the waves of the shore sweep over us.  But we need to find ourselves a portion of hope—a few things each week that we can look forward to.

To get beyond bitter and to move on to become better is contingent on protecting our heart.  It’s never too late to repent of the anger in cynicism or the fear in denial.  In fact, it’s life when we do.