I think this is true. You can value your beer can collection, your antique cars, and you can value people in your life whose place and purpose you seek to define for them.
This is my problem: I lost the ability to look into my mothers eyes and feel seen long ago. What she sees, what she needs to see, what she demands of me emotionally to give her, is who I was when I was obedient, quiet, and when I belonged to her. I feel this pressure when I am with her. She has no idea she is doing it. Almost nothing she does is conscious. It’s all impulse, papered over with very soothing self conceits and deceptions.
Life is fragile, uncertain, risky. Not everyone can deal with this. Many people seek to make of everything a routine, a certainty, a known, a given, an integer between 1 and 7.
And people are the least certain, the most risky. The solution? Control them. Force them to be as they were, to not change, to not evolve, to “blossom”, if they are to do so, in ways which are material and not spiritual.
And as my own children grow, I realize that soon they will have full and rich lives quite apart from me. What was, will be no more. I need a new purpose.
Controlling others is a way of governing ones own unprocessed fear and uncertainty. It is a way of reducing the world to a box which is known.
The more fear in the world, the more certain this impulse is to take root and grow.
For me, this insight brings me comfort. It explains, in better language than I have yet been able to use, why things are the way they are.
It is rare to look into someone else’s eyes and feel seen. Most people hide, and then wonder why they feel alone. When you do feel seen, this is so rare you call it love.
Perhaps the Buddhist path is about making a friend of the world, and of all humanity, because you have nothing to hide, and so can be seen by everyone, and can see others as they are. You are nourished and nurtured everywhere you go, and everywhere you look.