Slow Havamal: 123

[kylec]

In verse 123, Odin says there is no reward for dealing with bad men, but good men will raise your reputation with their praise.

We often have to deal with people who just aren’t that nice. Sometimes, circumstances force us. Others, we’re compelled by social customs. And still others, we grin and bear it because we believe that the benefit is worth the pain. But Odin warns that whatever we believe we will gain is an illusion. Out time is best spent the company of good people.

Just this morning I happened on a lecture by psychologist Eugene Gendlin in which he stated several times that, “A person is an interaction.” Note that he didn’t say “part of” an interaction. In fact, he belabored the point that in his view, there is no content to a person, no eternal traits or pieces we can pile up. He believes that what we think of as the self emerges from interactions. We interact with humans, animals, plants, the atmosphere, gravity, and many other forces. More appropriately, each of us emerges from these interactions—a contention that Alfred North Whitehead would probably find agreeable.

Even if you intend to be the same person with everyone, say the same phrase at each encounter, something is different. The outer context, your inner feeling, your tone, body language, and many other things that are easily discerned by others. As Jorge Luis Borges put it, “Everything happens for the first time, in a way that is eternal.”

So the people I choose to relate to are more than mere influences. In a process-relational philosophy, we are emergent from that collision. They compose me as much as I compose them. Whatever I think “bad man” means, however I comport myself, when I interact with a scoundrel the “me” that emerges in the next moment does so from that person (among other things), with their imprint.

While Odin seems to suggest that bad men will simply be unreliable and dishonest, and good men will give us five-star reviews to our neighbors, the rewards from that interaction are already a part of us before anyone speaks a word. My bad mood or plummeting standards of behavior are also what I get for thinking that some material or social benefit is worth the company of jerks.

If we believed that each person we met composed us, like the notes of a song, would that change who we spent our time with? What if we extended that to every meal we ate, every sunset we enjoyed, every road we walked? And though it’s inevitable that we have our share of rough encounters, to abide among the good is its own reward.