The One You Feed

It is when I saw this video by Artma that reminded me of the popular parable of Two Wolves.

A quick recall – The story is about an old grandfather who teaches his grandson about there being two wolves insides us. One is evil. It is anger, greed, ego, jealousy, resentment, inferiority and lies. The other is good. It is joy, love, peace, empathy, hope, humility, kindness, and truth.

The little boy upon listening comes back with a question – “Grandpa, which wolf wins?” and the old man smilingly replies, “The one you feed.”

As a frequent social media user, you might have noticed how ads appear amidst your scrolling and they are based on topics or things you like or prefer. You like a particular product, you get more information on that product or others in the similar realm. You read about a certain outlook and you are fed more of that, each time reinforcing your beliefs and not giving you an option to steer away (unless of course you voluntarily want to do it). That’s termed retargeting in the online marketing business lingo.

It took me a while to understand that it’s principle possibly lay on the basis of “what you feed, grows”. Since you keep consuming a certain kind of content all the time, you are fed more of such similar ideas and that goes on an on.

When I look back at times that I’m not my best, I realize how I am caught up in a vicious cycle. Some negative reactions to a situation trigger back into the emotional system as hurt, the resultant to which is more negative reactions. The loop is working; the feedback one. Basically, feedback loops are systems where the output is returned back to the input of the system, essentially causing the system to respond to itself. 

For example, I had been meaning to write blogs regularly. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, it’s not that I don’t have personal perspectives to share, it’s not that I can’t take out time to even pen down a few words. But, what I was caught in was my own web of negativity (judgements, critics, imposter syndrome, why am I even doing this, what does this even lead to etc. etc.). The lesser I wrote, the more overwhelmed I became of the number of days that I had skipped, the more glaringly it stood out to me that I am ineffective or a total failure; feelings which triggered me into getting deeper inside the cocoon rather than breaking out of it. I fed fear, it came out as irritation, frustration, hopelessness, and eventually more distress.

How I am breaking the vicious cycle and committing to myself, I’ll reserve it for a separate post, but, back to the wisdom from the above story, I realized a few things:

Just as there are external events beyond our control, there’re some aspects within us also that we can’t seem to control. The two wolves will always live. As humans, it’s unattainable for one of them to die, within us. There will be negative emotions but the task is to simply let them pass by and not react. So, while you give a nutritious meal to one (fill it to it’s brim and keep giving), you share meagre partakings to the other (keep it in check else it’ll try and predate the other wolf).

In the battle between the courage wolf and fear wolf, you don’t need to hate the latter to disengage it, because hate is itself an emotion belonging to it. All we need is to focus on feeding the courage wolf.

The two wolves are not necessarily two extremes of human behaviour. While one wolf could be the one we outwardly are (our egos), the other is what we inherently are. Behind the masks and titles, we are all beings craving for basic human emotions. If I’m more concerned about how my blog is being judged, it’s my ego at play, while all I want is the core need of “belongingness.”

Irrespective of where in the societal ranks a person is, every individual fights these battles between anger and peace or pomposity and humility. It gets us to become more accepting of people in general, whether we choose to have them in our lives or no, is a different choice, but we get to stop harboring hostility.

Every day, we have a choice of how to spend our time and/or the attitude we bring with us. Let’s consciously and purposefully use it to do things that keep us contented.

Thank you for reading and I would love to get to know your thoughts too. Please feel free to drop your comments below or chat up through any of the messengers 🙂