Guiding Light: Revenge is a Dish Best Never Served

Nothing has warped our perspective as much as the perception that life is a zero sum game. Whether it’s at work, or in friend circles, we can often feel threatened by the success of another. It’s the poverty mindset at work under the hood, which makes us believe that for someone else to gain, we are in some tangential way having to forego or lose something. The truth couldn’t be farther from this, there is enough for everyone to go around, if we can only expand our tunnel vision to look beyond the pond or well that we find ourselves in, and suddenly the world is our oyster!

And in this race to get ahead, people are often ‘cruising for bruising, causing affronts intentionally or sometimes even without realising it. And of course, with every action having an equal and opposite reaction, that sets into motion a domino effect of reaction and negativity, that pollutes the life experience for a whole chain of people, related through a causal unpleasant interaction. 

When the ego gets triggered, a reaction inevitably starts to formulate and then that unpleasant taste of revenge surfaces. That grudge you’re holding actually starts to wreak havoc in your bloodstream, producing the stress hormone, cortisol and suppressing the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin. So you see, it is actually true that revenge actually harms you a lot more than the recipient of your negativity.

Life is far too short and experiences far too transient to give them permission to toxify your limited existence and upset your peace of mind. Spirituality lends us the perspective that’s needed to either ignore or deflect negativity that comes our way, or to forgive and forget. That’s not to say that serious transgressions must be overlooked, they of course need to be dealt with using the legal and other means that are available to us, depending on where they happened. But for the minor intentional or unintentional sleights, it’s probably in everyone’s best interest to let them slide, rather than lose months agonising over something that an insensitive person said, without taking even a second to think it through. Live and let live.