I Have No Enemies

Hard feelings corrode their hosts.

I haven't been able to get The Avett Brothers' “No Hard Feelings” very far out of my head since watching Rick Rubin listen to it on a podcast in April. But I don't particularly want to get it out of my head either. So I'm going to explore that song and its lyrics and the places they take me in this post. But first, let's listen to the song while watching Rick Rubin listen to it.

And if you want the studio view of that recording, here it is.

(And if you want to hear my favorite performance of the song, you’ll find that at the bottom of this post.)

All right. Let's do this.

---

When my body won't hold me anymore
And it finally lets me free
Will I be ready?

The days that I don't think about death are rare. Sometimes it happens by accident. But usually I go there because I want to. Because I feel my thoughts turning there and I make a conscious decision to follow them. Giving a few minutes to death each day fills that day with more life. I've even started to think of days as little lives. Sleep as nightly deaths. Mornings as another chance to “get ready.” I don't remember when I started thinking this way. But I know that listening to this song highlights the thoughts. So what does it mean to get ready for death? And what does it mean if death's the only thing on the menu each night?

When my feet won't walk another mile
And my lips give their last kiss goodbye
Will my hands be steady?
When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts
The rings on my fingers, and the keys to my house
With no hard feelings

Fears, hopes, doubts, and possessions. But mostly fears. Fear in the steadiness (or lack thereof) of our hands. Fear on the other side of hope. Fear at the root of doubt. Fear in the form of letting go of one's possessions. Fear in the form of everything but the act of letting go of everything. Because letting go of everything requires letting go of fear (of everything). The answer to our question, I think, starts there. What does it mean to get ready for death? It means laying down our fears. But it also means purging ourselves of any and all hard feelings. And it might mean doing these things every day. Or at least trying to.

When the sun hangs low in the west
And the light in my chest won't be kept
Held at bay any longer

I don't know how far back it goes or where it begins. But the idea that there's a "light" in our chests is a lasting one. Few are the unfamiliar, I would guess. I'm not going to try to intellectualize the feeling I have that something about this "light" seems correct to me. I think it defies my understanding. It's like how dogs will never understand the concept of reflection no matter how many mirrors they look into or how much time they spend on the endeavor. Humans don't get to understand the concept of that light. But whatever it is, I think it's in all of us, and I think it's all one light. And I like the idea that our death sets our share of that light free.

When the jealousy fades away
And it's ash and dust for cash and lust
And it's just hallelujah
And love in thought, love in the words
Love in the songs they sing in the church
And no hard feelings

So we've purged everything. And that mysterious light in us breaks free and goes into the great beyond, or wherever chest-lights go. Where are we? Are we that light? Were we always that light? And if that's all that remains of us in the end, of what importance was everything else? I said I wouldn't intellectualize the light. But now I'm going to intellectualize the light. I think it's love. I think it's the thing that matters most and remains when everything else goes away. And I think it's the force and reason for allowing many of those other things to go away, to fall from importance. (Jealousy, fear, hope, doubt, greed, lust, hard feelings, etc.)

While I have no devotion to any religion or spiritual belief, my contempt for religion has slowly faded over the years, and my interest in religious stories and concepts has grown. I guess you could say I've become a lapsed atheist. God is a story we made up, not so different from the light in our chest. And just because we made it up doesn't mean there's not something true and valuable in it. I know there's not an actual light in my chest, just like I have a pretty strong feeling that there's not an invisible, omnipotent, judgmental, cruel, loving man or woman or genderless entity in the sky—given name, God. But suppose that light in us is love, and suppose that love is in us all, and suppose that love in us all is a fragment of one big love-light. If someone had just told me that story when I was young, called that love God and left the rest out, well, I probably still would have rebelled against it, but it would've been far less hard to find my way back to it and accept it as a worthy and nourishing possibility. Of course, if that's all God was and ever had been to everyone, all the horrors brought by different religions and conflicting religious beliefs probably never would have occurred. And that, too, would have made things a whole lot easier, for me and many other non-practicing non-believers.

And anyway, I was editing a transcript of a podcast episode a few months ago, and the guest, Arthur Brooks, had this to say about love and religion.

If you go back and look at the Commandments—it’s just interesting, to talk about love, for example, just from more of a mystical perspective. A Pharisee asks Jesus, you know, “The 10 Commandments, it’s a lot to remember, Lord. I mean, it’s like, ten’s a lot. So boil it down for me.” And Jesus is like, “Okay, easy. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. That’s one. And number two, love your neighbor as yourself.” That has everything in the world packed into it. Because if you wanna love God, where God is omnipotent and doesn’t need anything, including your love, the only way that you can do that is by actually loving people who are made in his image. So it makes kind of perfect sense. That’s why it’s an adjunct.

Okay. So 300 years later, St. Augustine is asked, “Even that, too, is too much. Boil it down.” St. Augustine said, “Love and do what you will.” Love and do what you will. That does not rule out the sentimentality of love between friends, of love between lovers. I mean, it’s all love, is the most important thing. And that’s the punchline of the great Vedic traditions of love, of the Hindu traditions of love, that the whole concept of love of the divine means that God is pulsating love, that our souls are a little chip of that love, destined to be manifest in ourselves in terms of love. And that Samsara, the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, occurs because we have not achieved perfect love. And look, it all comes down to this at the end of the day. I’m a PhD social scientist. But strip all the junk away and all the math that I’ve done, and this is all I got. This is all I’ve got. I mean, it’s like, it’s just one word.

Just before that in the conversation, Brooks had this to say in response to a comment about there not being a lot of talk of love on Capitol Hill.

In times past, leaders did talk about love. George Washington talked about love. Abraham Lincoln talked about love. The Gettysburg Address was about love. I mean, it’s incredible to me that we’ve got this desiccated understanding of what politics and public life is supposed to be about. If it’s not about love, it’s not about anything. What is it about, money? How boring! Is it about power? It just couldn’t be more boring than power! Power is the most boring thing ever. Right? And yet we talk as if love were something in the private realm. No. Love is the most public thing ever. It animates us. It fires our soul. It’s the nuclear fuel rods of our happiness. And as such, it should be at the very center of how we see ourselves and how we govern ourselves, how we share our values with other people. It doesn’t rule out even conflict. On the contrary. It should motivate the right kind of conflict. And yet, somehow we’re this husk of a culture, in which the things that I said just now are weird. I mean, that’s weird, actually, I think.

Agreed.

Okay. Back to the song. The last line from the previous lyric is important. So let's look at that full section again.

When the jealousy fades away
And it's ash and dust for cash and lust
And it's just hallelujah
And love in thought, love in the words
Love in the songs they sing in the church
And no hard feelings

So in the end, if we're ready, there's only love. And crucial to that, we have washed ourselves of the burden of all hard feelings. It's a choice. There's not room for both. We're fleeing a fire in our phantom spaceship and heading to an island where we're only allowed to bring one thing. Or something like that. So, if love, then no hard feelings.

Lord knows they haven't done
Much good for anyone
Kept me afraid and cold
With so much to have and hold

Hard feelings corrode their hosts. And yet they will come to all of us. The solution, I think, is not to ignore them or push them away. It's to practice noticing them. To look right at them when they come, and to wrap our love around them. I wish I could say that in a way that didn't make me want to puke. But that's just how I see it. I literally try to imagine myself wrapping those otherwise corrosive feelings in my love. It's an imagined sense more than an imagined image. But sometimes, like when the rotten feelings involve other people, which they often do, it's an image I imagine. When I notice myself telling stories that make me feel resentful or bitter or adversarial towards someone (or some group of someones), I imagine myself hugging them and letting go of my hard feelings, and I imagine them hugging me back and letting go of their hard feelings. And then the corrosive feelings subside. And even, in reality, if it’s only my corrosive feelings that have subsided, others still benefit. Because they get the less corrosive me.

When my body won't hold me anymore
And it finally lets me free
Where will I go?

A new question. Ready or not, where will we go?

Will the trade winds take me south
Through Georgia grain or tropical rain
Or snow from the heavens?

If there is a light in everyone, then there is probably also a light in everything. Every living thing. And if every living thing is a single piece of the light of love, does the physical death of one of those things initiate the release of its love-light back into the wild? Through wind, grain, rain, and snow?

Will I join with the ocean blue

And water?

Or run into a savior true
And shake hands laughing
And walk through the night, straight to the light
Holding the love I've known in my life
And no hard feelings?

I'll be honest. This lyric doesn't do much for me. As I imagine death, I'm already off on an adventure and one with the light. My body’s long gone. It’s a burden I've shed and left behind. There are no arms or hands for shaking. No legs or feet for walking. No mouth or face or magical funny-fairies making laughter. (I don't how how laughter works.) And besides all that, when I try to imagine a dead and corporeal me shaking hands with a savior and laughing, it looks like an outtake from Bo Burnham's Inside or something, which makes me actually laugh. Which is good, because laughter is good, but it removes me slightly from the song's molten center for a second. Only for a second, though. And then it's back to death I go. Back to the light, holding the love I've know in my life. And no hard feelings. Because again…

Lord knows they haven't done
Much good for anyone
Kept me afraid and cold
With so much to have and hold

And then the song crescendos and takes us with it. We brush up against the sky and come back down to earth. To today's little life, still in today's little body, a little more ready, perhaps, for tonight's little death.

Under the curving sky
I'm finally learning why
It matters for me and you
To say it and mean it too
For life and its loveliness
And all of its ugliness
Good as it's been to me
I have no enemies
I have no enemies
I have no enemies
I have no enemies

And there we are. We’ve arrived where the honey flows. Through paying attention to what's going on inside and putting in the work. Through reaching the end of our little days and lives and being able to honestly say, "I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies."

And that doesn't mean being a milquetoast. (Believe me when I tell you there is often a great rebellion in my love.) And it certainly doesn't mean that no one else thinks of you as an enemy. It's like Arthur Brooks said. Love doesn't rule out conflict. It drives the right kind. And if the conflicts you find yourself in begin from a place of love, then I'd say they're the right kind. And if others want to make you their enemy for it, then that's up to them. But if you want to make no one your enemy, and you want to live and die that way, then that's up to you.

All it takes is letting go of all your hard feelings and their ilk. Smothering them with your love whenever they come back, which they will never stop doing. And then just doing this over and over again for the rest of your life, which will always only be today.

---