Wikipedia defines Hubris as extreme pride or arrogance. The term is often used to indicate a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s competence, capabilities, or worth. This is particularly true when when the people exhibiting hubris are in a position of power, or use words or blogs or books or other forms of art to define or delude themselves or inflate their sense of self-importance.

Hubris can be the belief that the common rules of life – paying one’s own way, taking responsibility for one’s own life – do not apply. Or believing that one’s life is so important and sacrosanct that all reality must give way before it. There are lots of people out there eager to cheer on that idea, especially from afar.

I remember meeting a therapist in Saratoga Springs days after my crack-up at Bedlam Farm. She listened to my story, my tale of woe, the money I spent and gave away, the way I was living my life, the deep hole I had fallen into. She looked me level in the eye, a short, tough woman.I think she meant to stun me, I needed to be stunned.

“You have lost all perspective,” she said, as I babbled like a fish gasping for air in a dirty tank. I had no answer.

Hubris, I thought.

Hubris.

I know hubris well, it has been a silent if powerful partner in my life, I encountered my familiar companion again this morning when I declared myself healed from a wicked bout of viral gastroenteritis. I got up early to Maria could sleep in, went out to do the farm chores, haul water and hay, muck out the barn and announced that we ought to go to Brattleboro post hate to eat some Korean food at a restaurant we love and I could do my annual clothes shopping which consists of two pairs of jeans, two Chambray work shirts, two new pairs of suspenders, maybe some socks and underwear.

All this at Sam’s, a spectacularly rambling department store in downtown Brattleboro with fresh popcorn and acres of clothes in all sizes, including large and x-tra large. Brattleboro is an hour-and-a-half from us, our Korean restaurant was closed, we took refuge from the cold in a hip new cafe where I sampled some crepe with seasoned chopped beef. Then on to Sam’s where I picked out some clothes – Maria just puts away what won’t work – started to sweat, get dizzy and nearly passed out. I could barly make it to car. Back  home, in bed, with a fever, the gastroenteritis has it’s own ideas, hubris, my old friend, was sitting by my side grinning and dancing a jig and clapping his hands with joy, “you ain’t done with me yet!”

Aristotle defined hubris as shaming the victim, merely for gratification. Some people think by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.  I don’t use it that way. As a lifelong student of hubris, I feel it often has to do with loss of perspective, anger and fear. We are afraid that we can’t cope with life and handle it, so we delude ourselves into thinking we can simply ignore it and create our own reality. We think we are above the reality of the world – we think that is heroism – because we need to think that way get through life.

Hubris is a close cousin of anger and panic. If you meet someone who lives in constant fear, I have found (myself surely included), there is voften, in fact,  a loss of perspective, a denial of reality. What? The rules of the world apply to me? I have to pay for what I buy? The forces of the world are just waiting out there to rescue me and save me and show me again and again that I am better than most people, more wondrous and deserving? All I need to do is think positive thoughts and charge ahead.  Even as a diabetic, I don’t need to rest one day before heading out to shop and put aside my Bratt died of applesauce, rice and cereal? Why would I need do that?

As I have learned to deal with fear rather than the things fear invokes – fear is a symptom, not a reality, a geography, not a concrete thing – hubris has taken a beating. I am conscious of what I need, what I can afford, I do not consider myself better than anyone, I do not any longer expect the world to take responsibility for my life because I am wonderful. I get beautiful letters every day reminding me that I am not, humility is the antidote to hubris, it’s nemesis. When I finished my therapy, my therapist said the people in my life would no longer recognize me, no longer know who I was, and this has proven to be so, if sometimes sad.

I am done with hubris, and the people who are afflicted with it.

Still, vigilance is a tough state to maintain. On the way back from Brattleboro, Maria kept looking at me and my ashen face and saying “we shouldn’t have come, we shouldn’t have come.” No, no, I said, I was feeling good, it was fun. She is right, I thought, hanging on until we got home, I should never have come.

So back to bed. In it’s contemporary usage, hubris suggests overconfident pride and arrogance, a simple lack of humility. The last few years have been good for me in so many ways, my delusions shattered and swept away, one by one. I am getting humbler by the day. And happier. Maria is happy that my old Chambray shirt, whose collar has visibly disintegrated right on my neck, is heading for it’s new home as a potholder, possibly a design on a quilt.