Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

There’s an old story, often attributed to Cherokee tradition, in which a grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves live inside every person. One is made of anger, jealousy, greed, and ego. The other is made of love, kindness, humility, and peace, and the two are always fighting. When the boy asks which one wins, the grandfather answers, “The one you feed.”

It’s a beautiful story, but perhaps not the whole truth.

Our so-called darker emotions aren’t always the enemy. Anger at injustice can spark reform, ambition can build great things, and jealousy can reveal a longing we haven’t admitted to ourselves. The trouble usually lies not in the feeling but in what we do with it. Anger can turn into courage or cruelty, and pride into self-respect or arrogance. Simply starving the “bad” wolf may not make us better. If I bury my anger, smile politely, and claim to have forgiven someone while quietly wishing them harm, I haven’t become compassionate. I’ve only made my resentment look respectable.

There may be a third wolf, harder to spot than the other two, because it wears the clothes of goodness. It feeds on approval, respectability, and the comfort of feeling morally superior. It doesn’t care whether we are good, only whether we are seen to be good.

This wolf lets us preach forgiveness while holding grudges, condemn in others what we secretly desire, and perform kindness for an audience. We can even grow proud of our humility. Often we don’t notice it at all, because hypocrisy isn’t always deliberate. Sometimes it’s simply our blindness to the gap between who we are and who we need others to believe we are.

Two people can hold back from the same harmful act for entirely different reasons: one because it would hurt someone, the other because people might talk. From the outside the behavior looks identical, but inside it couldn’t be more different.

Awareness, not suppression

None of this means we should feed every impulse. Noticing an urge for revenge isn’t the same as acting on it. Emotions carry information, but they don’t always carry wisdom. Anger may tell us a line has been crossed without telling us what to do about it.

The real choice isn’t between starving one wolf and feeding another. It’s between acting unconsciously and becoming aware enough to choose. Perhaps freedom means seeing what we feel, want, and fear, including our fear of judgment, without being ruled by any of it. It means understanding our darkness well enough not to be governed by it, and our goodness well enough not to be trapped by it. The greatest danger may be growing so sure we’re feeding the right wolf that we stop looking inward altogether.

Later, the boy asks how he can tell which wolf he’s feeding. The grandfather tells him to ask, when he’s angry, whether he wants to set things right or just make someone suffer. And when he helps someone, he should ask whether it’s because they need him or because he wants to be seen as kind.

“And if I don’t know the answer?” the boy asks.

“Then you’ve already begun,” says the grandfather. “The trouble starts when we stop asking.”

After the boy falls asleep, the old man sits awake and turns the question on himself: if no one would ever know his private thoughts, desires, or actions, would he still be the same person?

For the first time that night, he isn’t sure which wolf he has been feeding.