on responsibility - 06-28-2007
Transcribed from journal on Sunday, Aug 5, 2007. (Mostly) written in journal on the plane to Austria, June 28, 2007. Everything after the sentence beginning “There is tremendous freedom…” was added on transcription. I’d like to write about this topic again in the future, from a more personal standpoint, but for now this is how it came out.
I catch a glimpse of the sunset through the western windows, somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the eastern side of the plane the sky glows blue, the special look it possesses for only moments each day: peaceful, luminous and infinite. My eyes are dazzled still by the shining ball of the sun I had just been enjoying, but still I can see the blue through the purple and green after-images, cerulean with the softest kiss of grey.
“The streets had taken on a playfulness, and play is hope.” — A Nervous Splendor, p176
Reading about these long-dead men and women and their accomplishments and strife, all before the age of 30, has got me thinking. We suffer an extremely protracted adolescence these days, where whining and wheedling and dodging help us escape blame, responsibility, self-stewardship and maturity.
It’s so easy to think that getting away with things—avoiding responsibility—is the right path for us, because we think it feels good (or that taking responsibility feels bad). We think we are avoiding punishment we don’t need (but perhaps punishment we deserve).
But by denying ourselves responsibility, we are not evading retribution but our own selves. Only if you take responsibility into yourself can you enact change.
There’s a difference between external responsibility—a thing foisted on you, a word people use to get you to do what they want—and internal responsibility for your own actions, owning up when you’d rather ignore such responsibility or weasel out of it. All the wriggling, contorting and justification only serve to add to our misery and feelings of powerlessness. We don’t want to believe it, but admitting the extent of our power over ourselves and our situation is the only way to exercise that power.
There’s a tremendous freedom in simply admitting your failings and reserving judgment on yourself: So, I did this thing. So, I have this problem. And then simply accepting it. You can beat yourself up, and pretend it isn’t true, and deny, deny, deny. And punish and flagellate and hate yourself… or you can just say, Yes, that’s how it was, how I was, and how it is, how I am. And it just was, just is. And from that vantage point—as near neutral emotion as you can get, as naked and honest as you can be with yourself—you see that you’re not a horrible person, but merely human.
At first, it feels almost like dying (you mean I need to admit this? but I spent decades denying it…). But then it feels like rebirth. And then, after a while, it is merely your way of living, the way you act every day, the subtle undertones of your behavior. And it is life-changing.
After all, you can’t change the past, you can only imagine the future… only the present is within your reach to change. Self-abuse and shaming never works. Why do we ever think they do? They don’t work when parents use them on their children (when our parents use them on us), but we grow older and believe that somehow they will work when we use them on ourselves. If anything, if that’s how we approach dealing with our mistakes, then the shame and self-abuse seem to draw us nearer to the thing we hate because we are used to the feeling of being loathed—by others and by ourselves.
That’s familiar.
And it’s what we think we deserve so we go about getting it however we can. And so the cycle perpetuates itself—unless we can look at ourselves straight-on in the mirror, be truthful and speak about ourselves with integrity and gentleness.
Once we can lay claim to everything that is true, without getting mixed up in the judging of our entire beings, we can begin to be truly responsible. Then we can decide what matters to us and begin to enact change. Then we can become adults.
