When we fire zingers into people’s hearts to protect our own…
I once saw a car swerve, right itself, and continue on without knowing that the car behind his wound up losing control and crashing into a guardrail.
Makes me wonder how many people have been pushed out of their lane, out of opportunities, or pushed into heightened states of panic or depression by people who simply had no awareness that they were the ones causing the trouble.
I wonder how many lives are wrecked by these unaware proverbial vehicles, who would never for a split second imagine that they were responsible for any of it? For any atrocity whatsoever?
Some people would rather run over everyone with reactiveness at the mere mention that they might have a blind spot, than consider that maybe they actually have something to do with the unhappy faces around them.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to admit that we could be part of what’s causing problems. That in the midst of fighting our own private revolutionary wars we could be causing collateral damage. Firing zingers into people’s hearts to protect our own without realizing that those other people meant no harm.
When my mother passed, everyone who knew her called to say how sorry they were and to lament about how sad her life had been. Some even told me her life helped them to see how blessed their own was.
But I wonder, did they stop for a second to consider their own complicity in any of the many circumstances that caused her to fall through the cracks, and sink so deeply that she literally passed on to another world? Did they imagine she dug her own grave solely by her own two hands?
Even when I tried to communicate that I felt some responsiblity for my mother’s death, they said, “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself.” Maybe, but why would I not take some responsibility? And why would they avoid seeing theirs?
It’s not easy to face the role we all play in the consequences of cause and effect. To take off our good guy costumes and at least recognize that life is complicated, and that our choices, in one way or another, impact other living breathing beings.
Not to shame or punish ourselves, but just to reposition ourselves from imagining we are observers to realizing that we have dissociated ourselves from the scheme of things to protect ourselves, but are still in fact part of all these actions and consequences.
So many of us wear the hat of open-mindedness but how often do we refuse to allow the passing through of anything that doesn’t support our personal agenda, refusing to consider at all costs that our personal politics, they way we run our individual lives, are part of the dysfunction at large?
For me, I think it’s important to consider that the way I once treated another might have been part of the reason they needed to find god. Or as Caroline Myss put it, part of their motivation for enrolling in primal scream therapy. Because it softens my edges and reminds me just how connected we all are, whether we like it or not.
And maybe if we realized just how connected we really are, we’d invest in building more bridges of understanding between us, instead of imagining we live on separate islands.
-JLK
