On Expectations and Responsibility
The ways I think the world expects me to be are the ways I've been taught to believe I should be.
People are judging and criticising and dismissing me all the time, but as long as I'm meeting my standards of how I should be, I don't even notice.
As soon as I don't meet my standards, I think other people know that I'm not and are judging me as harshly as I'm judging myself.
Are you willing to give up your life for what you think other people might be thinking?
Think about it.
Has giving up your own life brought the acceptance and approval you've always wanted?
Has not being who you really are brought the joy and fulfillment you've been seeking?
* * * * *
Whatever you do, recognize that you are doing it for you and enjoy it. If you realize you no longer want to do it, STOP.
"Isn't that irresponsible?"
You'll never know until you stop and find out. You could practice with some of the many little things you do and hate but continue to do because you believe you should or someone told you you should.
If you're responsible because you're afraid not to be, you're not responsible, you're afraid.
Cheri Huber
5 comments:
"Are you willing to give up your life for what you think other people might be thinking?"
So many people have indeed done this, omg unbelievable. Not only that, people ASSUME that's why others do the things they do because such a huge percentage of people live this way.
"If you're responsible because you're afraid not to be, you're not responsible, you're afraid."
Here's the one that got me for so many years. Didn't care what people thought, but ... so fucking scared to be alone.
Some of those sentiments were captured poetically ...
[...]
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
[...]
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
http://skdesigns.com/internet/articles/prose/oriah_mountain_dreamer/invitation/
I'm always a little surprised when people comment over here anymore, because once I took a weed-whacker to my own private Gethsemane (the garden formerly known as JCBW), I turned it into a zen retreat space where I started plopping down the ideas I read that happened to resonate with me at the moment I read them. It's like my own little word-a-day calendar, only with "pay attention to this today," ideas. So I'm glad if others are getting something, anything, out of them.
Paula, many years ago, I looked at my own life, and at the rampant unhappiness I saw in marriages all around me, and concluded, "there are far worse things in life than being alone."
Gekko, thank you for the beautiful poem. Zen writ pretty.
She rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife.
If aught she missed in her new day
Of amplitude, or awe,
Or first prospective, or the gold
In using wore away,
It lay unmentioned, as the sea
Develops pearl and weed,
But only to himself is known
The fathoms they abide.
- Dickinson -
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Buried alive, buried at sea. What I don't get is why any male would allow this to happen to someone he loves, much less any female to allow it to happen to her - how is being chained to misery like that a life?
We delude ourselves into thinking we can protect the people around us from pain. (Mainly so we can maintain our illusion of ourselves as "good people," but that's a whole other discussion.)
We delude ourselves into thinking we can protect ourselves from pain.
This is life.
As the saying goes, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
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