Tag: balance

  • No More Than Me

    The above thought has morphed in meaning for me over recent months. I used to think of it within the context of kids with prince or princess syndrome and recall how we were never raised to consider ourselves to be anything more than we were. We were always smacked in line when we got ahead of ourselves, and we were always reminded that we weren’t the most important people in the world either. Sometimes that felt grounding, and at times it felt as if something was lacking from my childhood. But neither one of those inclinations of interpretation defined me. It simply was a truth of my life that I reflected on from time to time.

    More recently, I find myself veering towards seeing it as a validation of my contribution. It reminds me that all I am capable of giving is all I will ever be capable of giving, and in reflecting on this more deeply, it seems to be a definition that can easily ground me. Of course, the nagging danger of complacency rings true with it as well, which means that its definition of me remains qualified and not absolute.

    Strolling through the surf today, I was visited with a familiar feeling that I experienced too seldom in my life. It was that feeling I got on occasions when I felt like I was truly taking care of me. While I’ve seen the need to serve others as being a legitimate calling of mine in life, I have become acutely aware at times of my neglect of my own needs in the process. Not in a self indulgent way, but simply taking care of the vessel that I leverage in my desire to serve. I remember one winter afternoon many years ago, I walked some distance from my car and felt the icy highveld wind of Johannesburg stinging my cheeks. I wore a knitted polar neck jersey, and a comfortably padded jacket. It felt as if it hugged me and for a very fleeting moment, I felt taken care of. It was a strange sensation then, and an even stranger realisation now. But it was a simple fleeting moment like that that made me aware of the type of care that I deserved from myself for myself.

    Due consideration and reasonable investment. Not over indulgence or extravagance. The former defines the value I place on myself while the latter defines the value I place on myself over others. It was a fine line that I’ve seen too many cross, and my revulsion at their behaviour always taunted me when I even approached that limit. How I see myself is most likely a distant cry from the way others see me. Their reflections of me only hold sway if their credibility commands respect. Like me, the credibility of most comes into question, especially when viewed through ill-informed lenses.

    Knowing this to be true, I dwell very little on how others see me. I acknowledge their right to an opinion, and the need to express that opinion, but if it stops at being an opinion without substance, it stops being important to me even before they’ve completed expressing it.

    No more than me. That idea dictates that in knowing the truth of it, I need to know the truth of me. It will anyways be an incomplete truth, but like it is with life, all endeavors for perfection will remain incomplete. However, just because the goal itself cannot be fully attained does not mean that there is no merit in its pursuit. And so I continue the journey of discovering me, while being careful not to over indulge or under invest in the process.

  • Dancing in the Rain

    Walking through a curio shop, I saw a frame proclaiming that life is not about avoiding the storm, but rather about learning to dance in the rain. That sounds profound, and childishly innocent. But as life wears on, we grow to realise that it’s even more important to choose carefully which storms we dance in.

    It seems there’s a time for everything, and I guess in our youth, the rebellion we embrace drives us to live in protest of convention and oppression. However, when lacking in informed wisdom, oppression appears in many forms, including discipline and respect. Under such circumstances, the oppressors are those who leave us to wander without this informed wisdom while believing that our discovery of the world on our own terms yields wholesome adults. More importantly, it pacifies the ego of those adults that believe that they’re being kind and gentle because being the adult is too onerous for a fickle ego.

    Consider the above in a broader context and suddenly we have some answers regarding the hoardes of wayward teens that lack in self respect and discipline while struggling to figure out why life treats them harshly. In fact, the number of adults that suffer from debilitating depression and other mental hangups are on the increase as well. (Pile on the hate, I’m used to it).

    I look around me and see an ever increasing range of health support systems than ever before. The more we progress with medical sciences the less we progress with humanity. It’s no coincidence that by design, the medical sciences are also accompanied by a philosophy that focuses on the individual and not the society. We diagnose the symptoms of an individual and we prescribe treatments that are almost entirely individualistic in nature. It’s a self-serving cycle that is extremely lucrative, and therefore unlikely to be broken anytime soon. Albeit a simplistic overview, it provides us with a point of departure that leads down the path towards the erosion of individual accountability, as well as social cohesion.

    The cycle goes something like this. Our health is rarely associated with what we don’t get from those around us. However, what we don’t get is proportional to what we don’t give. But when we grow up not knowing what to give, we also grow up not knowing what to get. The result is a symptomatic response to life, not dissimilar to modern medical sciences, which drives us to demand instant gratification before wholesome balance, leaving us physically spent, emotionally bankrupt, and socially isolated despite having friends lists that stretch to utopia and beyond.

    And it all starts with the adult that refuses to be. The one that lives vicariously through their children. Who seeks to avenge the oppression of their childhood by swearing not to enslave another with the rigour of discipline or the burden of self respect, because in the absence of the two, we can do as we please, live without limits, and grow old ungracefully, with a healthy dose of bitterness and ingratitude not knowing why the empty spaces remained empty, and the home lacked homeliness. That’s not a rant, it’s a reality that most are loathe to acknowledge, because of the indictment it holds against us.

    Some storms are more important than others. It’s usually not the ones we choose for ourselves, but the ones we choose for others that impacts our lives the most. Wholesomeness is lost when we lose sight of the whole and replace it with a focus on the self. Homes are broken, kindred spirits are abused, and worse still, spiritual grounding is discarded. No wonder we constantly seek fulfilment through retail therapy more than we do from silence.

    [Yes, this is my projection of reality on the world. At least I have one to project]

  • In a World of Worries

    I often wonder why it seems so difficult to write about the good of the day, as opposed to how easy it is to rant about the bad. Sitting in my corner of the cave, with a window facing the gurgling water from the pond just outside, I’m often focused on the mental fatigue that draws me to that corner while hardly noticing the calming effect of that water and the usual cool breeze that accompanies it.

    The moments taken to calm the soul are often forgotten in our distraction from the beauty that calms it. I wonder if the ability to notice the blessing that lifts the burden, rather than sighing at the lifting of the burden reflects the balance with which we meet the day? Are we so focused on what bears down on us that we’ve stopped noticing what makes the struggle worth struggling?

    Just trying to shift the focus in writing this post demands more presence of mind than usual. It’s easier to bleed at the keyboard than it is to spill beautiful petals of hope and resilience without the scorn or the rhetoric that accompanies a cynic’s tale no matter how often betrayed. So easily I find myself drawn into the darkness that offers some quiet. The absence of light is not always daunting if the darkness provides reprieve from the demands of the world.

    Every curious detail observed in the light by one driven to act demands attention, while every response holds within it the promise of joy or fulfilment. That joy or fulfilment is almost always incomplete if its essence is appreciated by too few. If the purpose of life is to serve a greater good, then what becomes of the fulfilment of that purpose when the greater good rejects such servitude?

    Cryptic thoughts are as exhausting as its interpretation. Speaking plainly is an art lost to me while being deliberately vaguely cryptic comes naturally in a world where such sincerity is most often misconstrued as an attack on the ego, rather than appreciated at the value of the beautiful face that it offers.

    I’ve seen too often how a good gesture is deliberately distorted so that the recipient is relieved of any compulsion to reciprocate. Those we wish to indulge, or we hope would indulge us, are the ones with whom even bad gestures we’d aim to distort into good ones. Seeing good in the ones we court is easy. It doesn’t require an investment in anything other than what we wish to receive, except where what we wish to gain is fulfilled within, and does not require validation from without. Achieving a state of composure in the face of ingratitude is the greatest gift in a world of worries. It saves us from feeling enslaved by the affirmations of others, while liberating us to enjoy the cryptic details that eludes most everyone else.

    Just last week I quoted Einstein to someone. If we can’t explain it simply enough, then we don’t understand it well enough. Perhaps this is telling of my grasp of this world. My struggle to articulate my thoughts reflects the challenges I face in trying to understand the multitudes of why, but comfort is offered when I consider that most shy away from the challenge even before reaching this point.

    The inclination to pacify myself relative to the lacking conviction of others threatens to prompt me into a similar space of complacency as those I despise. Perhaps I despise them so much because I am acutely aware of how even now, with this deliberate attempt to express the beauty of the world around me, I find myself consistently drawn towards emphasising everything that’s wrong with it.

    I walked on the lawn with bare feet the other day. For a moment my senses were teased and I felt grounded. I gazed around the garden and looked past the sprouting indigenous trees, and instead noticed the chores left unfinished, or new ones that begged for my attention. I walked on and paid little attention to them because the lawn felt so good beneath my feet. In that moment I knew that even the reality of this world and all its worries could not rob me of the fascination of that moment. But no sooner had that thought occurred that I found myself robbing myself of that which the world was unable to take from me.

    I know there’s an important point in all this rambling. Perhaps just that knowledge will make this worth sharing, even if the clarity of that point continues to elude me. Everything has an opposing truth, so perhaps this world of worries is simply the wrong side of the coin that too many are distracted by. If the first step towards success lies in acknowledgement, then perhaps this is the glimmer of hope that the realisation of the other side of this coin is the beginning of turning it over.

    [There appears to be no comfortable nor logical point at which I feel ready to end this post, so perhaps it is best left unfinished…for now]

  • The Belly of Delhi

    I simply couldn’t resist that play on words for the title. Delhi is famous for giving its visitors the Delhi Belly, which for those who received this gift would tell you that it’s no laughing matter. Like this, so many other aspects about Delhi and India in general leaves me with a sense of conflict. Recognising the effects of the caste system while noting the awkward balance it provides as well. Or seeing the beautiful structures left to ruin from the neglect of complacent or downright lazy hired help, while fending off beggars that rely on irritation and annoyance as a reason for you to part with your rupees just to get rid of them. The overwhelming sense I got though, when visiting Delhi and later Agra, is that it’s a distracted place.

    I thought the irritable hooting from the Arab driver behind me at an intersection in Arabia was annoying, but that fast became a cherished memory in the face of the incessant hooting that has become the staple language with which drivers communicate in India. Unfortunately the hooting is needed because road signs, traffic signals, and general rules of the road are merely suggestions for normalcy, but are rarely observed or enforced. At a single intersection I witnessed a driver take a u-turn in front of us while another cut in from the oncoming side, while we cut in front of a third driver that actually had the right of way, all in the space of about 1.5 seconds. In South Africa, someone would have likely been severely injured or killed at that intersection from road rage. But that’s the difference, in a way, between South Africa and India.

    When I look on the faces of drivers in South Africa, I see signs of life, mostly in the form of aggression, expectation, entitlement, or sometimes composure. But there is always an expression of emotion, which I interpret as life. In Delhi, the drivers probably make the best poker players ever. Regardless of how reckless the manoeuvre was of the person in front, the most it would solicit is a lotus flower-like twist of the fingers in that universal gesture of WTF. You know, palms facing up while fingers gesture as if unscrewing a lightbulb? So when you see that, you know it was really bad. The rest of the time it’s emotionless as if resigned to the fact that nothing more should be expected. Closer to the important truth in this I believe is the fact that it’s not rules or constraints that determine harmony in society. Those merely dictate an unnatural order. Collective subscription to a set of norms is what fosters the harmony that we all seek. In other words, if everyone collectively subscribes to the same version of chaos, is it really chaos? It stands to reason then that disruption or upheaval in society is caused when norms or standards are imposed on an unwilling audience. Hence your leaders are as you are.

    That there is a potential for greatness in Delhi is no less true than the potential for greatness in the most rural villages in South Africa. Unfortunately, too often I find that we’re trying to subscribe to a set of laws that are unnatural, or to be part of a system that is exclusionary by design, but we do so anyway because that is the prevailing perception of success. Such thinking is not what leads to ingenious outcomes. When we subscribe without true conviction or understanding in the underlying purpose, we lose ourselves in favour of the version of us dictated by that system. Stated simply, we forget who we truly are when we focus on meeting expectations rather than living with conviction. Defining our worth based on these external and unnatural systems, usually capitalistic in nature, distracts us from defining who we are as human beings. This is what I see on the faces of so many around me, whether in Delhi or Johannesburg. There is a vacancy of the self, but an abundance of need for acceptance or celebration. In Delhi it’s expressed as complacency in the face of the overwhelming odds that stifle any desire to change it. In Johannesburg, it’s the excessive aggression towards each other which in essence hints at a belief that we are robbing each other of success, rather than a realisation that our collective subscription to a set of governance that erodes our self-worth is why we are so quick to launch the first offensive.

    I would never have guessed that the Delhi Belly will come to symbolise the core of what is wrong with the human condition as we experience it today. We all partake in the consumption of things that we believe are needed for our sustenance, but are internally rejecting its origins or composition. Those that know better will subscribe under duress and will be more prone to the effects of such imbalance, while those that expect nothing more assimilate and become more efficient at processing the unpalatable. Such adaption might prove useful in the short term, but it lowers the bar in the long term.

    Intolerance to a pervasive vice or imbalance may seem idealistic and naive, but having the courage to recognise a vice as a vice is all that stands between us and the rest of that slippery slope of decay. We’ve become so good at adapting that we’ve given up on idealism or conviction. Those that speak of old school values are shunned as out of touch while those that lack it complain bitterly about the state of the world. Such are the distractions of arrogance. When we assume that the technological advancements of the current generation implies moral superiority over the previous ones, we deny the next generation the benefit of finding a wholesome balance between the two. But just as decay is generational in nature, so too is rebirth. I believe that the human spirit will only tolerate the stench of immorality and imbalance for so long before the innate intolerance for such states drive us towards a resurgence of balance and harmony. The absolutists assume that such a return to old school values implies an abandonment of progress. They’re the ones that are most deluded. They’re the ones that contribute to the excess that we experience as the Delhi Belly.

    I see it as being no different to cow hands working the farm and growing immune to the stench of the manure. They only realise what they’ve grown accustomed to if they remove themselves from it for long enough to grow accustomed to more pleasing aromas. And so it is with human beings. We’re collectively obsessed with competing for self enrichment while ignoring the greater purpose for which we exist. That is, the upliftment of those around us which automatically elevates our own condition. But in the absence of trust, we share a mutual contempt instead.

  • On Sin for the Sinless

    We’re experiencing a drought in South Africa at the moment. In some areas it is the worst they’ve had it in 30 years. One town even reported their tap water turning salty because the river mouth has dried up, causing the seawater to seep in. In response to this drought there have been calls from all political and religious persuasions to use water sparingly and support each other where possible, especially in the worse hit areas.

    The Muslim community responded as well and scheduled a special congregational prayer for rain to be held tomorrow morning. It is no different to the manner of praying for any other prayer time, but the intent and purpose is distinctly different. As Muslims, we believe that such conditions as drought befall us because of the general level of sin in our communities. Now before you dismiss this as religious hogwash, consider my perspective first.

    The subscription to the notion of sinning is not necessarily constrained to religion either, and most certainly not limited to Muslims. So set aside the stigma and think of it as an imbalance in life, and by extension, society. We always think of sins in a transactional way. We assume that the sin itself is what brings the negative recompense, but generally fail to consider the broader context of the environment that sustains such sins.  When we indulge excessively, either in good or bad, we tend towards extremism. Such extremism leads to imbalance, which is typically manifested in unnatural conditions that befall us. Extremism, again setting stigmas aside, is when we party more than we reflect, consume more than we contribute, or destroy more than we create. Within this context, I believe, the true nature of sinning is revealed.

    Droughts are caused by imbalances in the environment. Destroy the natural balance of an ecosystem and the results will mean the destruction of the ecosystem. Remove the trees that are the lungs of the earth and the earth will cease to breathe. Simple, yet so difficult for most to grasp. More importantly, relative to the point I wish to make, the reasons for this imbalance is what drives us to do the stupid things that we do like destroying balance in favour of imbalance. We party hard because we need to escape, or we need to feel included. The destruction it causes internally, and often to those around us as well, is ignored because we’re distracted by the gratification we feel from the ability to escape or the void that is filled when we feel included.

    Trees that are not appreciated for their contribution is quickly consumed as a trivial resource because it holds the promise of wealth. Re-purposing the fertile land to hold a shopping mall or block of apartments that will yield premium returns on our investment quickly dwarfs the need for reason around why the trees should be respected. The excess we indulge in for purposes of wealth creation distracts us from the balance we are responsible for maintaining. Chasing these trinkets leads to excesses, usually sinful in nature, because it goes with the territory. In other words, the sin is just the symptom of a sick society, it is not what makes society sick.

    What I am struggling to articulate is that when we hear religious leaders talk about our sins being the reason for the natural disasters we see around us, we automatically assume that it is a specific and deliberate response from God to smite us for our actions, when in fact it’s merely a natural consequence to the imbalance we created. This is just one example of this cycle. Far too often we find ourselves seeking answers in symptoms forgetting to reflect on the causes that landed us in the unfortunate situation to begin with.

    The sinless are those that are faultless. They’re the ones that believe that everything untoward that happens to them is not deserved. They believe that the occurrence of misfortune must be imposed and can never be a cause of their own doing. The sinless are the naive, the ingrates, the distracted ones. Those that are not naive, ungrateful, or distracted know that there are no sinless beings around. We all make mistakes. Just because the mistakes are not intended (they wouldn’t be mistakes if they were) doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly immune to the consequences. It’s like accidentally killing someone and then saying I didn’t mean to kill them hoping that that would miraculously undo the destruction that your action caused in the first place.

    The state of being sinless exists only in our own minds when we’re in denial. When we stop associating it with religion and punishment, we’ll start seeing it for what it is. It’s a harm we perpetrate against ourselves first, before anyone else. The excess, while being directly harmful to others around us, started eroding the good within us long before we acted on it. The collective imbalance of society is bound to result in an outcome that is larger than the sum of the contribution of each of us. It’s like a snowball effect. One plus one does not equal two in this case, because it often accelerates as a factor of the contribution and not just a reciprocation in equal parts.

    The lesson, for me, is simple. Stop harming myself, before I can stop harming others. Stop blaming others for the harm that I impose on myself. The rest will find its own balance. The difficulty in stopping the harm is not due to an inability to stop. It’s due to the unwillingness to give up the gratification that the excess offers us. The less likely we are to give it up in favour of more sustainable means of fulfilment, the more likely we are to reach the tipping point on a global scale. Say hello to climate change.

    [I’m too lazy to fully complete this thought process right now]

  • When Family and Friends Collide

    Being torn between my loyalties towards family versus friends was never pleasant. I recall specific events where I was treated with disdain after returning from an afternoon with a friend in my neighbourhood. It was not just from my father, it was pretty much from the whole family. Having a social life seemed wrong, and being socially awkward was my default disposition. I suspect the two went hand-in-hand.

    The insecurity of a family unit that grows insular by default rather than necessity is often a reflection of the insecurity of those that yield the most influence on them. It’s almost cult-ish by nature. The indoctrination that suggests that choosing the company of others automatically implies that you place less significance on your own family members is unnatural and stifling. Having to choose between your absolute loyalty to family that precludes any other bonds from being established and wanting a space for free expression unattached to your family should not be a choice that anyone should have to make. It sets the scene for a precedent that can rarely, if ever be met.

    The underlying principle is a simple one. If you impose limitations on others, limitations that don’t shape their moral or ethical standing but instead is aimed at defining their movement and free association with others, you need to be damn sure that you’re in a position to offer them what they would otherwise get from those social circles. Family can be toxic as much as they can be a blessing. Often, in a less healthy environment, they stifle the growth of each other and root themselves in a point from the past based on the belief that they need to protect each other from a perceived, but often unrealistic threat. Simply stated, a family of victims of society are more likely to restrain the social activities and affiliations of its members than one that is secure in their collective individuality.

    But that begs the question as to how do we become a family of victims to begin with? Again, I look towards the most influential members of the family, typically the father, or the mother, or both. They set the tone for what is perceived to be healthy and balanced, versus what is unacceptable or intolerable. Their fears and insecurities are often passed on as truths and realities, while preventing sufficient exposure for any of their children to determine the veracity of such claims themselves. This ensures that the established authority in the household remains unchallenged, and that the balance that is comfortable for the insecure, remains above reproach. Despite its best intentions, it is a sick environment in which to raise a healthy mind.

    I’ve often witnessed first hand how such environments yield common chronic health conditions. The kind of conditions for which most are happy to blame faulty genes, while remaining oblivious to the stress and strain our bodies face when subdued in such an unnatural way. Occasionally one member of the family will be free from that condition. They will generally have a more optimistic or healthy outlook on life, including a healthier social experience. However, the inclination under such circumstances is for the rest to believe that that one individual is fortunate, and since they are not afflicted with the same ill-health, it is therefore possible to live a healthier and more meaningful life. That is simply rubbish.

    When we stop to consider the impact of our emotions on our physical wellbeing, and stop writing everything off as a disease that attacks us from without instead of within, then hopefully we’ll stand a chance of breaking the cycle. The stress coping techniques that we adopt as we grow are learned from those we’re most exposed to. When that exposure is limited to only an insular family unit, it stands to reason that the resultant ill-health will be a common experience as well, hence being misconstrued as a genetic inheritance.

    The cycle can be broken, but it requires exposure to other frames of reference for us to develop any reason to question the truths that we hold dear about life. Of course the reverse is also true. If that insular family unit is balanced in its embrace of life, then it also stands to reason that the individuals that it spawns will be balanced by nature. This is unfortunately rare, if not impossible, because a healthy balance would unwittingly provoke broader inclusion in society, including the necessary contribution towards remedying the ills of that society.

    The greatest irony of society is that it is most severely criticised by those that are in fact an inherent part of its make-up. When we assume a level of aloofness and distance ourselves from the ills of society, we become party to the problem, rather than the solution. Too often those that break the cycle extract themselves from the environment that spawned them. While it may be healthy for the individual to do so, it robs the very same society of the resources and influences that are needed to uplift its social fabric to be one that is healthier and more wholesome. That societal structure can be as small as a single family, or as big as a community of families. Either way, we are an inherent part of it, even if we remove ourselves from it. That absence defines our contribution, whether we like it or not.

    The test of our character therefore arises when we find ourselves needing to hold on to the new-found freedoms experienced external to that sick cycle, while acknowledging our responsibility to assist others to see that there is a life that is possible beyond the unhealthy indoctrination that defined our reality before that point. Empowerment lies not in liberating yourself only, but in liberating those with a similar affliction as your own.

  • Personal Space

    The concept of personal space is an interesting one. We’re social beings by nature. We have an innate need to be appreciated and acknowledged for our personal contribution or expression in everything. We insist on withdrawing into a personal space when we are convinced that such appreciation or acknowledgement will be replaced by ridicule or rejection. I can’t imagine why anyone would prefer to recede if they have the opportunity to bask in the affection and attention of those that appreciate them endearingly. So it stands to reason that such withdrawal must be motivated by the absence of such an embrace.

    It’s a distraction, like so many others that we’re surrounded with. The fear of rejection is established so early in life that we respond from a position of habit without realising that it goes against our innate nature. Our ability to be absorbed or immersed into the being of another underlies our sense of belonging. The less we feel like we belong, the more likely we will be to prefer our own company to the company of others. For this same reason we insist on establishing a personal space that excludes all others, because it also protects us from criticism or rejection about those things that we feel most passionately vulnerable about. Chances are, we include total strangers in those spaces through acquiring what we want, or indulging what we need provided they have no social or emotional attachment to us.

    No wonder then that we are more inclined to social networking than social interaction. Face-to-face interactions are fast giving way to impersonal ones. It’s not because of convenience or constraints, but because it’s safer than being there in person. It’s easier to hide our vulnerabilities through a few choice words as a response, than it is to retract an involuntary facial expression. So it makes sense that we are more likely to express ourselves more willingly online with limited traceability to who we are, because to withdraw without repercussions or accountability is so much easier.

    Personal space therefore appears to be a contradiction in terms because the need for it signifies an imbalance that makes it a necessity. When faced with overwhelming odds in one area of our lives, we seek balance in another. Most often, that space we can pursue such balance is in the absence of others, since it is the very presence of others that gave rise to the imbalance to begin with. The easy answer is to choose more carefully who you surround yourself with. The reality though is that there are repercussions of excluding the detrimental elements that may outweigh the benefits of righting that balance. Establishing your personal space to recover from that imbalance, even if just for a moment, therefore appears to be a necessary compromise that most are willing to make.

     

  • The Vehicle of My Life

    The analogy of the car has always been the most versatile and relatable of all when used to describe the complexities of our existence. Recently I’ve found myself preoccupied by its relevance in how we relate our bodies to our souls. But the analogy extends almost seamlessly to reflect how we interpret or experience relationships as well. It’s fascinating but also dulling, because something as complex as life can be explained by something as simple as a commodity used for daily commutes, but dulling because it enforces the realisation of the ephemeral nature of life, and everything we associate with it.

    Like with any car, the more you abuse it, the less likely it is to give you a pleasant drive and a long service. The same applies to relationships that are imbalanced. When one partner is constantly demanding more and giving less in return, it wears down that vehicle of marriage. The longer that continues, the more likely it is that the vehicle will eventually stall, or fall into total disrepair, often beyond a state of economic repair. But we miss this obvious truth. So the reality often plays out where the offending party continues in their erroneous ways for an extended period of time, and eventually when they realise the abuse that they’ve been subjecting their partner to, they resolve to be better and in the process expect everything to suddenly continue as it was intended in the first place. Regardless of their good intentions, the reality of the damage caused up to that point cannot be dismissed.

    That would be like driving the absolute hell out of a car from the day you bought it, and then realising that it’s starting to show signs of malfunction and possibly breakdown, at which point you decide to drive it nicely. No matter how smoothly you handle it after that, the damage done will still require a massive effort, and often expense, before the car will be in a good condition. However, the creaks and rattles will never be entirely gone, so those reminders of its original abuse will always remain. The same applies to an imbalanced relationship. Regardless of how many good reasons may exist for the disruptive partner to have behaved in a disruptive way, they need to accept that they lose the right to be treated without prejudice or bias when they eventually realise the error of their ways. At that point, their sincerity of resolve will be tested in a way that will reduce them to a humbled subject that must begin by earning the respect and commitment from the one whose trust and kindness they may have abused up to that point.

    This is an unnecessarily complicated post to explain a really simple truth. If you’re not willing to reap what you sow, don’t be upset when your crop fails. Don’t blame the earth, or the rains, nor the labourers, or the tools. And if you’re not willing to accept your accountability in the process, then expect to spend what will feel like an eternity before you let go of the ego that drove you to believe that the problem was with everyone else, rather than with you.

    This world lacks accountability and community. In the absence of these it is not surprising that we are prone to take more than we give. We feel entitled to claim more than we feel responsible to contribute. But worse than all this, our small efforts are almost always dispensed with an expectation of reciprocation. We present our contribution as selfless but quickly grow vindictive when it goes unappreciated. The world is in an imbalanced state, and everyone thinks that problem will be solved by farting less.