The other day I was having a conversation with a good friend. He said something to me that was so profound that I had to write it down for fear of forgetting it. I have a pretty good memory and I don’t often forget things, but this I had to write down. He told me that sometimes “We obligate ourselves to things that hold us back.” It was like being slapped in the face because I needed to check myself. Its impact was just that forceful; it really woke me up. I had to step back and take a few very deep breaths after he spit that one out. This eloquent thought let me know how hard I had been working against my own best interests and against my right to choose for myself.
For the last couple of days, I have been trying to come up with some clever, droll, or useful way to expand on what he said. I was going to try to put out some concrete examples of how this applies to my life and experience. I was going to bring up how I had been volunteered into things by people who disrespected my right to choose for myself how to best use my time. Or, I was going to try to talk about long-term, ill-conceived efforts that stretched on for what seemed like interminable periods and that produced horrible results. After all, relating these thoughts to my experience is what this blog is all about.
None of it seemed appropriate. This was nothing that could really be relegated into a simple set of observations. Talking about the importance and irreplaceable nature of time wasn’t enough. I even considered going in another philosophical direction by mentioning that obligation implies an artificially produced debt that never truly exists. Acceptance of that debt prevents benefiting from the higher value that conscious choice brings. I could get esoteric and discuss how when we don’t question the belief systems and opinions we are given; we obligate ourselves to ways of existing that may not be appropriate for us. The truth is that sentence could have a million different meanings a day to a million different people and all of those meanings would be valid and appropriate.
The most meaningful thing that I can say is that this summarizes a lesson that it has taken me many years to learn. That lesson is simply that I have a right to choose how to use my time and a right to say no when I deem it appropriate without guilt or recrimination. Over my lifetime, I have found it very difficult to simply say no to people. I can’t pin down one exact reason for it.
Somehow, despite my protestations to the contrary, I have felt the need on many occasions to seek outside approval for and recognition of my character and generosity. I have felt the need to be validated. It has taken me a long time to know that I need to balance my overdeveloped sense of idealism and desire to help with my underdeveloped sense of self-interest (not selfishness). It has taken a long time to mature in this respect and to begin to truly make decisions that are right for me.
Because it has taken me so long to become fully internally motivated versus externally motivated, I am sure that I have missed opportunities, including opportunities to do interesting things and to meet good people. I can not begin to calculate what it may have cost me. But now I accept the potential loss without regret or need for validation.
I am not sure that even this explanation is complete enough conceptually. I am not sure that I have enough intelligence or wisdom to boil the essence of this thought down any further for anyone but myself. I decided that the best thing to do was to leave interpretation open to anyone who reads it. That is what I would hope for in any case, but especially in this one.
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I think that that is one of the first things that must be concurred in order to progress toward a higher self development. I mean, of course it is. We us the validation of others as a first strategy for learning the ropes of our cultural expectations. After we have achieved a basic mastery with that fundamental structure we either begin to wither and decay on a self developmental level or we learn to not call in the struggle we are having internally. We reach out to others for some substantial metric by which to judge our attempts at growth. The reality is that it must be self forged at a certain level or we are not ourselves. We are not a self to develop if we can't decide on our own to control our boundary between I and Not I.
ReplyDeleteGod point, man. It has been a hard lesson /struggle to really learn how much power or independence to introduce into situations. Somehow I am still struggling with setting boundaries and limits on what i will do or subject myself to. I think that I am getting better with it.
ReplyDeleteI have spent a lot of energy testing others' boundaries without realizing that I should set up some of my own. A lot of the people in my life have not come to the realization that they don't have the right to my resources and somehow I have facilitated that lack of realization.
It is almost like a cancer that alternates between benign and malignant. Eventually, it gets out of control and kills the host. I have to find a way to remove it or at least control it.
This is all second circuit shit. You would think that I would have already understood this by now.