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April 29

Responsibility 

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I had a conversation yesterday with my friend, Tony, about  friends and mentors and how, no matter who they are, they all eventually will prove themselves to be human. Just as will we. We all will make mistakes. Perfection does not exist on this plane. It's an ideal to keep in mind with regard to our behaviors, but to hold ourselves, or anyone else, to an ideal that by definition is unattainable is to guarantee for ourselves an ongoing experience of dissatisfaction and disappointment.

So then what good is meditation, of living a "spiritual" life? If we can't be perfect, what can we be?

As it turns out, what we can be is responsible. This is the gift of living a spiritual life, of trying, day in and day out, to do our best, and having that best supported by our practice and our thinking and what and who we are surrounding ourselves with. 

Being responsible. Able to respond. As we let go of the stresses that have kept us reacting to life in narrowly proscribed ways, we become open to having a new experience each day. We become available to be present. We become able to follow our hunches, our intuitions, that still, small voice of charm. We become able to respond to the subtle cues of nature that are indicating, at every moment, what is the most evolutionary action to take. We become able to follow these cues, moving in the direction of evolution and enjoying it.

And when we miss the cue because of old ideas or current, overwhelming hungers or simply because we've talked ourselves into some less-than-ideal behavior, we find ourselves able to be responsible for that as well. Able to step into a mess we've made and speak to our behavior and the way we see it has impacted others; and we can amend that behavior, making things right with others, where we can, and making a commitment, to ourselves as well as others, to try in future to do things differently.

This is the kind of friend we want: not someone who never screws up. Rather, someone who screws up and says, immediately, "Wow. I screwed up. I want to make it right." And ideally, this also will be a friend who can say to us at those times we haven't yet figured out where we screwed up ourselves, "You know, when you did that thing, it hurt my feelings," and then we get an opportunity not to take it personally, to respond rather than to react, and to be able to say to our friend, "Wow. I screwed up. How can I make it right?"

Today I will notice the difference between my reactions and my responses, and at least once I will find the grace to trade the latter for the former.