in/balance

this is another one that I had titled but completely forgotten about but for some strange reason, it all came back to me today while watching The Simpsons.

How responsible are you?
By that, I am not talking about regular responsibilties like keeping to your word, respecting those who deserve respect, and other niceties. Instead, I am talking about the smaller responsibilties that all the same play a big part in your life, albeit in a much more subtle way.

How responsible are you for your actions, not just your larger overt ones but the smaller, less noticeable ones.

Mies Van Der Rohe famously said "God Lies In The Detail" and so it is true that your nature is best revealed in the little things that you do and in the things that are often beyond regular perception.

I have said (after others) that we exist in and through our interactions the people and things around us. It follows that because we are creatures of interactions, we share an equal part of the responsibilties of each and every interaction, no matter how brief the moment. How often have you heard people shirk responsibilty but blaming it on fate, or luck, or perhaps more accurately, bad luck?
Is "it wasn't meant to be" a vaild excuse for anything?

Ok, while the reality is that sometimes, things really are not of our doing and totally out of our control but again, like many other things, this is something that only you can answer and how honestly you answer lies solely on your conscience. It is too easy to blame things on other people and even easier to blame something that is intangible but does that really benefit us beyond the bliss of ignorance of our irresponsibility?
Ignorance is often cited as being a device to protect ourselves from truth; the perfect example being the 30 seconds from doom scenario but that, as a descriptive scenario is deliberately extreme to aid in the description.
Life is not that extreme.

Our existance, that is our interactions with the things around us are constant. As I am sitting here, hitting these keys, I am doing something, thinking something and perhaps more intrigueingly, in a state of constant change. Every word I am typing is being processed and reprocessed for a reason. In this peculiar interaction, I am interacting with myself but again, bizzarely, I am interacting with myself as I was the briefest moment ago. These words are appearing on screen a moment after I think them and by the time the sentence has completed, I will be left reading what is essentially, my past self. After that, I read and re-read and occasionally, delete and re-type.
This is my primary interaction in this situation.

Let's skip a few steps and get to the part where you are reading this; that would be, your interaction with what I was thinking. Where does my responsibilty lie there? If you are upset or angered or elated or saddened, is that my fault? Would I be the cause of any reactions you may have from reading what I have written, especially if that text was written months ago and without reference to you or anything about you?

Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
That would depend on both our honesty.

That was perhaps a bit too cryptic and bit too confusing but you get the gist of what I am trying to say, no? How about we go onto something a bit simpler?

If I am unhappy with my friendship (or lack of friendship) with someone, who is to blame?
Let's for a moment ignore that it might not even be a blame issue and to seek someone/something to blame is indicative of something else about your nature and instead look to the situation and the responsibilties within that situation.

Any relationship, be it good or bad, long term or in passing, has at the heart of it, two people.
What ever happens, it is always about how those two people interact and so it is reasonable to say that both parties are equally responsible for the outcome of that relationship.
The problem is that people have developed a atural tendency to point out when things are good and how that is a result of them. At the same time, when things are bad, they instanty find fault with the other side.
To that, I say bull.
Even if the other party has a fault (note: not "IS at fault"), you are still, if not more at fault for not bringing the issue up. Who is to blame if you don't say anything? If you don't tell them you're not happy, whose fault is that. That is of course a trick question as the answer is in the question...

All this is a very long winded way of going back to the title:
in/balance

There are two sides to that title, just as in our interactions.
It is easy to blame others for things but always so hard to blame ourselves.
People alway say that you get what you put in, so my question to you is this;
if you're not getting a lot out of something, how much are you putting in?

Titled: 9th December 2007
Published: 6th January 2008