Glory – For Adults Only
Colluding with Circumstance.
Are you finding it easier to spend money than spend emotion? Are you finding it easier to give your daughter a career, than find her a husband?
Sometimes we tend to blow everything out of proportion to escape the responsibility of our own choices.
We want that our children be independent so that they needn’t be leeches or victim. Traditionally our sons found this in careers and our daughters in marriage.
Perhaps because, so many men in the past have seen themselves as the law and have treated their wives as convicts, we belong to a generation of parents who increasingly want to ensure that our daughters too find independence apart from marriage.
This has resulted in the notion that any form of dependence, especially in a relationship, is a lack of freedom and undesirable. It has also resulted in the mirage that money is the saviour of free will.
On the contrary I find, that the two most common lies dissatisfied people delude themselves with are:
(a) I need more money before I can proceed with my life independently.
(b) Being dependent means being victim.
There is a vagueness in their articulation; guardedness in their response. Ask what independence really means and most often this is the substance of the answer: – The ability to make a decision not needing any form of scrutiny.
It’s most easily visible in families that are in business. The business thrives as long as the owners have clear boundaries and subject themselves to these.
The rot begins with the claim of “What is mine by right!”
This ‘right’ is described as the freedom to “Do as I want” or more clearly: “The ability to make & implement my own decisions without having to bother to explain it to somebody else.”
Perhaps nowhere else is the absolute lack of character in man more visible than in the person whose decisions or conduct does not want to bear scrutiny, and this lack of character is perhaps the single largest reason why families in businesses don’t survive.
Or why other kinds of relationships, including marriage, suffer or fail.
Seeking the absence of dependence is the route to our greatest loss. It provides the same initial ‘high’ of recklessness but with sadder consequences.
The earth might well as state it no longer wants to orbit the sun.
Independence is not the absence of authority in our lives. The absence of authority is attractive only to a lawless people.
Independence is the subjugation, by our own free will, to another’s authority. We may either exchange our glory for useless things or pursue dependence.
The coward gives up and pretends submission; the deluded are bitter; the fool is lonely.
Success lies in subjecting ourselves to the demands of our choice. Failure lies in colluding with circumstance.
People colluding with circumstance tend to be people who are boiling over with silent rage yet able to express anger only with a safe victim. At all other times they display constant enthusiasm.
The ‘safe victim’ is usually that person, or set of people, the individual most needs, and actually is most dependent on.
People colluding with circumstance specifically avoid displaying dependent behaviour of any kind only with that ‘safe victim’. At the same time they’re happy to display gratitude to anybody they are not dependent on.
It can be troubling. Remember the one who is colluding with circumstances is usually blind to the fact. S/he cannot see.
The most obvious symptom is that one tends to feel like the victim. That one wants change but feels helpless to engineer it. That one feels hurt continuously. That one is simply unable to engage in the necessary conversations…at least in a rational and sane manner.
If you feel victim of your circumstances today, it’s not complicated to make the necessary alterations.
Remember, perhaps it’s not your fault.
We’re always victim or beneficiary of the ideas and premises we’ve been taught and chosen to embrace. Thankfully we can choose to never stop growing up!
Grow up again. Own your circumstances.