conscience & conscious
November 17, 2014 § 2 Comments
Awake and attentive, intentional and intuitive. I like to believe I aspire to live a life entrenched in authenticity, but some days I catch myself toying with judgments and certainty that blind me from my own consciousness. That awareness sits heavy on my conscience.
The irritation I feel for self-centered, busy body behaviors of others distracts my attention from my own tendency to dwell in a space of self or interject my opinions against another’s experience. The woman whose world is a perpetual catastrophe of need is not so different from my role as a mother navigating special needs. I judge the woman who gossips about others in unkind tones to my husband’s ear without hearing the hypocritical undertone that taints my purity. Were someone to cast a stone my walls of glass would cut painfully into my own distorted sense of entitlement.
I have come to stand too long in a place of self.
Even my recent wishes to shield my children from unhealthy familial relationships assumes that my guards are less damaging. Perhaps it is healthier to let my children see the truth of an unpleasant situation, the brokenness of family, from a place of safety rather than deny them the exercise in unconditional love. On this note, I am yet undecided, but I am aware that in protecting my children there is a new harm as they grieve the loss of something they do not fully understand. To balance the emotions of grief and assumptions of security is an impossible scale for certainty.
I tell myself that I am maturing into boundaries that define respect and foster kindness, but the abruptness of my certainty is unforgiving in its noisy righteousness. I am not like her, don’t want to be them, wouldn’t do that, or allow this are petty whispers that speak more of my shortcomings than others’ character. Perhaps the greater truth is that I am certain of very little and so I cling to threads of dignity.
The only true surety, for me, is the accident of awareness that perpetually humbles me in my assumptions. Last night I found a borrowed perspective in the musings of a woman I barely know, a college acquaintance I remember only tangentially to my own muddled memories, someone gracefully navigating a terminal health crisis. In her words I read a clarity of value for imperfect days and a vulnerability for her death that informs acceptance for an absence of control. There is no pettiness or greed for what is lost, no comparison to what cannot be.
The universe rarely whispers once and so this morning I recognized the lesson still unformed in a friend’s company. In the warmth of her ease I noted a similar grace; a bright soul who sees the world’s imperfections with an amused acceptance for inconvenient truths. Without an unkind thought I am drawn to her lightness.
Perhaps this is the lesson for me today: the little things that collectively inform a burden are only heavy when we carry them across our days. Today I am letting pebbles of unkindness and certainty slumber beneath my path to better navigate the day with a lighter sense of self.
scribblechic 
Nicely put! Sure we often need to carry those burdens for some time but there is help and as you have pointed out, we can decide that we only need to carry them so far…
Oh, Maurice, the power of choice says it all. To decide to release ourselves from a burden is the difference between surviving and thriving.