We possess two powers to create a future worth living in. One of them is the power to forgive. The other is the power to make and keep commitments. We can use them both to secure a future for our most precious relationships.
The power to forgive frees us from past pains that we cannot accept and cannot forget.
When we forgive, we ignore the normal laws that strap us to our painful pasts. We fly over a dues-paying morality in order to create a new future out of the past's unfairness. When we forgive other people, especially people to whom we are committed, we untie ourselves from the unfair pain they caused us. When we forgive ourselves, we unshackle ourselves from unfair pain that we inflicted on others. We thaw a past that was frozen in pain, and shake ourselves free to face the future.
Just as the power of forgiveness releases us from a painful past, the power to make promises creates a foundation for a hopeful future.
The remedy for the ...chaotic uncertainty of the future is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises." Hannah Arendt wrote this at the conclusion. Of her epochal book The human condition. With commitments, she said create "Islands of security" within a wild sea insecurities. This is the power of commitment-the ability to secure our vital personal relationships against the tides of disillusionment.
Commitment is our unique human power to stand up against the whims of fate and circumstance. It ranks alongside of, maybe even above, the other noble faculties that civilized human beings applaud themselves for having-intelligence, great feeling, and imagination. "How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!...in apprehension how like a god!" Let Shakespeare go on about our likeness to rational divinity. The truth is that none of us is even more God-like than when we simply make and simply keep commitments to each other.
There so much about our future that is out of our hands. We are stucked into the deadly games played by principalities and powers of this world. We are walloped by private tragedies and gifted by divine providence. And we all rise and fall with the American dollar. Yes, some things are beyond our controls.
But we have control over the most important arena where we live out our lives: we can decide, once,.and then a thousand times over, that we will keep our caring commitments to people. This power, when we choose to use it, is what breathes lasting life into the most precious facet of our future, the relationships we have with people we love.
It is a paradox. For we use power to limit our power-to tie ourself to a promise, a promise we intended then to keep. And we give someone else the right to hold us to that promise. All of which sounds more like losing control than taking control, like being stuck with the past more than taking charge of the future.
But that is the paradox! Being bound to a promise we make is only a way to set the stage for a future that is in our hands.
The promise we made yesterday is like the foundation an architect lays for the building he is planning. Once he has the foundation; he is free to improvise, to change, to recreate all the rooms in his building. He is free to improve on his plans as he goes. But he needs the foundation to make it possible.
Its that way with commitments. The promise we make at the beginning is the foundation. From then on we are on our own to the story of our relationship with another person. The foundations only gives us a continuing chance to keep on creating our future.
Each moment is a new beginning. In every decisions we swipe, the fates aside and take charge of our future. With another person. Whe.change, our mind, we improvise, we adjust, we suffer, we wait, we forgive, we move in and out of love, and we accommodate ourself to the shifting scenes of our life as we move from stage to stage on our journey. And we can make all our moves, freely, on the foundation we created by our commitment.
Life does not always feel as if we are in charge of it. Whenever a lasting relationship goes sour, we can feel fated, checkmated by things we cannot control. We feel bound by our obsessions. We feel driven by unsatisfied desires. We feel crippled by whacky parents. We feel trapped in an illicit love affair. And disabled by diverse demons tangled in the dark grottos of our soul. All in all, we do not always feel like a giant wings and cuffed legs.
We shop for a therapist who can work a magic that we cannot perform alone. But the therapist can only help us take responsibility for ourselves and take control of our future.
In her book MARRIED PEOPLE, Francine Klagsbrun remarks that "People who stay happily married see themselves not as victims, but as free agents who make choices in life." This is the key.
The first choice we make about our future is about ourselves.
Are we victims or are we choosers,?
The initial, and the most critical, choice in commitments is the choice to say no to the victim syndrome and yes to the power of keeping promises.
Of course if another person always met all of our needs, we could glide through the future with him or her without even thinking about commitment.. If the flame of desire for the other person never flickered, we would never feel pressured by a promise we made when we didn't know what keeping it would cost.
But most of us keep our commitments in spite of at least some good or bad reasons for not keeping them. Commitment was invented precisely because of the "in spite of" that haunts every lasting relationship. No matter when or where we live, we keep our commitments in spite of two factors that are present in every close human association.
FIRST, we suffer a global epidemic of imperfections. It hits people of every race, every culture, every faith. Every relationship is carried on imperfectly by imperfect people. Every friend is flawed. Every spouse has failings. Every son or daughter is faulty. Every commitment ever made, this side of Eden, has been made by a flawed person to a flawed person. So we always keep our commitments in spite of the imperfections of the people to whom we make them.
SECOND, each of us is unique, different from every other. Inside or outside, we are all, at certain points, strangers to each other. Which is the way it should be, because our mysteries make us interesting. Besides, if you are different from me you offer me something I cannot find in myself.
But differences can push us apart too; if other people are too different from us, they do not attract us, they threaten us. If you have too many habits that looks crazy to me, if you use too many words I cannot understand, if you have too many beliefs that are aliens to mine, if your quirks are too strange, I am likely to withdraw from you, and look for someone a little more like me. Our differences can become our incompatibility.
So, we are imperfect and we are different. And we keep our commitments in spite of our imperfections and our differences. Somehow love has to be kept alive, for no real relationship lasts unless love lasts. The shell can survive, but the relationship dies for lack of love. And the only love that lasts is the promised love of commitment.
Relationships do not die because the whimsical gods of Eros stop smiling on us. Nor do they survive because the gods of Eros fan the flame of our desire. Our romantic feelings float with the Fates;erotic love flickers and fades, flourishes and flounders. But lasting relationships do not depend on the ficle Fates or changeable gods of Eros.
We decide for ourself whether we will keep the promises of love. Not fate, not destiny, not accidental, but our own choices keep our pivotal personal relationships going.
Remember that every genuine personal commitment has two components. Consistency and care.
Consistency keeps the external structure steady. But care breathes lasting love inside the structure. Consistency is the backbone; care is the heart. Consistency is the muscle; care is the warm blood. Consistency is our predictability; care is our personal presence. We are consistent to the extent that we choose to be. An obvious point. But caring too is a matter of choice. We do not fall into care. Not the way we fall in love.
We have to choose to care. At least to care enough to respect the other person as a duly accredited image of God, not to be coerced, deceived, or demeaned. We have to choose to encourage the other person to develop and deploy his or her own gifts-even if they compete with ours, to honor the other person's trust, to accommodate ourself to unsatisfactory realities within our relationship, to applaud the other person when she dances to the tempo of her own music. We have to choose to care.
But we can also create our own landscapes of care, patterns of care. The desire of lived-out commitment.
We Listen.
Listening is the silent shape of caring. We listen to what the other person says to us. But we listen closest when no words are spoken. We listen for the unuttered message of feeling. We listen for pain expressed in disguised sighs. We listen for desires heard only in the language of the eyes. We listen to our own message to learn how they were heard through the filter of the other person's needs.
We Stay Awake.
A caring person stays alert to what is happening. We notice the little things that have large meaning. We keep our wits about us when trifling temptation at five o'clock in the afternoon could take us where we don't want to be at ten in the evening.
We Stay In Tune With Reality.
Caring takes the form of accommodation to things we cannot change. We choose not to live by fantasies of the ideal friend, the perfectly satisfying spouse, the superior child.
We Forgive.
Caring on the longer journey takes shape in forgiveness. We can, if we choose, always go for the jugular, getting at least an eye for an eye and, if possible, two of theirs for one of ours. Or we can choose the way of healing for the wounds of unfair injury.
WD Stay Honest.
Caring is nurtured in the truth. And honesty comes whole, not piecemeal; we have to be truthful if we hope to speak truthfully. So if we care for another person, we will be our very self, not a fake, not masked self, in her presence.
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Hari
Blessings...