The other day, a friend was talking about telling someone else that she was sorry for something she'd said - making amends. As we talked, I began thinking about humility and the willingness to take responsibility, at how necessary both are to getting free. We live in a culture in which many people are defensive and blame everyone else. Sometimes, I can see them stewing, rehashing all the reasons they are right.. It seems impossible for them admit any wrong-doing and I think this comes out of insecurity. The more threatened the ego, the more it wants to protect itself.
I think of the many times I've said or done something I shouldn't have, gotten angry, tried to get my own back. Something eventually shifted, though, and I began to realize that it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong; what I actually want is to let go of the residue of bad feeling I can so easily drag around with me. I've learned to feel in my body what anger, resentment, the need to prove I'm superior feel like. A motor revs up inside me and takes over, makes me go over and over again whatever the incident or argument was, becomes an obsessive reliving of all the bad feelings I walked away with.
I no longer want those feelings in my body so I've had to cultivate the kind of humility that helps me recognize when I've been wrong or done wrong. It keeps me from leading with ego and from the need to prove anything. It's what make amends possible.
But there's another ingredient in the willingness to make amends. Someone once said that the only way out of guilt is to take responsibility. Guilt imprisons and paralyzes me. Taking responsibility puts me on a new footing; it's as if I've been in a dark cave, endlessly blaming myself, giving myself all the bad feeling that keeps me from change. But I can find the way out, the way past the prison of guilt and that means taking responsibility. Not only for things I've said and done but also for the voices inside that tell me lies of negativity. I want that pathway, the freedom it promises. If it requires owning up to the truth or making amends or surrendering the need to clutch bad feeling to me, I'm more than willing to do it. I just don't want to live in guilt and carry bad feeling forward.
I was talking to a friend of mine who inherited a lot of money years ago. Everyone urged her to buy a house but she just couldn't do it. It seemed beyond her, to have to take care of all that maintenance, to have all that responsibility. She knew home-owning would fill her with too much anxiety so, even though people told her again and again she was making a mistake and should invest, she couldn't bring herself to do it.
We've talked about this many times. She knows it actually was a mistake, that if she had bought a house and handled the money more wisely, she'd have something substantial to leave to her children. But she sees very clearly who she was at the time and that person couldn't do anything but what she did. She's not the same person now and if the money came today she'd find a way to take on the responsibility she ran from those years ago. But given who she was then, it's hard to see how she could have acted differently.
I, like most people, have many things in my past I wish I had done differently. There are all the opportunities I walked away from, the countless things I misunderstood, the long long time it's taken for me to know any part of who I am. But like my friend I too see clearly how it was that I did what I did. I see who I was at the time and how, given the information I had, I couldn't do anything else.
Is it right to say my friend and I have regrets?. The dictionary defines regret as a feeling of sadness or disappointment about something you did or didn't do. Remorse, sorrow, contrition are some of the synonyms. I don't think either one of us feels any of those things. For myself, I can see that my life would be different if I had made different turns but I look back on the girl I was, the young woman so often stumbling around in the dark, and .I feel nothing but compassion for her. No one knows better than I the fear and confusion she lived in and the desperate efforts she made to deny it and never let it show. I understand, I want to say to her, I understand completely.
That compassion has been a long time coming. I remember vividly the long times, whole eras when I was drowning in bitterness and resentment, and punished myself for everything I thought I did wrong. I remember the hopelessness I felt about anything ever turning out right. But somewhere along the line I began to understand that I felt those things because I was focused on only one aspect of my life, the aspect that's all about getting and spending, about looking for my reflection in the world outside. I didn't know that something else was also at work, that the pain I was lost in would lead me to a path I didn't even know was there, the one that would take me toward self-acceptance, compassion, forgiveness - toward getting free. All the time I was looking in one direction, I was being turned in another. I had no way of knowing that this deeper part of me would lead me back to the young woman I had been and show me how to love her.
