August 13, 2025

No Excuses

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Children talk it up when seeking a path out of responsibility, post-infraction. There flows a river of forgetting, not-knowing (the rule), blaming others, and all manner of excuses based on “the dog ate my homework”. Our social order necessitates life lessons to ameliorate this universal shortcoming. Sometimes scoldings and punishment seem like the reasonable intervention. And sometimes they are.

But if we fail to kindly take the child’s side as we deliver a strong life lesson, the negative affect is retained and the lesson is lost. Think of it this way: loss of a driving privilege may be the ideal consequence for breaking curfew with the family car. But if delivered with parental anger and attitude, there is no learning except “my parents are jerks (or a more colorful expletive)”. Besides, when delivering an agreed upon (think “behavioral contract”) punishment, there is no better time to take the kid’s side: “I am sorry you got home so late: no driving this weekend but you get a fresh start next week and i know you can do better”. After all, in a family shouldn’t we all be on each others side?

Of course, too often we are crazed in opposition to each other. We over-ameliorate irresponsibility, this very human flaw.

Parents blame children for these derelictions. Think of it: a child blames a sibling, then a parent blames the child for wrongly blaming a sibling. The immature schema of blame is never replaced by its mature alternative, responsibility. The starting point of this essay.

When blame dominates a family system, self-blame is inevitable. Unkind punishments from without become self-attacks from within: I am bad, no good, unworthy, even worthless. Ruminations tear at us and tear down ego-structure. We develop mistrust, shame, doubt, guilt, inferiority, and overwhelming confusion. In this instance, personal responsibility fades into the distance as self-blame gobbles up the territory of our everyday life. Children (and adults) become self-piteous, powerless excuse-makers.

Instead, lessons of responsibility are better taught as empowerments: the ability to respond to circumstance. Those lessons run deep and deserve a family dialog that illuminates the causes and effects of our mistakes, even (and especially) those with harm done. No blame. After all, there are always reasons for human behavior and if we are to grow it is imperative to understand them.

Responsibility: Reasons, but no excuses!

 

November 9, 2024

Bad Story. Good Story. No Story

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Tell me a story!

It’s a child’s plea whispered or even demanded (so often at the twilight of bedtime). These stories might be ancient or hot off the presses or made up by parents on the spot. But it is undeniable that kids need to hear those tales, featuring the irresistible protagonist who is none other than themselves.


And the tale so often invokes an antagonist and antagonisms aplenty. There are conflicts conquered, with lessons and morals and life instructions toward “living happily ever after”. Now that’s a good story!


With children, we do not need to explain how the mechanism of storytelling puts them at the center of every plot. They just know! Perhaps that is because our brains are story-attracted brains from the start. Stories promote life lessons, socialization and the assimilation of values. Such a brain has evolutionary advantages for groups, individuals and their progeny.


Story-attracted brains actually think in stories; we become the story. From early on we think in narratives that consist of thoughts and images often propelled by emotion. We remember in stories and we plan in them too. These capacities are an advantage to survival, and maybe sometimes, our happiness.


The story-oriented mind can bring people together with common cause narrations and shared advantage for all. Good stories. Of course, some stories pull groups apart. And competing narratives can and do pit tribes against one another with spats and rumbles and wars. Within individuals, negative thoughts can unleash stories of war upon the self. These can degrade to self-contempt and self-destruction. Lesser outcomes might include a bad day, un-satisfactoriness and deflation. Those are the bad stories.


Perhaps one of the most insidious, if not altogether bad, functions of stories is to inflate a compensatory, false self: “me, Me, ME”. Sometimes called our “storyline”, these ubiquitous narratives address deflation with an armor of conceit or worse: an over zealous selfishness and sense of entitlement.


Such a problem has led some to consider the alternative of inner quiet and no story at all. We could drop our self-serving storylines and engage fully with life on life’s terms. No agenda. No scheming. The trouble is most find it hard if not impossible to go from bad stories to no story at all. Those bad stories seem to grip us…and if we are honest, many of us hold on tightly to them too.


How might we proceed?


While difficult at first, we could start attending to good stories that reduce narratives imbued with automatic negative thoughts, and rest in our blessings. We nudge forward stories that promote themes of loving kindness, compassion, generosity and serenity. With imperfect but consistent effort those personal narratives slowly change.


What else? We could unplug from compulsions with social media and be inspired by the myths, parables, koans and chronicles that highlight our basic goodness and wisdom. These perennial philosophies abound across time and space, so we should pause and listen.


While bad stories anchor us to egotisms within and between human beings, good stories seem to calm us, even liberate us. We could be delivered, moments at a time into the serenity of no story at all:


that wonderful pause and silence at the end of every outbreath.

 

October 2, 2024

Varieties Of Hope

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Hope is good, right? Wait a minute, I heard that hope is actually bad. Well, maybe not exactly.


Let’s just say that hope is tricky.


We could imagine that hope occupies a continuum stretching from no hope to high hopes. No hope, the absence of hope, is hopelessness, a state that social scientists have rightly associated with depressed states, even suicide. Surprisingly, some very wise teachers have suggested that we cultivate a mindset of hopelessness. But why?


To understand that as anything but utter madness, consider the other end of the continuum, high hopes. That is, through the ceiling, ultra-optimistic hope. As a temporary or lingering state, that kind of hope feels pretty good, even ecstatic. Such a mindset deserves a deeper look.


Most will admit that high hopes occasionally rendezvous with big realities and that great aspirations might be the very path to realizing those big dreams. It happens. But what about lofty hopes so extreme that our leaps become hard landings, half-steps and stumbles? We land disoriented and empty handed. There is disappointment…and discouragement and depression and giving up. Our hopes and expectations can become, not uplifting, but an anchor taking us down. That is the nature of false hope.


Perhaps, we have this continuum all wrong. The extremes of high hopes and no hope have their moments of course. But a better guide might be to start with honest hope. That kind of aspiration is basic and true. For honest hope we must summon our courage and rationality as well as our fundamental truthfulness as we abandon self-deception. It is unsettling to imagine that this approach messes with the continuum of hope we started off with. After all, the answer to hope may not be quite as easy as to keep it high or keep it low, and then go on auto-pilot.


Instead, hope seems more of a moving a target. We could abandon the delusion that there is some static bulls-eye and all the trembling that goes with the pressure to hit it.


This new conception of hope is as fluid as the blood in our veins. As light as the air we breathe. Our ever-changing life demands that hope be ever-changing too. Mindfully, we could begin to notice that there is a natural, dynamic relationship of hope to circumstance. Ever-changing hope is hard but genuine. As precious ideas about hopes high and low disappear, we might discover, moment to moment, honest hope for ourselves.