Obligations
I have been thinking a lot about obligations these days- and I am talking about personal obligations. How much are we really obligated to another person? How much obligation is good for you or the other person? I think that there are several things that have triggered this.
The first thing has been that I have been doing a general housecleaning of my life. I mean this literally and metaphorically too. I spoke about this in another blog post called “cleaning house.”
The second thing that prompted this post is a conversation I recently had with a total stranger at a restaurant bar while having lunch. This stranger, who later introduced herself to me, postulated that the criteria she uses to determine whether to continue any relationship is whether the relationship “pleasured” her. She was not talking about sexual pleasuring either, but pleasure in the emotional sense. You know what I mean- whether after hanging up a typical phone conversation with the other person, you felt good, or you felt like jumping off of your terrace. I have been thinking much about using this yardstick myself, because I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that emotional stress is potentially the most deadly kind, and is often administered best by those close to us; they are the ones with access. My lunch acquaintace may have an even better reason for doing this: if you accept the premise the universe does not want us to suffer unnecessarily, when we rid our lives of people not making us feel good, we are actually serving a divine purpose.
The third thing that has caused this examination into obligations is a study I read about on the internet. The study was one of personal happiness, and used various measures to determine what exactly makes our fellow human beings happy or not. It turns out the best predictor of whether any of us is happy is the happiness of our three closest friends. Not only that, but the health of our three closest friends also greatly determines the level of our own personal health. This really doesn’t surprise me too much, because I believe we absorb the energy of those closest to us. The energy factor-once again- is controlling.
The fourth thing that has caused me to rethink obligations is the realization that much of our intervention in our people’s lives, justified by our thinking it is an “obligation,” is not just unnecessary but actually makes things worse . When intervention is done to stop someone else’s pain, our efforts are often thwarted AND resented for a reason perhaps never contemplated: we are interfering in a life lesson the other is meant to experience-as painful as it can be to watch.
How do you see your personal obligations?
