Responsibility & Abandonment
- aarshimajumder
- Nov 8, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 10, 2022
There's a fallacy in us as to the true meaning of responsibility. For the most part, one tends to be clear on its generalization: a carriage of weight that grounds life. Living is of course incomplete without the knowledge of duty: and even if it doesn't seem to be much of a burden that may make itself intermittently conscious; we probably end up feeling that the conception of such responsibility is delineating to us only a certain quantity of freedom - of which there's already less. Most of us, however, infallibly recognize our duties as the part of the process of becoming - and staying - who we are. And that's just another simplification to living, isn't it?
I think responsibilities change within us over time. It's not much how external demands compel us to be aware of finer necessities, as those other aspects involved in understanding how we rise to meet them. And I think that's the point where most of us lose out. I certainly have. All of us may not equally fulfil all of our required responsibilities; be it in any given instant. But, it could also be that at that particular point our responsibility towards an objective transformed almost immediately to something sudden. That (as I'm sure you must have been told) is called being whimsical. Inconsistent. What we sometimes fail to remember is that this "lapse" in our patterns of "being reliant" is a graduality of maintaining responsibility.
What leads to abandonment? Is it really as bad as we claim it to be? My mother might answer in the firm positive. She's a lovely woman, probably one of the best you'll ever meet; and she's been a staunch mother - highly idealized, highly expressive. I've asked her opinions a couple of times on Nora Helmer (Ibsen's dear) walking out on her family, and every time there came the same answer: abandonment in any form is a sign of weakness. There's a difference between letting go and abandoning, she cautions me. Releasing one's hold from something resignedly is an acceptance of truth; while forcibly suppressing reality is fallacious.
If that's true, why do some feel an impulse to abandon their personal forms of responsibility? Outside the bounds of real life and requirement, we tend to fall out of place more with what we expect out of ourselves than what is expected of us: and their presupposed difference is not as explicit as one would like it to be. I've seen people wavering under "influential stigma" because they feel it to be interconnected to their lives through ineffectual (and sometimes invented) means. The assertive hold that circumstances may imprison us in can be dissuaded from their threat of control through the choices we make. It's not a question of how strongly one braces oneself to best survive the impact of something undesirable; but how it can modulated to befit one's own needs. It's not as "reasonable" or "acceptable" as looking at the bright side of life all the time. Acceptance is not always necessitated by an ethical principle of what ought to be done - but what you know essentially to be existent, resultive of the choices you have always made. One can learn to adapt to one's responsibilities as a form of fluid exchange between oneself and others - in a cyclical balance. And such is the same for abandonment as well, come to think of it.
Responsibility and abandonment are like the variant faces of a single continuum. They depend on the basis of reason deemed most suitable to a certain individual. For two people united by a common event, listening to the explanations they give as to its occurrence are sometimes so vastly different. It sort of reminds me of what Camus once said: there are truths, but no truth. Our responsibilities and simultaneous abandonment of them are often used by our current social contexts as a double-edged sword. But after all, it only matters when we use that very same sword against ourselves - to imaginations of the good and bad.
Thank you for reading! For your support, this has been able to continue for so long! I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
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