I am continuously surprised at the lengths people will go to in order avoid responsibility for the things that are clearly their fault.
I do it.
We all do it
It’s like taking the time to damage the heating element in your dryer so that you don’t have to do the laundry without feeling like you are being lazy, and then somehow having the nerve to complain when you don’t have anything to wear to work.
It would be so, so much simpler for us to just acknowledge what we did wrong, fix it, and move on by simply not doing it again, but we often take the more arduous route of fabricating a complicated façade of reasons why we are not at fault.
We may even spend more time concocting these reasons (and making ourselves believe them) than we would fixing what we did, even though doing this ensures that we will have to deal with the same problem again.
It’s repainting a house with a cracked foundation or doing the makeup on a corpse instead of burying it.
It looks okay for a while but it will fall apart eventually. It is inevitable. It’s math. Anytime we choose image over substance things will go wrong.
There is some truth to Occam’s Razor, and when we catch ourselves doing mental gymnastics in order to explain exactly why something isn’t our fault, there is a really good chance it is exactly our fault. Many things are as simple as they look, and they are our fault.
This isn’t the end of the world.
It isn’t even necessarily a bad thing.
It’s an opportunity to own it and keep it from becoming a long term trend that brings suffering into our lives and the lives of those we love.
Own it, clean it up, and don’t do it again.
It’s amazing how many things this fixes.
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