Tag: burden

Sharing the Burden

It’s not you. It’s me.

We’ve heard this cliché line again and again. And we know it means bad news.

Regardless whether these words come during a breakup or the breakdown of a business partnership, they effectively mean, “It’s over.”

Or, more accurately, “It’s over ‘cause I said it’s over. You had no hand in the decision.”

What a load of bull.

Of course, the other party had a hand in the decision, whether they know it or not. And pretending to fall on one’s sword over who’s to blame only serves to paint that other party as the villain.

It’s a twisted bit of guilt-tripping that paints a gray world as black and white.

Here’s the truth: If it takes two to make a thing go right, it takes two to make a thing go wrong as well. Partnerships are a shared burden. And when things break down beyond repair, both parties are culpable for letting go of that burden.

Now, this is not to say that all blame gets split 50-50. There are times in any partnership where one half of the equation might not act in good faith. Spouses might cheat, business partners might act fraudulently and friends might make selfish choices. In these instances, the blame for these actions fall on the offending parties alone.

Forgiveness could understandably be fleeting in times like these, as the moral ground has clearly been tilted. But if these feelings of tension and anger lead to the end of a partnership, the blame goes both ways.

For the fact remains that both parties once agreed to enter into that partnership in good faith. The dissolution of that partnership — justified or not — is the very definition of bad faith.

In the wake of this decision, the hoodwinked party should not be considered a victim. Instead, they’re guilty of dealing themselves a bad hand — even if 20-20 Hindsight is the only way they could know it. And they will ultimately have to pay the price for the decision they made — a price that will manifest itself in the ashes and scars of a once-promising agreement that goes down in flames.

So, don’t be fooled: There are no winners when a partnership breaks down. The responsibility weighs heavy, and both parties are eternally beholden to sharing the burden. Punting or posturing will only get them crushed in the end.

Put “It’s not you. It’s me” out of your mind. The only word that matters is us.

The Art of Letting Go

Keep it or throw it out?

It’s not quite Shakespearean prose, but I reckon I’ve heard it more often than any line from Hamlet — from the voice in my head alone.

This time, the words were my mother’s. My parents are in the putting their house on the market, and part of that process includes cleaning out 26 years of assorted items. Even though I left the nest more than a decade ago, plenty of mementos from my childhood and adolescence stayed behind— which is why I got daily “Keep It or Chuck It” messages as my parents sorted through everything this summer.

With a few notable exceptions, the answer has always been the same:

Get rid of it.

***

It hasn’t always been this way. In fact, it rarely has.

Long before hoarders were immortalized on TV shows, I was on a mission — a mission to keep anything and everything. But I didn’t want to make a mess, so I would stuff cabinets, closets and out-of-sight storage spaces with piles of things I wanted to hold on to.

There were two reasons I obsessive took this approach. First, I wanted to preserve memories in a visible way. Second, I loathed the mental image of anything I’d bought or created wasting away in a landfill.

These sentiments are fine on a small scale — this is how scrapbooking and recycling came to be. The problem was that I felt this way about everything.

It started with physical items, but my mission quickly degraded my relationships with family and friends. I was constantly adding on, saving memories, maintaining everything I had accumulated.

I was afraid of letting go. And I was suffering because of it.

***

Letting go is an undervalued part of life. It’s something we all must do — after all, we don’t live forever — but it’s also something we try and avoid in our everyday lives. Breaking up is brutal, losing touch is unbecoming, and getting fired indicates failure. Our memories are the only part of the past we take with us to the present; those we share those memories with serve as the bridge between the two worlds.

So we hold on, incessantly. We become sentimental. We fixate on the past.

We cling to every detail of How It Was, so it can serve as the foundation for How It Is.

But all we’re really building is a burden. A bigger footprint, more items to keep track of, more meaningless details to weigh down our mind.

We must stop this madness.

***

If the past informs the present, and the present informs the future, we must move on from anything that doesn’t move us forward. We must master the art of letting go.

We must rid ourselves of the static. Let go of all the memories that leave us lost in Yesterday without a ticket back to the Here and Now.

We must move on from the mementos that don’t tell a story, or those we can’t tell a story from; they alone tell us nothing.

For growth guides us down the current of life; we can’t afford to be anchored in place by a fear of letting go. We must free ourselves and live unburdened.