Great Power

October 3rd, 2019

Will Smith and I are on the same wavelength.

I had been thinking about writing a post about the difference between fault and responsibility lately, and then I saw a video of his yesterday in which he perfectly describes what I was going to say. That smug ass. To sum it up: sometimes things happen in your life that is nobody’s fault. What you do when those things happen, however, is your responsibility. Regardless of whose fault it is.

This all sounds basic but, somehow, it’s not. The lack of understanding of these two principles is the underlying cause of most our world’s problems. Personal, global, social, political — nobody wants to shut the fuck up, put their fingers down and take responsibility for their actions.

Harshly put? Maybe. Truly felt? Absolutely.

We live in a world where our memes are the new projection. We recognize our faults — like we always have, through self-reflection, through discussion, through art — and then instead of dealing with them, we deflect on a social media level. The deflection isn’t new; the format is and is widely accepted, no matter what is wrong with any of us.

You go to a restaurant that represents your internal life. You sit down at a table and you recognize the menu laying on top. You recognize the menu — but you never pick it up to read it. Because that would require effort, and that would lead you to the truth about what’s in this restaurant, for better or for worse.

If I didn’t describe you: fantastic. You live in a world of honesty, and you want to know who you are, defects and all. But, unfortunately, a lot of us don’t or can’t pick it up. And instead of even facing that truth, we trivialize it. We find a meme that represents our shame and we share it instead of fixing it.

It is our responsibility to fix the faults of nobody.

This has been weighing heavily on me lately because I feel like in my world, I’m around a lot of folk who don’t want to be where they are.

And I just want to sigh and say: it is your responsibility to either change things and move on to someplace new, or to make where you are right now better.

Even if it’s not your fault.

Because every moment is your responsibility.