Balancing non-attachment with social responsibility.

A few days ago, I created and published this Pithism post that I ultimately chose to take down.

A peer insightfully pointed out that my posts, particularly my Pithisms, are akin to prompts, which is seriously the best way to describe what I've been sensing they are. 🤩

Pithisms are deliberately not elaborated upon. They are meant to be brief, to be out of context, primarily because that's precisely how I receive them. BOOM! Something lands. BOOM! Insight arises. These intuitions are hardly ever accompanied by lengthy intuitive lectures. They are what they are: Eureka moments, and I share them as such.

However… that also does open the very real possibility of misinterpretation.

My practice as a writer is to let go of attachment to any positive or negative perceptions that others may have of my words, and by extension, me. As I wrote in my About page, I am writing for me. I am a student of life, and I write to remind me of what I need to hear, learn, practice and remember. These are my study notes, so to speak.

However, I strongly feel that, as a writer, I must still be mindful that, regardless of my intentions, my words can be misused and abused, intentionally or unintentionally, to cause hurt and harm to others, whether to themselves or others around them.

Sure, I could claim, “Oh, I have no attachment to the perceptions of others; therefore, I care not about how people may perceive or use my words. That is their folly, after all!”, but that is spiritual bypassy crap and anathema to me. It feels utterly irresponsible.

As I said to my peer, I'm happy to be insane. 🤪 However, I refuse, to the best of my ability, to be harmfully insane. And that means I choose to balance the meaning of having no attachments regarding what I write with what I feel is my—our, really—social responsibility for potential impact.

The path I have chosen is not a “get out of jail free card” from consequence just because I profess to practice some spiritual shit.

Though not elaborated, I do often drop a follow-up thought or two with my Pithisms. When I originally posted the above post, this was what I followed it up with:

Permission to be flawed, permission to be human. Not excuse to be hurtful or harmful, obviously.

I wrote this without thinking; the words just jumped onto the screen. I must already have felt uncomfortable with what I sensed as a higher potential for the misinterpretation of my words by people who misuse and abuse spiritual concepts to justify or excuse hurt and harm.

Could I have simply converted it into a longer-form post, an Articlish, to elaborate and clarify? Perhaps. But I didn't feel called to do that. If I tried, it would have been a contrivance, and that defeats another point of my writing practice, which is to stay as true to the original inspiration as reasonable. This post wasn't born as an Articlish; it was a Pithism, and I respect that. So I chose to take it down instead.

Yes, ultimately, anything we create can be taken out of context and used for hurt or harm, for we have no control over anything, and especially not the perceptions or intentions of others.

However, I still prefer to practice social responsibility to the best of my flawed human ability because it is one of my chosen entanglements with this world. 🙏🏼