Autonomy and Authority
The Art and Science of crafting personal responsibility is a work in progress…
Alan Watts used to say that the only relevant or pressing question, after ‘Should I kill myself or go on living?’, is ‘Whose fault is this?” followed by “Who is going to clean all this up?” This still seems accurate.
I recently caught myself blaming others for not recognizing my authority — or is that my autonomy? I had to check myself — put myself back in line. No one else can give me the authority which is mine to claim, and no one else can take it away from me or deny it to me. Power is not given, it is assumed. To whatever degree anything is real in this house of mirrors we call reality, external validation is secondary to the internal shift I must make to claim what is inherently mine.
I have the authority to exist, and to live my life as I see best fit, to whatever capacity I can within the limitations I find myself bound by; even if many of those are imaginary. I think this is an area where I fall down a lot — I have a hard time distinguishing useful illusions from useless and false realities.
There are endless opinions and counter-arguments and differing perspectives that may or may not see me with any degree of accuracy.
