Everyone Pays

I'm generally aware that when I failed at marriage, my ex-wife and children paid a price for that failure. So did other members of our families and some people who were near enough to get hit. Throughout my life some women have paid for my failure to grow up and make real decisions about what I wanted. When I have been hard and stressed, my students have paid for that. Nowadays I am loose and relaxed and my students pay for that, too.

In short, I've made an assortment of mistakes and carried a complex of flaws with me through life, and people who are close to me pay for thoise.

I say this not in a self-torturing I'm so awful kind of way. Beating yourself up for your failings is just self-indulgent. Recognizing that you owe a debt to everyone and the best way to pay it back is to do better-- that's the thing.

This is an issue of privilege as well, because one of the benefits that comes with privilege is the chance to screw up and not have to pay for it yourself. For the privileged, the cost is spread around and other chances are given. For those living without privilege, it's less easy to get that second chance, that opportunity to move on and leave your costs behind.

But to live with privilege should mean being mindful of the debt that you owe. Anybody who claims not to owe anybody anything is a fool. He is that guy who always lets somebody else buy dinner and never thinks to take his turn.

If you are human, people are paying your way through this world in a hundred different ways, and you owe them all. Often you will never get to pay them back. It's useful, I think, to imagine that your debt is not just owed to individuals but to the world at large. You may not be able to pay back, but you can always pay forward. And you can adjust your attitude-- when the moment comes that you must pay for someone else's screw-up, no matter how small, better to think of it as paying off your bill than being hit by a cost that you don't believe you owe.

I owe more than I will ever pay back even if I live to be 100. But I have th privilege of getting to pay back at least some of what I owe.