Choose Well

Have you ever been caught doing something you should not have been doing before?  I’m sure we all have.  Maybe you took a cookie from the cookie jar as a kid after your parents said not to (do people still have cookie jars?).   Or maybe you found some cash on the ground and instead of looking to find the rightful owner you quickly pocketed it for later.  In those moments have you had “that feeling”? The feeling where you knew it wasn’t right, or it just felt wrong, and then you try to start justifying to yourself…I think we all have been there, as we all are human. 

Sometimes our first reaction might be to try the blame game.  Maybe you threw a rock through a window and broke some glass, and your first reaction was “it wasn’t me, it was my brother!”, or maybe things went bad at work, a job wasn’t done, someone got hurt, and instead of taking responsibility for it you look around quickly to calculate “who can I blame?” The blame game is real, we’ve all seen it, and I think it tells us something about the human heart.

It's easy to be judgmental, and it’s easy to blame. I remember reading a line from a book one time that said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”  Reading that line cut through my heart.  We are all capable of good and evil?  If we are honest with ourselves, we know this is true, and we don’t have to look far for evidence.  Just watch the news (or don’t), and you will see that good and evil is very much real.

What then, do we do with this knowledge?  Do we throw up our hands in despair? Do we look for who to blame for making us this way?  Or do we do something old-fashioned, do we take responsibility for this human condition, and do we choose to take responsibility in our lives for who and what we are, and most importantly, how we behave?  

Sadly, many of us want to blame someone else, or we want to blame “the system”.  We know that life isn’t fair and no system is perfect.  While we can fight the injustices in society, I would contend that one thing we all can do is work on individual selves.  We can commit to being better people, we can be kind to others, we can educate ourselves about things of which we do not know, and we can listen to that inner voice that is telling us, this isn’t right”.   Knowing that this dividing line runs through our hearts, we have a choice.  I hope we consider this, that we choose well, and choose to be good.

"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being". 

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from his book The Gulag Archipelago