Then, Whose Fault Is It?

Umayma Abdulahi Issa Good

umayma022@hotmail.com

One of the pictures that never left my mind was on the wall of late Dr. Annelina Tonelli’s office. It showed a person who faces a mirror which reflects his back. Late Dr. Tonelli died trying to fix that picture. Here, Umayma redraws that picture – this time, in words though. 

Recently, I started to have some profound conversations with myself. Reflecting on my life, I found myself stuck with one question: Why we make the wrong choices and then not accept the responsibility afterwards? This question hit me so hard.

People usually find it much easier to blame someone else than own up their shortcomings. No one likes to be wrong. Our inflated egos take charge as soon as we sense any blame bucket passing around. But it is interesting that we don’t mind being at fault when we don’t know our mistakes. For some reason, our egos can accept to confess provided we do not feel that any comparison of knowledge is involved. I am not any different except that I find especially unsettling when I do not listen to my own conscience before taking a particular action.

These days, it is not difficult to prove that we do not like to take the responsibility of our actions. One of them is the frequency that we lambast politicians for pandering to select few. I am not interested if it is true or not at this stage (most of the time, it is). I am interested in our responsibility towards creating such a situation in the first place. We do not accept that we are the ones who recommend our kinsmen to the politicians for appointment and urge our cousins to benefit the maximum possible while in office. On the other side of the fence, we bemoan the corrupted powers, the diminished community spirit, or the reduced civility in our everyday life – and the list goes on.

It is natural that we, as humans, sometimes want the impossible. We all starve for an easy life.We want to succeed so easily. We want to have name, reputation and celebrity status without earning it in the hard way. Life isn’t just like that. It has ups and downs. We strive for things – some of which we get, other we don’t. Some are way beyond our grasp and then we wonder why these things do not come to us so easily or ever at all. In our struggles, we make decisions that “might” help us reach our goals yet we do not take a moment to consider at what could happen if they turn out otherwise. And when the positive does not come, there we are again playing the blame game and regretting our lost chances to look at the situation closely enough. 

Like most things in life, it takes a lot of self-discipline to admit the responsibility of our actions – because of arrogance and egotism, we may not accept facing the erroneous outcomes of our actions. But Sometimes, we have to just be frank and truthful to ourselves and learn from our mistakes. We deserve to apologize to ourselves not by saying “sorry” to ourselves, but by teaching ourselves the lessons in that experience. On many occasions, we may have to confess our faults to our loved ones. We are definitely hurting those dearest to us in the hope they will heal in time. They may not forget what we did, but when we honestly seek their pardon, they can forgive us and we can move forward together. 

The value of reflection is its ability to shape the action and behavior of the person. With that belief in mind, I decided to become the change I seek and to lead by example and deed, not by word. I decided to keep my mouth shut and since then one phrase frequently runs through my mind: “No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.” By now, you may be asking yourself, “Then, whose fault is it?”

Just as each individual creates much of the realities in each one’s life, so do we, as a society, create the overall experience of our community, culture and other realities that surround and impact us. As each individual grows in awareness of how our individual actions, for better or worse, amalgamate, converge and intertwine to create societal forces, we create the shared social experience and power to direct those forces around us.

The first step towards success in life is to know that we, and only we, are responsible for our actions. When all is said and done, our decisions are made by no one else, but by us. We do not always listen to that small voice that whispers conscience into our thinking, ethics into our action and morality into our behavior. When we neglect, we simply act on a whim only to regret later when the blame bucket is circulating. And that is not fun – in many cases, it destroys important relationships in our lives.

Unless we are making mistakes, we’re not working on important and difficult problems – and that is even bigger mistake. Mistakes are always there – the building blocks we later on call experience. But if we, as individuals or group, don’t consider ourselves responsible of the the outcomes of our actions, then, whose fault is it?

Only when we accept the powerful cumulative impact of our insignificant individual actions, we take the first step towards accountability, which leads to development. When we admit our responsibility as individuals for our participation in collective outcomes, we grow more powerful both as individuals and as a community.