Speaking a little personally here. Looking back, I’ve come to realize some things about my mother’s life that I could not see when I was young. She was a young mother in the 1950s. My father was privileged in a variety of ways and she was not. She was large hearted and sweet, and she was blue. She didn’t have a lot of extended family supporting her. She did not live in the village it takes to raise a child.
And like a lot of kids who become a little parentified, I was empathic and caring, and I felt a certain influence. It was gratifying to feel like I could cheer her up, and to be her confidant sometimes as I got older.
That can lead, as an adult, to an excessive sense of your own influence. An unrealistic appraisal of your own influence over what is really happening in the minds of others.
Many people have some version of this. A sense of over-responsibility for what’s going on inside somebody else. Caregiving responsibilities, caretaking responsibilities. Alongside it, a sense of being overly to blame for what is happening in the mind of another person. And then, using a loaded word deliberately, a kind of grandiosity about how much you can influence what’s going on in there at all.
The Five Reflections, Turned Toward Other People
There’s a teaching from early Buddhism called the five reflections. It comes from a short discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya. You ask these of yourself, and you bring a don’t know mind to each one, a fresh beginner’s mind.
Is it given to me to avoid aging?
Is it given to me to avoid illness?
Is it given to me to avoid death?
Is it given to me to avoid being separated, one way or another, one day or another, from all that I love?
And is it given to me to avoid inheriting the results of my deliberate actions?
I’m slightly updating and paraphrasing some of the traditional language, but I think those questions stand in their own right as I’ve expressed them here. In the sutta the Buddha talks about those who don’t face these reflections, and then those who do.
The twist I want to put to this is to foreground the fact that these reflections apply to other people too.
They face aging, illness and death. They face separation, given impermanence, from all that they care about and love. So we can certainly have compassion for them. And then there’s the fifth one. They too inherit the results of their actions. Your karma, in the sense of the results of actions in this life at least, is your own, for better and for worse. Theirs are their own, for better or worse. Two truths side by side: oneness and distinction, joining and differentiation, the ocean and the waves.
The Bad News and the Good News
Inherent in those reflections is a compassionate recognition that other people are being affected by streams of causes and conditions that are not your own.
And with wisdom, over time, we can start to recognize that the bad news and the good news is that there’s almost nothing you can do.
What a release. Because if you don’t have power, you don’t have responsibility. If you don’t have the power to change what’s happening inside another person, you don’t have moral culpability either. You’re not to blame. It’s not your fault, right?
Others are the inheritors of the streams running through their lives. The results of their own deliberate actions, and also so many forces affecting them from upstream that you’re not the cause of, and that you have very little power to change. That’s worth recognizing.
Much of this comes up when people try to set boundaries in their own lives, which is what I’ll be teaching in a four hour workshop, Setting Healthy Boundaries, on September 19th. We’ll get into the practical side of it: sorting what’s coming at you, knowing what you won’t put up with and what you’re no longer going to give, and how to hold a line with someone you also love. Don’t forget to use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.
The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.