I want you to be free. I cannot do it for you; my path is not yours. But I can tell you where it is and let you find it on your own.
When you place reins or chains upon another, you are as surely bound as they. Civility means you avoid situations where you would be on either end of chains or reins. You should hope to season with grace your encounters with other humans, but the majority of humanity lacks grace. However, all humanity is accountable to God’s Laws, and civility is an expression of His moral law. Your path to peace and sanity over the broken ground of this world will require feet shod with civility.
Civility assumes voluntary cooperation. In this world you will often be thrust into moments of decision which inevitably affect others. Even as you strive to be true to your own convictions, those convictions are invalid unless they include a sense of accountability to those affected by your choices. You need not yield to their demands, needs, hopes, wishes and feelings, but you must take note of them. That’s because you must be prepared to bear the consequences of any necessary disregard.
Even when the affect is strictly imaginary, when they have zero legitimate claim, simply seeking some excuse to throw a fit and play the victim, you must take into account whatever you could know of such things. Any failure to consider them takes you down the path of neurosis or psychosis. In other words, you have to steel yourself far in advance for such moments, particularly when those moments are matters of emergency, and decide how you will need to react in general terms. It won’t hurt to rehearse. Indeed, to be truly yourself means not simply absorbing everything portrayed before your eyes and modeling that, but realizing you are not that person, and must have your own reaction. Those of you who love TV and movies take note — don’t lose your sense of self in entertainment. You cannot control the factors of any context; you cannot script the behavior of others.
Every dysfunctional relationship I’ve ever seen hung on one or more members demanding a scripted result from situations. The fantasy of making someone move their hands and feet at your will, of shaping their thoughts and desires, is the ultimate slavery, because the chains are stronger than any tangible material. Every other human must be free to choose their own path. If you cannot come to amicable terms of cooperation, separate. There may well be compelling reasons you can’t fully implement geographical distance, but there is more than one way to separate from others. It may require you consider carefully before committing yourself to such situations, whether you can afford forced association with wackos, and what your options may be. Civility is the art of crafting multiple lines we should not cross within a given context.
Civility is planning for your lines to be transgressed by others. Peace is not letting someone else have your reins, of seizing the power to make you react in this or that way. It’s the creative art of human interaction, or refusing to interact, not bound to any script, but to underlying principles. It requires you divest yourself of the emotional commitments to predetermined results, yours or others. It’s balancing between competing needs and necessities, knowing what price must be paid for this or that sacrifice. It’s calculating in advance the price of your departure from this prison existence on the lower plane.
No one will ever meet your standards, not even you. Civility is negotiating an existence between various degrees of failure. Peace and sanity is celebrating how well things turn out in spite of it all.
