You may have to watch out for mankind when you break a promise. When you give the ultimate promise to someone and then take it back, cancel the promise out and release him, what happens to his heart in the process? Granted, he will pick up the broken pieces of his own heart after you are gone, but will there be a price that even others pay for the lack of trust that evolved from your stunning wisdom?
If you were not the trustworthy sort to begin with, the results of these events might be in your favor. You may have made a promise to one you loved that was not believable because you were untrustworthy back then. With luck on your side, the one you loved will remember how untrustworthy you were to begin with. He may reflect upon his pain later and rationalize that his love for you evolved from his own poor judgment. You may then be 'off the hook'. "She was not the trustworthy kind to begin with. Why should I have believed in her promise at all? I'll find someone else worthy of trusting and things will be better." Keep in mind that this will be if you are lucky.
But if you were perceived as the trustworthy type back then by your lover, making the promise about hereafter and ever more and then changing your mind for any reason short of your own demise, well… it may result in his lack of ability to trust again. You may promote or create the heartbreak of the century, funny as that sounds, not just for your lover, but for all others he then touches and all whom he makes promises to, as he takes the experience you provided and rationalizes that even trustworthy people in life break promises. This, with all the other broken promises made in the world by the trustworthy and the untrustworthy alike, then begins to resemble a pandemic virus spreading through the learning population of mankind like an unending hurricane.
Children may go without a parent, wives will be brokenhearted, even though your recipient lover was well-intentioned in his own promise-making back to you in those days, now concluding that "sometimes even trustworthy people have to break promises!" Show me a child who understands that statement. But even so, the example is set and the result in the life of that child, when it is time to take his turn with the adult baseball bat at the home plate of life, is almost guaranteed to be similar. Many of the promises made will be loosely devised thereafter because you taught, quite resolutely by intention or example, to a child you did not know, that promises no matter how well intentioned not only can, but will be made and will be broken.
It takes more than just desire to make a promise, it also takes the insight of the prophets, which would induce consideration of the fact that perhaps you were not at fault to begin with. Making promises about life requires more than passion. As unromantic as this may seem, it takes hard and cold inspection to examine the balance between one's own capabilities and a lover's capabilities in producing the promises of forever and hereafter. Who makes promises with hard and cold inspection anyway? - certainly not the young, or to better qualified that statement, not youth who basically live by the hormone burst. However, don't start celebrating because you are not entirely free of fault in this dilemma. It was you who made the promise that was better left unmade and there is a chance that someone, or many, are paying for it now. If the promise were not made to begin with then it would not have needed to be broken.
Filling this scenario out a little further, what would you do if you passed by the one you loved so many decades ago, and he made the same offer to you today? "I missed you since the day you left. I'm asking you again to be mine as I did before." Would you believe your former love is trustworthy enough to make this promise to you, as it was you who generated the destruction of his trust so long ago? Will you expect to find this person as pure as when you broke his heart? Will you wonder now that you have witnessed both sides of a reasonable promise, if he can even make one? Will you let others convince you that you just have cold feet as you ponder this question, or even believe inside yourself that this is fate's way of balancing your past of immature commitments with today, now that you are wiser? Do you have the courage to break his heart again and deny him twice? Will granting his request this time be truly better than denying him again for his own sake?
These are your choices. You could choose to be strong and resign yourself to be available to the beauty of his love and whatever comes with it - late but not too late. You could also avoid "the promise" again, and make allowances for oceans of time and human events; simply listen and not speak, as it should have been in the beginning when you were too young to know how promises were made. Whichever path you choose, try not to make a mistake this time as well. There might be sweet wisdom available to you in the sound of his aged brandy voice and inspection of his undying amorous beliefs. A third option is to run and, engulfed by your fear and suspicions, abandon this proclaimed love that lasted the test of time, and one which you basically want to believe in.
Which course will you choose to balance the destruction of trust? As question marks prevail throughout your pondering, the answer might be found in both that which you need and that which you think you know, allowing for the knowing to be modified by the listening. If his needing and your knowing should lead to the same place perhaps you are now wise enough to neutralize that which you innocently created, this time starting within your own soul.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle July 21, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment