Knowing Your Own Outs
When is it right NOT to follow through with a commitment you made? This is a tough question because men who don't follow through with their commitments can't be trusted. A man who doesn't keep his word and doesn't follow through with something they said will be the way things are or will be isn't necessarily a man in the eyes of society.
There has to be in my mind at least a delicate balance between knowing when to leave something on the table and knowing when to have it leave the table that supersedes what society thinks of you. You aren't seeking approval here but that's also not why you didn't follow through with X commitment or Y commitment. These things are NEVER a one size fits all approach and need to be handled in a way that doing this thing continues to serve you throughout in the way it did in its initial inception in a way that you can still live with yourself after the fact. Have circumstances changed? Have I changed? Is this no longer a viable option? Do the other side value what I'm sharing here? Are they showing me that they value what I'm sharing here or are they leaving me in an ambiguous position where I have to look for the answer?
Sometimes there is a rock and a hard place that can emerge completely independent of the circumstances made in the initial opening that at this point in the interaction keeps you from moving forward but again, this goes back to being willing to take in new input and also doesn't necessarily apply to every situation. If, in this rock and a hard place existence you might find yourself in, you see that not doing anything is worse off than continuing to leave things the are, your best choice may or may not be to do anything to include pulling out. Knowing what to do requires feedback and first-hand experience
This isn't, again, to say that anyone on the other end of this commitment did anything wrong. It's to say that if I'm shooting for a star, where and how I aim my bullet makes all the difference. If it's off by a centimeter here, if the star is as close as the moon, chances are I'm still gonna hit it. But if the star is as far as stars usually are, the chances become that the centimeter in the shots birth will become light-years apart at the distance the star is reached.
I say all this to say that in a world where men who keep their commitments matter more than men who don't, a man needs to know when, for his own internal awareness, to break a commitment, take a step back. If I know I am capable of keeping them and have examples of doing so, this doesn't change the fact that I FOR ME know myself as a man who is capable of keeping commitments. And knowing that I can and will break them when that is needed, and knowing when that is needed, also contains with it the realization that I made the right choice ... even if and when society thinks otherwise.
Beyond that, there are clear indications that I can make mistakes. That I thought I was doing the right thing by breaking a commitment. This almost happened around the halfway point of my 30-day poetry challenge. I wanted to pull back and to pull out. The way things were felt too vulnerable, outside of my control, uncontained for what I wanted to be happening and how I wanted to feel. That same day, I stepped back in after having stepped out with the certainty I was heading in the right direction and I could be comfortable moving forward in the commitment I made.
If you aren't engaging throughout the commitment with whether the commitment is still for you and you give up your autonomy to choose for yourself, you forfeit the right to engage on the level I'm speaking to. You might be playing a game you lost interest in a long time ago. Advertisement and game mechanics have all kinds of tricks and ploys to get you to play the game ... and to keep playing the game beyond the point of no longer enjoying it. Gambler's addiction works in some of the same ways.
You see, I've made a "commitment" to do something and I changed my mind. I'm not going to dance around it. I take ownership of how things progress and I respond with the progression in a way that keeps my ship moving forward. Boundaries are at play and how I play with the way things are operating shifts the game in my favor, or not, ultimately and inevitably pointing me out as either a man who doesn't keep his word or his commitments or a man who sees his own value as something worth being taken seriously along with having the choice of leaving what's on the table on the table or having it leave the table as a result of where I'm seeing the interaction go throughout that particular investment.
