This week I bought some plums which, I accept, is unremarkable. I like plums a lot and these were a source of particular delight because they were also reduced in price presumably only a day from their use by date and destined for fruity oblivion. To say that they were a disappointment would be a massive understatement. Still pretty green, too hard and without any sweetness. I found myself waging a silent but vitriolic war in my head on the supermarkets obsession with putting fruit on the shelves which we are required to “ripen at home” like some sort of edible version of IKEA in which, far from being able to buy and eat our fruit, we are required to nurture it, put it on the windowsill or pop it into a bag with some bananas to bring it to a peak which never seems to arrive. Peaches, nectarines, avocados (don’t get me started on underripe avocados) are all victims of this self ripening tyranny and fuelled by the seeming unstoppable imperative to have strawberries on the shelves even in the depths of winter rather than when they are actually growing here. I don’t even know that we want strawberries in December do we? When I was a boy you only saw a tangerine at Christmas but now we can take them on picnics with us. I blame the supermarkets for most things, the growers for allowing their fruit to be ravaged too early, the accountants for being so greedy and the consumers for being so lacking in imagination that they can’t knock up a crumble and instead have to fall back on a strawberry pavlova in February. But in the end, where does all this blame get me? Nowhere.
Our options for casting the blame are generally endless. There is invariably someone at whom we can point the finger, a soft target for our frustration and agitation, an architect of our pain. We can berate and moan, vilify and criticise, batter and beat but unbeknownst to us the pain and hurt that we so resent is steadily building to a crescendo by virtue of the fact that we place so much focus away from ourselves and onto someone else.
Sometimes the blame that we cast is without foundation. Unable to face our own shortcomings we look around for another, usually completely innocent of the crime accused, to take the weight of the emotional baggage we just don’t fancy carrying. Much deeper, something dark lurks within us.
We can also become quite adept at using blame in a strangely passive aggressive manner. We will coax and encourage the very situation which might cause us some pain just so we have an excuse to explode. Egged on by some simmering resentment from yesterday, last week or last year we craft our own sadness so as to create an opportunity to hang our aggressor out to dry, casting blame where we feel it justifiably lies but ignoring the truth, that we had a hand in it ourselves.
Today I spent a large proportion of my waking hours wrestling with a problem on my website. What had begun as an optimistic attempt to construct something useful turned into a sour cocktail of frustration and recrimination culminating in my referring to all software developers as “utter cocks”. I wasn’t proud of myself but I did feel that the blame cast was utterly justified. But, so what? It wasn’t getting the problem fixed. That only started to happen when I stopped blaming and set about taking action.
It is perhaps in these situations where we feel that blame is wholly reasonable that we incur most pain. It seems ironic that our understandable emotional reaction to damage done to us should only increase the hurt rather than diminish it. Retribution, revenge, reprisal all come hurtling back at us like a boomerang and no matter how hard we try to throw it further and with more venom it just returns with increasing speed.
Of course it isn’t really when we are frustrated about websites or disappointed about our plums that we feel the full force of our own blame, it is in areas which are far deeper rooted. Betrayal, abuse, abandonment are the more common battleground. Feeling that we have been wronged by a lover, undervalued by friends or family, dismissed or treated as if invisible. It’s not unusual for the pain to keep coming when an injustice turns from the incidental to the chronic, when the damage shifts from the unconscious to the conscious. This is when the anger hits hardest. “You never loved me”, “I can’t believe you would do this to me”, “If you hadn’t done it we would have been ok”, “You have ruined my life” and so it goes on. The blame can be thrown far and wide or laser targeted it really makes no difference because there is only one real result when we stand and blame and that is a pain which refuses to recede.
I had a complicated relationship with my mother and as I traveled heavy footed through a particularly tough period of my life she got the blame. She was dead by now, but death doesn’t save you from blame. Blame by its nature is a blanket, it covers everything like a snow which is twice as cold but is adept at preventing the thaw which eventually allows it to recede. It took me a long time to realise that even though I had made so many changes and found so much light in other aspects of my life my blame was maintaining a darkness which would dim even the sharpest brightness. Even when I did make that startling realisation I was not immune. Years later I would find myself blaming again, bathing in the negativity which feeds blame and wondering, wide eyed like a newborn baby, why on earth I wasn’t feeling better.
Blame can emerge in any form but it makes no difference. You can shout, you can strike, you can damage and you can be utterly silent but blame will always get you and there is little evidence that anyone else, least of all the object of your ire, will be affected in anything like the same way as you are.
You see the plain fact is that blame serves only to keep you stuck. Blame prevents you from taking action to move somewhere better. The addict blames the bottle, the needle, the horse. The child blames the parents who got it wrong (as we frequently do). The adult blames the cheating spouse or despicable lover and often both. None of these situations makes anything better, instead the wound is deepening with each passing day.
The emotion behind blame is pain but the pain is worsened by it. Blame is like a joke which is worn too thin, like a favourite song over played. Blame is a beautiful town that you stopped in but where you stayed too long so that leaving it became less of a wrench and more of a relief. Blame pulls you down and puts it’s boot on your throat. Blame pushes the breath from you and, when it’s done, pushes harder still. Blame doesn’t make anything better ever and the idea that it makes you feel stronger or vindicated is a myth, but don’t take my word for it, go ahead and blame away, just be conscious of whether you feel any better afterwards.
When you let go of blame you aren’t saying “it’s OK” or “it doesn’t matter”, rather you are taking control of the one person who is always walking in step by your side, you. When you let go of blame you are turning your face away from the pain that is past and looking out towards the horizon where anything is still possible, where extraordinary change is likely, where the unimaginable does actually happen.
This week I was walking down the high street in Tenterden. It was an unremarkable day but I felt strangely exhilarated and content. I bought a coffee and sat in the gardens reflecting on the fact that it was probably no coincidence that my uplifting mood coincided with a distinct lack of blame in my life right now. Afterwards, in the bright warm autumn sunshine, I went to Waitrose and I was most careful to avoid the plums.
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