Pretty much every one of us was born into this world crying; our only means of protesting our displacement from the comfortable place where we didn’t have to do a thing to survive to the place where life is a constant struggle. If we had been left alone to lie at the spot where we were born, our lives would have been very short indeed. Instead, for most of us, we had our basic needs provided by others for many years. At some time, though, each of us reached the point where we decided to take on the responsibility for our own survival and our own lives.

I am fifty-nine years old – almost sixty – and somehow I feel that I have never faced that responsibility squarely and accepted it. It seems that my entire life has been a constant effort to deny reality; to pretend that actions have no consequences and that things will always work out for the best in spite of my actions or inactions. Not only have I lived my life this way, through my actions I have encouraged and allowed others within my sphere of influence to live the same way. Now the proverbial pigeons have come home to roost and it ain’t pretty.

In theory, in seven short years I should be “retiring.” In reality, because of my profligacy I will never be able to retire. I have come to accept a truth that I have always wished to avoid. Not only will I never be able to retire, if circumstances arise that force me to leave the working world, the quality of my life will fall to the point where the will to survive may disappear.

Can I, at this point in my life, actually take control of my life? Am I able to take responsibility for what remains of my future? And, perhaps more importantly, am I able to allow those who have depended upon me to assume responsibility for their own lives, their own decisions, and their own actions or inactions? I’m not sure.

Perhaps it is very presumptuous to think that I have not allowed others to run their own lives. Well, actually, it is very presumptuous, but the truth is that my financial support and my involvement in their lives has allowed those people to make decisions and act in ways that they would have otherwise been unable to do, or at least would not have chosen to do. I accept the fact that I may have encouraged other people to make bad decisions by giving them the means to do so, but now I am faced with the fact that I can no longer provide those means and I feel guilty about not being able to do so.

Logically, I can accept the fact that every individual makes their own choices and is responsible for those choices. I accept that in my own life. I may not be happy with the results of the choices I have made in life, but I cannot blame anyone else for the choices I have made. I accept full responsibility for my current state in life. It ain’t no one’s fault but my own.

It is quite another thing to accept that the people I care about and love will have to suffer the consequences of their own decisions. My natural inclination is to protect and shield those people from as much unpleasantness as possible. Of course, this all assumes that I know what is best for them. It means that I have been trying to protect them from what I see as bad situations. It means that I have considered myself the arbiter of what is right and wrong in their lives. What in the world ever made me think that I had the authority, or the knowledge, to do so?

As I said earlier, I feel guilty about not being able to continue to provide for the people I care about. It is almost as though I consider any person unfortunate enough to have become involved in my life to have become my responsibility, and my failure to be able to support those people in the fashion in which I assume they need to be supported weighs mighty heavily on my conscience. Perhaps this is why I have no friends; it would be too great a responsibility to feel this way about everyone who comes into my life.

I do not like to see other people in pain. My reaction to someone in pain is to want to put my arms around them and shield them from whatever is causing that pain. I know that I cannot do that for everyone, but I have tried to do so for the very few people I have let close enough to me that I accepted that responsibility. Now, when words are not enough to compensate for what money can do, I am powerless. I will have to let those people suffer the consequences of their financial decisions and there is nothing I can do about it. I cannot protect them anymore, and I don’t know how to handle the pain that causes me. I have failed them and can find no succor in the idea that, in reality, only they can be responsible for themselves.

It looks like I’ll be going out of this life crying as much as I did when I came into it.