Obligations

Everything seems to be an obligation. Our life is so full of duties that every waking hour appears to be presenting us with inflexible demands. Do this, you must, you have to! Stay here, go there, be quiet, speak! The rules and laws of our authorities are always valid, and only the unconsciousness sleep gives brief nights of relief.

There can’t be an escape if our obligations are loaded on us from the moment of our birth. If humans have all these strict duties just because they are humans, we will necessarily always fall short of the requirements and for a conscientious person life must be misery.

How can we possibly come even close to obeying all those commandments that the moralists heap on us? The world is so full of suffering and we are all responsible for it. There isn’t a starving child in Africa that is outside of your personal domain of duty and should you ever fail to recycle a piece of plastic, you will be held accountable for the earth’s environmental disaster.

Mere humans that we are, we can always do better, but to perceive our shortcomings as failed obligations is hardly very encouraging. After all, if our duties cannot be fulfilled anyway, why bother? They are abstract demands that keep expanding whether they are obeyed or not. The greater and more overwhelming they appear, the blurrier and more meaningless they become. We might as well ignore them then. They are not real.

We don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to have obligations, but most of us have acquired them voluntarily. We were not born with duties since we didn’t choose to be born, so it would be possible to escape it all and run into the wilderness where no one can demand anything of us. But if we choose company, we are obliged to observe our part of the tacit agreement. For the rest, let’s just do our best.

https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/your-daily-word-prompt-oblige-ydwordprompt-July-7-2020/