Guilt
Why do I always feel guilty when I don’t attend an event that I know I should? And even that word should, where has that come from? Is it my mother talking? This morning, there was an arranged meet and greet to welcome new members to the community. We need older members in which to do the welcoming. It is happening now. It has also been pouring with rain, I have a speech to practise and I have things to prepare for the weekend and to be quite frank, of all weeks, this is one where I don’t need another thing to have to do. Tomorrow Chiara is coming out for her weekly tuition and Friday I have a doctor’s appointment before we head down to Whangarei. I think the date of this get-together was changed at the last moment. It was originally planned for now, then changed to June or July and then brought back this week, to today. I could have changed some of the other things had I known, but that still doesn’t change the obligation I feel towards things like this. It is easy for Stephen. He wasn’t well yesterday and today he is quite clear that he doesn’t want to go. No qualms.
I have always been like this. I have carried a huge sense of obligation, especially when I was still married and living in a small rural Maori community. I would always feel the need to help in the Marae, though I am sure no one would have been expecting me, nor wondering where I was if I didn’t show up, yet the obligation was always there.
It must come from my childhood and perhaps a past life. It is something I have never worked on, nor examined the roots of. It is time to do that. Perhaps it is triggered by all those occasions when I was forced to do things as a child. There were plenty of those times, such as going to church or for a Plunket check-up when I was very small. If I resisted, I was growled at, perhaps forming those patterns of obligation – this is the right thing to do etc. My mother was very strict and strong. ‘’Get out of that chair. Wait until the adults have eaten. Help Mrs Smith carry that bag.”
We did as we were told. The consequences of not doing so were huge for us. So perhaps my sense of guilt is me feeling those consequences of not doing something my mother would have considered one was supposed to do. She was a very community orientated person and perhaps driven herself by a sense of obligation. Being the bank manager’s wife, her own mother also carried a sense of duty, in that she often had to provide refreshments to customers in social settings. I have inherited her best, plain, white tea-set that came out on such occasions. Nothing much to look at, but full of significance. So perhaps this obligation business is an ancestral thing.
Something I did discover during all my past life work is that often issues were in both the ancestral and past life line. I will need to do some work on this to see if there is anything that needs to be released. Perhaps if there is, and I release the obligation, I will attend these things more often. After all, sometimes it is the having to, that makes one not want to do something.
I found this same feeling in other areas of my life too. I have always found it hard to say no to any request. I have watched friends quite calmly, guilt free, no excuses, saying no. It should be just as easy for me. Yes, definitely more work to do.