March 3
The Detail That Does Not Fit
We describe someone as always inconsiderate. Then we remember a kindness they showed us, and quickly explain it away. They probably wanted something. The memory interferes with a conclusion that has become useful to us. If they are entirely inconsiderate, there is less reason to examine the way we have begun treating them.
One kind act does not erase a harmful pattern. Still, accuracy asks that we stop discarding every fact that complicates our preferred account. We might remain angry and acknowledge that this person has sometimes been generous. We might need distance and admit that the relationship once mattered. Such an inventory can feel untidy because it no longer supplies a simple verdict. Yet the fuller picture may help us respond to the actual person rather than the character we have assembled for our argument. We lose some certainty and gain a more truthful basis for whatever decision is ours to make.
Which inconvenient fact have I left out of a familiar resentment?
That kindness happened, too.
For the A.A. nerds: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Step Four; As Bill Sees It, No. 222, “Who Is to Blame?”