What Potential?
What experiences do I enable when I am in a practice of creating agreements?
What potential futures do I seed when I secure a promise of something I would only ever want if it were freely given?
What openings for betrayal am I creating with the agreements I insist upon invoking?
Even in the case the agreement is fulfilled, I'll usually notice other problems.
If I’m in the practice of creating agreement structures in which to live my life, I'm continually managing the hastily-built ones falling on my head. I have to take the stable ones for granted, I might not have time to notice the agreements going right. My attention is for the agreements which are falling apart, the expectations going unmet. I'm taking damage, I'm making repairs.
Expectation is the gateway to disappointment.
Extraction is born of undeserving.
Getting it perpetuates striving.
Fulfilling obligation breeds resentment.
The possibility of betrayal exists because there is a structure there which may be violated.
This is how a system free of perpetrators creates violation. This is how a system of innocents produces harm.
"I suffer because I am a body;
if I were not a body,
how could I suffer?"
v. 13 Tao Te Ching, Ursula LeGuin & Lao Tzu
