2024.09.16 Oldness Echo

Had a pretty good birthday - complete with chocolate cheesecake, playing D&D with Amy, Dave, and Bonnie, playing AIF with Amy and the kids. Life is good, and all that.

But embedded in all that was also a poignant little vignette of passed-on Castle-ing. Because Simon and I had on Friday a wee confrontation, where he wasn't in a headspace to hear some parenting that was based on what I felt like was an important bit of philosophy relevant to our lives. He had been ill, so the resistance and defensiveness was understandable and I was able to back off and give hime some processing time.

Until a couple days later, when we were sitting quietly on a couch together and I could carefully bring it back up. Because the distinction of responsibility and being responsible from things such as blame or fault is worth having a shared understanding of. Simon is extremely canny regarding rules and arguing technical compliance with such, but that is perpendicular to a practical wielding of responsibility. We talked about how being responsible is both separate from blame, but also can include being willing to take blame for things outside our control. And we talked about how being responsible is a greater application of making things within our control the best that they can be, or at least recovering from inevitable problems as they occur the best that we can.

Once he actually believed I really didn't blame him for anything, which was slow due to his suspicions about blame-related strategy concepts, I feel like he started to internalize much of it. Maybe. Probably in a manner very similar to how my dad also tried to infuse me with a sense of ever-expanding generalized responsibility. To be a responsible hiker. To be a responsible skier. To be a responsible driver. To be a responsible member of society.

But, really, it's not one of those things you can just tell somebody. A person needs concrete examples to witness in order to understand how they can embody it themselves.