A life of promises
Romain Gary said: “life makes us a promise that it cannot keep”. As he was comparing the love of his mother to all the love he later received from the women of his life.
When you look at it objectively, you cannot help noticing that everyone’s life is designed around their inability to keep the majority of the promises they make. Especially the ones that matter the most. It all starts when we are very little …
When we are 3 years old, as we get to school for our first day, our mother, the person we trust the most in our very short life, makes us a promise that she doesn’t keep. As she leaves us crying with the other kids and the teacher, she promises that she is only stepping away for a few minutes and that she will be coming back very quickly. Instinctively, we don’t completely believe her, as we carry on crying and asking her to stay. But she insists and the teacher confirms her promise, so the crying subsides just a little bit for her to feel that she can leave. Surely, she doesn’t come back in a few minutes and the first big promise made to us in our life is broken by the one we love and trust above all other people. Eventually, our mother comes back at the end of the day, but as children, we don’t have a real grasp of time, so we believe that the promise was delivered after all. At that specific moment, and for the rest of our lives, we are torn between two feelings. The first feeling is one of betrayal because our mother left and didn’t come back right away and the second one is a feeling of a deep need to cling to some reassuring truth in our life: she did come back after all, and maybe it was a few minutes.
This day leaves a lasting trauma in every kid’s mind, and imprints in their grown-up sub-conscious three fundamental things:
A promise, no matter how important it is, and no matter how dear is the person you made it to, can be broken.
A permanent anxiety, not to say disbelief, about every promise made to us, by anyone. The line of thought is quite simple: “if our mother didn’t keep her promise to us, then who will?”
An endless indecisiveness about what a promise is, and how it is really kept. We endlessly hesitate in accepting the idea of being lied to by someone. We fear being wrong, as we believed we were with our mother when she eventually came back at the end of the day. We also fear, by confirming someone’s betrayal to us, losing them for good, from our lives.
From that first moment, where we feel betrayed or at least confused, we start organizing our lives, our thinking, our behaviors to avoid any other betrayal or to eliminate any confusion. A foolish pursuit of the unattainable. A human’s risible way to try to feel in control of the better part of their lives, which depends on the promises of others.
The first years at school, all kids hear a promise from their teacher: “if they listen carefully to him/her, and work hard on their lessons and homework, they will succeed in their studies and therefore in life”. This sentence is repeated multiple times across the first grades of every pupil. The teachers use this to calm the students down and urge them to pay attention. It is understandable to a certain extent. But in the ears of the sub-conscious mind of many young spirits, this sentence translates into a promise, whose emptiness most of them will later discover. Teachers could easily say: “you are here to learn, for that you need to pay attention during the classes, study at home and do your homework”. There is no implicit promise in this statement, and it is as clear as the other one. The only thing is, it plays only on the rational mind of the child, and not on his ego and self-pride. The mind can be deceived, but not as much or as easily as the ego. Hence the rather tricky approach many teachers use, to the detriment of the future value system of the children they are supposed to enlighten.
As if the school is not sufficient, or if by any chance we don’t get fooled into greatness by our teacher, then we come home. There the bigger part of the treachery takes place. The mother (again), the father and any other adult of the family that happens to be present on that day, join forces to tell the child all the promises that life is holding in him/her. These adults completely ignore the damaging consequences that these false hopes can have on their kids. The word ignore can hold two meanings: a) they don’t know, and therefore cannot avoid doing the wrong thing, b) they know, but they decide to not heed what they know, as they seek the easiest way to influence their children into studying or whatever else they want them to do, to become the great(est) humans when they grow up. Needless to point out that the second meaning is more pernicious, but the effect of both are the same on the kids. In the first case, at least the parents are doing their best, with what they know. Not knowing is a problem. It is the symptom of lack of curiosity and/or intelligence. But knowing and purposefully ignoring is a symptom of laziness, deceit, and lack of consideration for the children, these beings that we create and bring to earth, based on a desire to perpetuate our immortal legacy.
For the very lucky kids that escape from the flood of promises at school and at home, they still run the very high risk of being disappointed by their friends, and they definitely do. They do in so many ways that enumerating them all would take the better part of this article. The most telling case is when few male friends get so close that they start calling each other brothers. In moments of exaltation, with a bit of alcohol in their blood, they pledge to each other loyalty for life. They say that they are brothers from another mother and nothing or nobody will ever stand between them. Some mean it, others don’t. Then, life comes in the way. When I say life, there are three ingredients that define it more than anything else:
Daily relationships, another man or another woman we fall in love with and who eventually shares our daily lives, in the same house or apartment. That person becomes by its omnipresence more important, to most people, than any other person in their lives. Routine creates dependencies. Dependencies are much tougher to break than exaggerated pledges and promises done on liquored-up nights.
Money, to make everything outside of love possible. Money builds and money destroys. Nothing resists money, other than an exceptional kind of love, but only that. Money feeds relationships with things it needs to grow or at least stay in good health for as long as it is possible. Money is vitamins and medicine. When a relationship is at its best, money, like vitamins, helps its stamina and vigor and takes it higher. When a relationship suffers a bit, from an incident or from older age, money comes to the rescue, to heal part of the illness and injects in it a new life. This will work while the two patients react positively to the drug. Of course, with time, either the patients get used to the drug, and the effects become imperceptible, or whatever is between them gets terminally sick, and therefore no amount of drugs could ever cure it or save it from its programmed death.
Repetition, leading to a lack of renewal and eventually boredom. Over time most people get tired, lazy or both. They stop being curious about new and different things, they lack the energy to experience new adventures, they stagnate in their past. They start retelling the same stories, over and over again. It might work when they continuously meet new people, but it doesn’t when they are with their old “brothers”. Guess what happens? It is easier to change whom you see than who you are.
So, when life comes in the way, brotherhood takes a rest. Everyone fails to stay true to their pledges. All these affirmations of “nobody and nothing” start to lose of their luster. Somebody and something can and will stand between the brothers. A daily relationship, some money or plain boredom get the upper hand and the promises are forgotten yet another time. But life has to go on, and more promises have to be made and most probably to be broken.
Forgetfulness is probably among the most powerful capability of the human brain. If in reality we never quite forget, we tend not to remember what doesn’t suit us in a particular situation. And that is powerful. Animals driven by instinct suffer less from this rational strength. If they are bitten, they are shy, period! If we are bitten, we are twice shy, but not completely. The brain elects not to remember most of the past promises that have been broken. The recollection being cumbersome in certain circumstances, our brain simply shuts it off.
We stand facing each other in a town hall, a temple or a church, and we say with a certain degree of conviction, yes, I do. We hear what the official or the priest are saying, but we don’t really listen, and in the rare cases where we do listen, we don’t really understand or believe what we hear. When we say, I do, maybe our innate optimism plays an important role in allowing us to do so; maybe our vanity convinces us that we are better than anyone else and no matter what we heard or understood we could say yes to all of it; or maybe we say I do, simply because we are willing to make promises that we are not prepared to hold.
Before the moment when we say yes, this defining moment in a human's life, this moment where we put the biggest jewel on the crown of our empty promises, there is another moment that leads to it, the moment when we create the crown.
In a different set up, less formal, but equally intense and full of half expressed meanings, we tell the other person that we love them. And most people, really mean it when they say it. It is a promise, there is no doubt. But it is in reality just one third of what the promise should be. I love you, means I love you now. It doesn’t mean I will love you forever. And more importantly, it doesn’t mean that I will not love anyone else but you, or at least I will not love anyone else more than I love you. However, when we hear the magic three words: I love you, our brain immediately fools us to hear, forever, and no one else but us or more than us. These three words become THE PROMISE that constitutes the CROWN of all false promises. We all omit “now”. Only if we use four words, instead of three and say: I love you now, this promise might stand a chance to be held for at least a little while. Unfortunately, we cannot add this fourth word, it kills the moment, it kills the intensity, the passion, it might also kill the two words coming just before it, love you. So, what we do, we use a little treachery, very much like the few minutes our mother used to indicate when she will be back. We just keep it to three words: I love you. And we let the other person understand what they want, knowing very well that in their minds the omitted words are forever and only you. If our mother lied by a few hours, we could definitely lie by a few years, couldn’t we?
In truth, all this is not that vital! Break-up, divorce are words which have been invented to put a name on our failure in delivering on our promises, but the broken promises they describe are not deadly. They are surmountable. If we were able to forgive and “forget” our mother’s broken promise, our own flesh and blood and one of the rare unconditional love and trust we will ever experience in our life, then we surely could overcome a break-up or a divorce.
There is another kind of promise that we make and break, and as we do this, we lose our humanity. We lose our kindness, our respect and our honesty. We fall short on every value that counts in our humanity: care, solidarity, courage, generosity, wisdom, and tenacity. One day, inspired by our eternal hope and limitless ego we decide to create children. In that decision lies the BIGGEST, MOST IMPORTANT, and MOST VITAL of all promises. We make the promise to take care of them, no matter what, in any way possible, all the time, even when they start to fly with their own wings. Some miserable human beings break that promise, neglect their children, even worse abuse them, destroy them, torture them, kill them. These people don’t deserve to breathe. They deserve the same fate as the Almighty who created us and left us on this earth, in eternal suffering and the relentless pursuit of our own extermination. They deserve extinction!
Unmet promises from start to end. A pretty accurate description of most people’s lives. Nonetheless, one promise is always met, no matter what. So, until then, enjoy the making and breaking of promises. We were designed for this!