The reasons things are happening or not happening are not excuses.

They are REASONS you use *to excuse* yourself from responsibility and accountability. Excusing is a verb, and nominalizing it is an attempt to distance oneself from the action.

Excusing is an action inspired by obligation, and obligation is a shadow element. The true obligations in life carry SEVERE penalties for neglect and abandonment. Mostly death. (And then death relieves all obligations, so that’s something!)

Everything else which seems obligatory (or which others want us to believe is obligatory so we go on being convenient to them) is optional, voluntary, choiceful, a pursuit of desire.

Excusing may be very important if obligation or blame are regularly foisted upon you, and if failure to fulfill a false obligation projected by another carries harsh punishments. Excusing can preserve harmony in relationships with demand, blame and obligation, so it’s good if you’re into that kind of thing or just don’t like the alternatives.

But excusing become self-defeat when you are relating to your actual responsibility and accountability the same way you relate to misplaced projected obligations. Excusing is self-defeating because it erodes your integrity and/or your own perception of your integrity (which are different and separately important things).

What does not have integrity *does not stand.* What doesn’t inspire belief in its integrity will be avoided, even if it *has* integrity.

Integrity is structural. Lack of integrity guarantees collapse, but not necessarily right away. It’s sustainable in its own way because humans are adaptively durable to ongoing collapse, to cycles of rupture and repair, to failure and trying, trying again. The ontology of lacking integrity is relentlessly painful *because* it is also relentlessly forgiving and replicable.

A lack of integrity will still produce an experience of some success, the way a paper airplane is flying, then it’s falling in a way we could still call flying (it’s still in the air!) then it’s back on the ground where I can pick it up, throw it, and begin again to believe for a moment it is flying.

Excuses, reasons, and the question WHY have very little place in true accountability and responsibility. The paper airplane didn’t stop flying because it hit the wall, it was never *really* capable of flight, which involves things like steering. It also wasn’t doomed by its missing engine, it’s simply true that one sheet of paper does not an airplane make.

Excuses and reasons offer red herrings that occlude my ability to refine my actual responsibility and truly ACCOUNT for all factors. In the case of this sheet of paper, what am I doing thinking that it “should be” capable of flight?

True responsibility is my FREEDOM to live the life I choose and cultivates my freedom FROM false obligations, limits, and aspirations placed by others. True accountability empowers me to be the person I want to be in the world, taking account of all factors within and without in a way that ensures success.

I don’t give excuses to myself because I don’t want to be excused from my freedom. When a “reason” seems to occlude my ability to respond how I’d like or how I planned, I know I am responsible for taking that redirection, praying “ok god, if not that way, then how?” When I see that I have dropped something, when I feel shame, I take it like a medicine, I don’t abuse it like a drug. I learn more about who I want to be in the world and how that practically looks.

I don’t give excuses to others because I will NOT endorse false obligation in order to seem polite. I will muster all my courage to say the truth, “I don’t want to do that.”

It really does take ALL my courage to say something so bold, to back myself in my desire and will and priorities even as someone else is vulnerably revealing their desire and will and priority. It takes courage because it is a plan to trust them to the suck if they find this confronting of their control and demand patterns.

It requires a taste for eating crow to move beyond excusing my lack of responsibility and take account of who and how I am willing to be in the world, the actions I am actually taking and *exactly* how aligned they are with the values I espouse.

Let me say, though, integrity is rewarding as fuck.

There is no greater endorsement of my value as a facilitator than the experiences others have of relating with me when I am entrusted with responsibility and stewarding accountability. I’ve had one former (gentle) doubter tell me that my way seemed flimsy and self indulgent, as I’m always saying “just be who you want to be!” Yet, in their dealings with me they found me prompt and professional, highly and immediately accountable, a breeze to talent-manage in concert with other factors.

There is no amount of money that could buy me the resources I access via trusting relationship, and no amount of money for which I would sell that trustworthiness. There is no form of recovery, rebuilding, or repair that is sweeter or more efficient than the ongoing harmony of structures that stand in integrity and do not constantly collapse.

This kind of peace is a long-game. It does not tolerate shortcuts or intermittent commitment, and truly those don’t even make sense in light of the peace available via integrity. The rewards for my success in integrity ripple through my life and the lives of others. The punishments for my failures ripple, too, though they hurt me most of all, as a gift.