Harm and Self-Awareness

“Drinking heavily, you abandon people - and they abandon you - and you abandon yourself.”

Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma

And this is the sum of the problem, right? We abandon and are abandoned. We abandon ourselves. For all this - abandoning one another - it sometimes makes it hard to sit down and make a list of every single human we have ever harmed.

The young mother who abandoned her children to go smoke crack may have trouble seeing the harm when her own mother sold her to sex traffickers for heroin. The upright, uptight, high achieving and uber successful businessman struggles to see a connection between himself and his own father who abandoned him to serve jail time for felonious behavior.

But their children? They do not see the distinction. If you sat down and tried to make that list of all persons you had harmed, how would the harm done to you cloud your own self-awareness? How hard is it to see the ways you abandon yourself?