The One Obligation
On Thinking for Yourself in a World That Rewards Agreement
I Am Telling You Directly About the Self.
⚖️
I am speaking to you about the fact of your own mind,
not the idea of it but the actual thing operating inside you right now,
the one that doubts, that reaches, that retreats,
that knows more than it admits and admits less than it knows.
⚖️
This is what I have observed in my years among men and women.
The greatest poverty is the refusal to think for yourself.
Not ignorance, ignorance can be corrected.
The refusal, the willful surrender of judgment to institutions,
to crowds, to the approval of people
whose opinions you would never freely choose to carry.
⚖️
You were given a mind that is yours alone.
It came into the world already furnished with original perceptions.
It sees this morning's light at an angle no other instrument records.
What it concludes about beauty, about justice, about how to live,
these conclusions belong to you.
They are yours to state plainly and with full confidence.
⚖️
I have watched capable people go silent in rooms.
I have watched them trade their genuine assessments
for the comfort of agreement.
They walk out diminished and call it getting along.
⚖️
Here is the direct statement this poem is building toward.
Conformity is a choice, and it costs exactly what it appears to save.
The energy spent managing other people's expectations
is energy removed from the work only you can do.
⚖️
Stand in your own place.
Form your own sentence.
Say what you have seen.
The world is not improved by careful agreement.
It is improved by one person at a time deciding to be accurate
about what they actually think and saying so out loud.
⚖️
That is self-reliance.
That is the subject of this poem.
That is the subject of everything.
About the Creator
Tim Carmichael
I am an Appalachian poet and cookbook author. I write about rural life, family, and the places I grew up around. My poetry and essays have appeared in Beautiful and Brutal Things, My latest book. Check it out on Amazon
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Comments (3)
🌼The level of discomfort I felt while reading this was astronomical. This is exactly how I want to feel when I am reading something true. 🌼The chiasmus in the first stanza moves the reader's eye away from judging others and points the finger back at ourselves. It forces us to look inward to truly know the "self" of another. When you wrote, "...that knows more than it admits and admits more than it knows," you made the need for change inescapable before we could even tie our laces.
Fantastic poem that we should all bookmark for those moments when self-doubt sneaks back in and tries to run the show.
This is so wonderful. Lately, I've been having a recurring discussion with someone on how they're losing someone to the internet. This person has suddenly developed every issue of the things they're seeing in their feed. They have become incapable of thinking for themselves and just agree with everything they see. It makes me sad. I refuse to allow my kids anywhere near social media simply because of that. I don't want them influenced by the crazy amount of opinions. I want them to form their own and think for themselves. Great work, Tim.