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Reckoning
2 min read · 434 words
Reckoning is the operation of facing what has actually been happening, when the operator has been avoiding facing it.
The system can run with significant gaps between what the operator consciously acknowledges and what is actually occurring. The drinking that has progressed past where the operator admits. The relationship that has been failing for longer than the operator is willing to see. The health condition that has been worsening while the operator looks away. The financial situation that has been deteriorating while the operator avoids the numbers. In each, there is the actual condition and the operator’s working version of the condition, and the working version is missing something material.
The avoidance runs because facing the actual condition is uncomfortable in a way the operator’s current configuration cannot easily handle. The Avoidance entry covered the mechanism. What avoidance produces, over time, is the accumulation of unfaced material — and the unfaced material does not stop existing. It continues operating in the background, producing the deteriorating conditions while the operator’s conscious model claims everything is roughly fine.
Reckoning is the operation of finally bringing the unfaced material into view. It usually does not happen voluntarily. It happens when the gap between the actual condition and the conscious model becomes too large to maintain — the crisis that surfaces what was being hidden, the report that arrives at the door, the moment when the operator suddenly sees what they have been not-seeing for a long time. The reckoning is felt as crisis, but the crisis is mostly the simultaneous arrival of material that should have been arriving in smaller doses across the avoidance period.
From the chair: voluntary reckoning is much less painful than involuntary reckoning. The operator who runs periodic, deliberate examination of what is actually happening — in the body, in the relationships, in the work, in the finances — catches drift while it is small enough to address. The operator who avoids until forced to face accumulates the costs that smaller, earlier reckoning would have prevented.
The discipline is uncomfortable: deliberately turn toward the territory the operator has been avoiding. The honest assessment of the body’s actual state. The honest read of how the relationship is actually running. The actual numbers, not the rounded version. The unanswered questions whose answers the operator has been avoiding hearing. The discomfort produced by this examination is real. The discomfort produced by the consequences of unfaced reality is much larger, when it eventually arrives.
Reckon while reckoning is voluntary. The involuntary version arrives anyway, with the cost compounded.