Author’s Note
This essay began with something that happened at home. My five-year-old son came into the room where I was working one evening and began crying because he missed the home our family recently left after more than twelve years. After comforting him and carrying him back to bed, I returned to my desk with his sadness still very much with me.
What followed was not initially an attempt to write an essay. I found myself thinking about the distance that can exist between decisions and their consequences, particularly when those making decisions are sufficiently removed from the lives of those who ultimately experience them. That reflection eventually widened into a question that extends far beyond the particular circumstances of my family: What responsibility do we bear for what our decisions leave in their wake?
I have chosen not to identify the institution or individuals whose actions form part of the background of this reflection because the larger question interests me considerably more than the particulars. All of us participate in families, organisations, communities, professions, and institutions in which our decisions ripple outward. We may never see all of their consequences. But perhaps consciousness asks something more modest and more demanding of us: that every so often, we turn around and look.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
Recently, one evening after we had settled the Younglings down for the night, my five-year-old son came into the room where I work and began to cry. I mean really cry.
It was not the sort of cry that comes from being denied something he wanted nor from one of those passing disagreements among siblings that can seem catastrophic for several minutes before disappearing entirely. He was genuinely sad. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me that he missed our old home. I thought, “Damn!”
There are moments when an entire period of one’s life suddenly becomes concentrated into a single experience. For months, I have been navigating negotiations, calculations, conversations, disappointments, plans, reassurances, uncertainties, and the practical work of keeping a family moving forward during an extraordinarily difficult transition. Much of that can be managed intellectually. There are numbers to examine, decisions to make, messages to answer, obligations to meet, and possibilities to pursue. One develops a certain discipline around such things because there is work to be done and because other people depend upon one’s capacity to continue doing it. Then a five-year-old walks into the room crying because he misses our old home, and everything that had been held at the level of strategy suddenly becomes human again.
I spoke with him for a while and tried to help him understand what he was feeling. There was no need to explain the complicated circumstances that had brought us here. Those belong to the world of adults. What mattered was that he missed the only home he had ever really known. I reminded him that we were together and assured him that we would have another home. I told him that things would be all right, not because I wanted to offer him an empty reassurance but because I believe they will be. I believe that deeply.
This present chapter is not the conclusion of our story. We will secure another long-term home. The work my wife and I have spent years developing will continue to evolve. Projects that presently exist as early structures will mature, new revenue streams will emerge, and doors will open that I cannot yet see. If the trajectory of my life has taught me anything, it is that dissolution and reorganisation are often close companions. What appears for a time to be an ending may eventually reveal itself as the clearing in which something different could finally be built.
Yet believing that tomorrow will be better does not require pretending that today does not hurt. Hope is neither a strategy nor an obligation to deny grief, and confidence in one’s capacity to rebuild does not erase the cost of having to rebuild in the first place. That evening sitting at the desk hurt because my son’s tears gave form to something I have spent months processing largely through the language of adults. We talk about revenue contraction, organisational decisions, institutional priorities, housing transitions, strategic pivots, and financial recovery. A child has no need for such language. He simply knows that the place where he woke up, played, learned, laughed, celebrated birthdays, argued with his siblings, went to sleep, and understood himself to belong is no longer where he lives. And his sadness brought me back to a question that has increasingly occupied my thoughts over the past several years: What responsibility do we bear for what our decisions leave in their wake?
I have watched decisions made far upstream produce life-altering consequences far downstream. For a long time, I tried to understand what was happening primarily as an organisational problem. Perhaps the strategy was wrong, leadership did not possess adequate information, circumstances were considerably more difficult than those of us working locally could see, or decisions that appeared inexplicable from one vantage point made greater sense from another. I still leave room for some of those possibilities because complex institutions are rarely reducible to a single explanation, and I have no desire to replace one oversimplified narrative with another.
Over time, however, information accumulates. Numbers become publicly available and patterns emerge. Explanations can be compared with outcomes, and priorities become visible not merely through what institutions say but through what they repeatedly choose to fund, promote, protect, and preserve. At some point, one must allow the evidence to inform one’s understanding rather than continually searching for interpretations that make the evidence more comfortable.
For me, this has been particularly difficult because the institution in question is associated with a tradition and practice to which I have devoted a substantial portion of my adult life. I know what the practice has meant in my own experience and what I have witnessed in the lives of people I have taught. I know why I became a teacher and why my wife and I devoted so many years to making the programme viable in Cambridge. None of those things disappears simply because I have become deeply troubled by decisions made within the organisation responsible for administering that work. If anything, the contrast makes the questions more difficult because one naturally believes that an institution devoted to the development of human consciousness will demonstrate an unusual sensitivity to the human consequences of its own choices. Admittedly, that expectation may itself deserve examination.
Institutions, after all, are not their philosophies. They are collections of human beings operating through systems, incentives, hierarchies, habits, loyalties, financial pressures, and competing priorities. A beautiful teaching does not automatically produce a beautiful bureaucracy. A philosophy centred upon consciousness does not guarantee that every organisational decision will be conscious of the people affected by it, and a tradition may contain extraordinary wisdom while the institution entrusted with transmitting that tradition nevertheless makes decisions that cause harm. Acknowledging this distinction has been difficult but increasingly necessary for me.
What has troubled me most is not that anyone failed to rescue us. I do not believe another person or institution bears responsibility for every difficulty my family has encountered, nor do I wish to construct a story in which my own decisions disappear beneath accusations about the decisions of others. We made choices, assumed risks, remained committed to work longer than perhaps others would have, and continued believing that circumstances might improve. Those choices belong to us. But responsibility for one’s own choices does not require pretending that other people’s choices had no consequences. This is where my thinking has changed.
For a long time, I believed the central question was how these circumstances had developed. I wanted to understand what decisions had been made, why they had been made, what the numbers actually showed, and whether the explanations offered over the years were consistent with what had occurred. Those questions mattered, and some still do. Yet the question that increasingly stays with me is much simpler: Having seen what happened, did anyone care enough to look back?
I do not mean whether someone could have repaired everything. Nor do I mean whether an institution should have assumed responsibility for my family’s housing or finances. I mean something much more elementary and, for that reason, perhaps more revealing. Did anyone think to ask how we were doing?
There is a peculiar loneliness in discovering that people who know something of what happened, who have seen the numbers, who understand the history, and who know the contribution one made can nevertheless continue forward without apparently wondering what became of the people who absorbed the consequences. Perhaps they assume we are fine, they do not know what to say because institutional loyalty makes certain conversations uncomfortable, or they believe acknowledging another person’s suffering somehow requires accepting responsibility for causing it. Then again, perhaps everyone is simply occupied with difficulties of their own.
To be clear, I cannot know what exists in another person’s mind, and increasingly I recognise that I do not need to know. Motives are often inaccessible. However, behaviour is not.
This is why the familiar observation attributed to Dr. Maya Angelou has returned to me repeatedly: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I used to understand that primarily as advice about recognising the character of individuals. Increasingly, I hear something broader in it. Repeated behaviour is information. The priorities people and institutions reveal through their actions are information. The things to which they respond urgently and the things they permit to languish are information. Their presence during difficult periods is information, and their absence is information as well. And accepting such information need not become an exercise in bitterness. It may instead become an exercise in orientation. There comes a point when continuing to demand that reality conform to one’s preferred interpretation becomes more damaging than accepting what has already been demonstrated and deciding how one wishes to proceed.
Perhaps this is where the deepest tension resides for me. Organisations devoted to elevated ideals can become extraordinarily fluent in speaking about humanity in the abstract. We can speak about peace, consciousness, enlightenment, service, transformation, compassion, and the creation of a better world. These are worthy aspirations, and I have spent much of my adult life exploring several of them. Yet abstractions possess a peculiar advantage over actual human beings: they make very few immediate demands upon us.
Actual human beings, on the other hand, are considerably less convenient. They experience the material consequences of policies, lose income, become frightened, struggle to pay bills, wonder how they will navigate the coming month, devote years to building institutions and programmes only to discover that decisions made elsewhere can alter the viability of what they have built. And they have spouses whose lives are affected by those decisions and children who cannot possibly understand the organisational structures operating somewhere beyond the boundaries of their family. And sometimes one of those children walks into a room crying because he misses home and every philosophy eventually encounters the crying child.
I have been sitting with that sentence because I think it reaches beyond the circumstances that prompted it. Every institution eventually encounters some version of that child as well—governments, corporations, universities, religious organisations, families, even movements dedicated to changing the world. All do. And eventually the beautiful abstraction encounters the particular human being whose life has been affected by the manner in which that abstraction was pursued. And what happens at that moment tells us something that mission statements cannot.
The real test of compassion may not be how eloquently we speak about compassion when it costs us nothing. It may be whether we remain capable of noticing another human being when doing so complicates the story we would prefer to tell about ourselves. The real test of consciousness may not be the sophistication with which we describe higher states of consciousness, but whether our awareness extends far enough beyond our immediate objectives to perceive the effects our choices are having upon people who possess less institutional power than we do. This is what I mean by looking at what we leave in our wake.
Human beings are naturally oriented towards destinations. We want to accomplish things, expand things, build things, transform things, and bring our visions into existence. Institutions magnify this tendency because their survival often depends upon growth, fundraising, recruitment, visibility, and the continual articulation of some future towards which everyone is supposedly moving. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Progress requires movement. The danger, however, arises when our attention becomes so fixed upon the destination that we cease examining the road behind us. The people who helped build that road may still be there. Some may have carried more than others, may have sacrificed because they believed deeply in where everyone was going, may have been injured along the way, and some others may simply have become inconvenient to remember once their usefulness to the journey diminished.
It is entirely possible to reach a noble destination through means that contradict the values the destination supposedly represents. And as I have ruminated over the last year more closely as I continue building in a forward-facing manner, that possibility deserves considerably more attention than we generally give it.
It has also changed how I think about recognition. Recognition can easily be mistaken for vanity, particularly when the people seeking it have already given years of service to something larger than themselves. Yet I believe there is another way to understand it. Recognition is one of the mechanisms through which communities preserve memory. To acknowledge those who built something is to acknowledge that institutions do not materialise through slogans, strategies, or leadership announcements alone. They are built through human lives, through hours that could have been spent elsewhere, through risks assumed, relationships cultivated, programmes sustained, problems solved, and sacrifices that rarely appear in official histories. And when those contributions disappear from the official narrative, something more consequential than an invitation or accolade has been lost. The history itself has been altered.
And yet I find myself increasingly uninterested in fighting for inclusion within stories other people have chosen to tell. Admittedly, there resides an unexpected freedom in reaching that point.
For years, I think some part of me believed that resolution required acknowledgement. Perhaps eventually someone would examine the evidence, understand what had occurred, and say, in whatever language seemed appropriate, that they could now see what we had been trying to communicate. Perhaps the institution would recognise the consequences of decisions that had seemed reasonable from elsewhere but had proved devastating downstream. Perhaps relationships would adjust accordingly. That may still happen. Then again, it may not. But I no longer believe my resolution depends upon it.
Resolution does not always require reconciliation. Sometimes resolution means allowing what happened to become information rather than allowing it to become poison. It means accepting another person’s choices without requiring that person to interpret those choices as we do. It means relinquishing the exhausting effort to make people understand what they have repeatedly demonstrated little interest in understanding. And perhaps most importantly, it means recovering the energy that has been invested in trying to repair structures one does not control and redirecting that energy towards building structures one does. From where I sit, that is not resignation. It is orientation.
That evening, after I had my son hop aboard for a piggy-back ride back to bed, I returned to the desk and sat there thinking about him and about the home he misses. For a while, I found myself moving again through the familiar terrain of the past several years. I thought about decisions I wish had been different, conversations that should have happened, warnings that could have been taken more seriously with accurate information, and relationships that I once imagined would respond differently under pressure.
Then another thought emerged. There is a difference between losing a home and losing the capacity to create one.
We have experienced the first. Painfully, yes. But we have not lost the second.
The house mattered enormously. I have no desire to diminish its significance simply because we no longer live there. It held more than twelve years of our family’s life. For our children, it contained virtually every memory they possess of what home means. Its rooms became inseparable from the ordinary rituals through which a family becomes a family. Birthdays, lessons, work, and lots of meditation all happened there. There were meals, disagreements, laughter, illness, celebrations, disappointments, quiet mornings, and impossibly busy afternoons. There were children’s belongings that migrated mysteriously into places where no rational explanation could account for their presence. There were thousands of ordinary days that seemed unremarkable while we were living them and now reveal themselves as the substance from which a life was made. And my son’s tears that evening reminded me how much that place mattered. But they also reminded me that the source of what made it home did not remain behind when we left. We brought it with us.
Home was never simply an arrangement of walls and rooms. It emerged from the relationships lived within them. It existed in the particular way six people learned to inhabit the world together. The physical container changed before any of us wanted it to change, and there is real grief in that. But the capacity that transformed those rooms into a home remains wherever the six of us are gathered.
Someday there will be another room where I work. There will be another kitchen, another table around which conversations unfold, another place where children’s books and toys accumulate, and another bedroom from which one of them emerges when something hurts. At first, perhaps, we will call it “the new place” because human beings need language for transitions. Then something will happen so gradually that none of us will notice when it occurs. We will stop calling it that. It will simply be home.
I cannot tell my five-year-old exactly when that day will arrive. I cannot spare him every sadness involved in travelling from what he knew toward what he does not yet know. However, what I can do is remain present while we make that journey together. I can hear him when he tells me that he misses what we had without immediately trying to convince him that what comes next will be better. And I can allow the old home to matter while still building the next one.
Perhaps that is what that tear-filled, crickets chirping outside night finally returned me to.
We are always leaving something in our wake. Every decision sends consequences outward into lives we may never fully see. Sometimes our influence is enormous; sometimes it is barely perceptible. Most of the time, we probably have no idea how far the ripples travel. Unfortunately, we cannot prevent every unintended consequence of our choices. And we cannot be responsible for every difficulty experienced by every person with whom our lives intersect. Nor should we become paralysed by the impossible task of anticipating every effect before acting.
But we can turn around, remain curious about what happened after we passed through, and ask whether the people who helped us reach our destination arrived there too. And perhaps most importantly, when we discover that someone has fallen along the road, we can resist the temptation to protect our preferred story by pretending not to see them.
On that night, a five-year-old boy walked into the room where his father was working because he missed his home. I stopped and listened.
Maybe, just maybe, in the end, so much of what we call compassion begins there. Perhaps one day our institutions will learn to stop and listen, too.
Suggested Practice
Consider a consequential decision you have made recently, whether in your family, work, organisation, or community. Rather than evaluating the decision only by whether it achieved its intended objective, allow your attention to travel beyond the outcome you sought.
Who else was affected by the decision? What changed for them as a result? Were there consequences you did not anticipate because you were understandably focused upon reaching the destination? Most importantly, is there someone you might simply ask, “How are you doing?”
The purpose is not to assume responsibility for every consequence of every choice. None of us could live that way. The practice is simply to cultivate the habit of looking behind us occasionally as we move forward.
Progress matters. So do the people in its wake.
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About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a scholar of consciousness, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationship between Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, and social systems, and how deeper awareness can inform both personal growth and institutional transformation.
He is the Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, an initiative examining the intersection of consciousness research, cognitive science, and high-performance decision-making. He is also President of Serat Group Inc. and Founder and Director of Radical Scholar Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to consciousness-based research and public scholarship.
Alongside his wife and teaching partner Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation program for Cambridge and the Greater Boston area. He is also the host of the On Transcendence Podcast and Founder of International Meditation Hour, a quarterly global gathering dedicated to the unifying power of silence.
His writings—spanning frameworks such as The Model for Perpetual Growth and Progress and The Seven Layers of Manifestation—explore the evolving relationship between consciousness, leadership, and society.
He writes from the conviction that the most important race is not between nations or machines, but between the conditioned mind and the awakening soul.
To learn more about him, visit: https://barutikmtsisouvong.com/.