Dodging the bullet.

Someone said something  to me last week that I haven't been able to forget. I was interviewing a guy that had had a, let's say, self-destructive past. He explained that all through his life, he had put the blame on everything and everyone for his problems, except himself. This has got me to thinking - do we all do this?
I could look at my life and list things that I'm not happy about - am I to blame for all of these things? Well, obviously people aren't responsible for all of the bad thing that happen to them - but we are responsible for how we perceive and deal with these things. I believe that things in life can only improve when we take responsibility for them. I know that this has helped me in the past.
It's easy to blame other people. It's easy to blame my mum for my ample bottom, and to blame my dad for my clumsiness, but what good will that do? I could blame my childhood, as a lot of people probably do. I could blame certain family members, my surroundings, bad influences, or the cruelty of the universe, but where will that get me?
We're all guilty of it. When was the last time you comforted the crying friend on your shoulder with 'it's his loss', after the bastard said to crying friend 'it's not you, it's me'? Probably not too long ago. And we all use the phrase 'everything happens for a reason', just to give us somewhere to put the blame when things go wrong. It seems that blame is about as fluid as money, it goes where it's needed.
People always search for reasons other than themselves to place the blame, it's human nature. I guess it's because if we know we're responsible for what we don't like about our lives, that makes it worse.
We look outside ourselves for reasons and explanations. If we can't find the answer to a question, there's always a vague resolution that somebody will offer to make us feel better. Where do you think the concept of heaven came from? In my opinion, it's something for us silly little humans to naively believe in. We live in a cynical world. Homeless people got themselves on the streets, Michael Jackson was a paedophile... but when we die, there's a world in the sky where our dreams come true. We believe what we want to believe. We don't want to believe that we could be responsible for our own downfalls. Don't like this blog post? Well, that's really not my fault.