Choosers and Choices
I’ve become very clear that in each moment, in every experience and event, I can always decide which me I choose to be, what I’m selecting for my part of the event, and which patterns I’m energizing. Somewhere recently I read about hand-crafting one’s belief structures and life. I loved it!
Looking back over the years, I see myself making choices for how to think and not think from the time I was six or seven. At that age, I was being told by the females in my family—said with both humor and some certainty—that girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, while boys are made of rats and snails and puppy dog tails. When I thought about what I was hearing and matched it up with my experiences, it didn’t make sense. That picture didn’t fit my best friend Dickie nor my father, and being sugar, spice, and all things nice sounded sickening. So, without telling anyone about my choices, I decided to not think that way. Instead, I saw everyone as a person rather than fitting people into some kind of silly and untrue gender box.
This independence of spirit and choice-making continued throughout my life, which of course was interwoven with lots of cultural designs and patterns I didn’t think about. Then sometime during the months leading up to October 2002, when I would be seventy in cultural terms, I decided to see myself as one of the younger members of those who are the elders of the human tribe. It was a good feeling to view all of us who have played parts amidst our culture for decades being able to talk about what we’ve learned, if one chooses to do that. And obviously, that’s what I’m choosing to do.
Winding the tape to the present, individually and together, over the years my partner, Jim, and I have been transforming the wonderful cultural hopes and dreams about relationships and love from our early adulthood in the 1950s. Those cultural hopes and dreams continued on into the 1960s and 1970s, with the addition of hopes and dreams about a better world. But, in order to translate them into our lives today, each of us has had to become a very different self, with very different belief structures, using very different patterns for who we believe ourselves to be and what powers we can use.
Important questions I ask myself frequently are, “Which me? What reality do I choose to energize? What part do I choose to play (or not play)? And, in highest good terms for all of us, what is the best way to freshly think about each specific situation?”
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