Consciousness and Choice

The collective consciousness of most of our world is one of fear and helplessness and hopelessness. Tied to that consciousness is the presupposition that we are expected to wait our turn and take things slowly and really think through our choices.  I know that it’s very easy for me to be sucked into the mindset and belief that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or not together and so we must take our time and be careful.

I hear Tom Lehrer’s Bright College Days and the uncomfortable lines – “Soon we’ll be out amid the cold world’s strife.  Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life.” When I consider people marching lockstep together toward someone else’s goal, several visual images come up.  Anyone for the prostitutes in Never on Sunday? Or lemmings blindly moving toward their own destruction?  Or Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump?  That has never sat easily in me.  All I’ve kept asking was why was I supposed to just go with the flow, so to speak?

I’m becoming comfortable with my iconoclasm and my unwillingness to blithely go with that flow without question. I’m getting comfortable with being a nudge and not worrying about what anyone else feels about that.  And I’m becoming comfortable with not trying to change what everyone else chooses AND with choosing for me first and foremost.  What others might choose is not mine to influence AND I’m choosing to no longer take responsibility for that.

I remind mySelf that there are several ways of looking at things. One night not too long ago, I had computer issues.  And so I chose to do something else rather than sit and be angry.  And, as I made that choice, I realized that I didn’t think that having a ‘technology day’, as I call it, was a conspiracy against me and that my frustration wasn’t with me for not knowing what to do to fix things – it wasn’t about performance and feeling foolish.  It just was what it was and I choose something different in both my actions and my response.

As I step into the fullness that is ME, I hear the voice of my inner critic whose strongest voice was my father’s much less frequently than I ever did before. It’s fainter and less present.  That does make it all the more annoying to me when it does come in on my receiver.  I remind myself to be on transmit rather than solely on receive.

As I look for the more that will be revealed to me, I continue to create what really moves and interests me. And the trust that that generates in me – the willingness to trust my own instincts and my own impulse fills me with energy and space and a sense of wonder.

I’m not totally free of thoughts of performance and doing the right thing in someone else’s eyes. AND I know that, with each day and each moment and each breath I am embracing what I choose for me and which maps to the I AM that I AM.  I am not invested in embracing that collective consciousness any more.