To Act, or be Acted Upon
How many choices do you make in a day? Hundreds, thousands – or very few. I have a strong suspicion that you make a lot. Some of them big, some of them small, and occasionally some of them will be so important that you’ve agonized over it for a long time.
Yet many of us also give up our ability to choose more often than we would like to admit.
And your ability to choose is really all that you have.
Because as a conscious entity, a sentient person, someone who is self aware, you are here to act, or be acted upon. And that’s your biggest choice, but one that we often don’t want to hear about, because it carries with it a tremendous responsibility.
Once you accept that almost everything in your life is a choice, you have to accept that the outcome of your choices is on you.
You may not control the events, you may not control the consequences, but the way you react to a situation is almost always up to you.
I know – you don’t want to hear it.
You may have just flashed over any number of possible situations and thought to yourself ‘well, that reaction is not a choice’ – and you’d probably be wrong. Because unless the reaction is hard wired into your nervous system (and some are) you had a space between the recognition of the stimulus (event) and your reaction to it.
Because you get to decide what things mean, and then you get to decide how you want to respond.
I hated learning this. I still remember the good man who tried to teach it to me, and I wonder at the patience he must have mustered to deal with my hard headed, abrasive and honestly pretty rude reply to his lesson.
Truth was, I didn’t want to hear it, because if I wasn’t responsible for my feelings, then I couldn’t be held responsible for my anger, or self pity.
I didn’t want to give up the nice story line I had going in my head, which made me the victim, and deflected any responsibility to deal with my emotions.
I’ve found that time has a way of teaching us lessons that we don’t want to learn. Time teaches slowly, and often very painfully, but if you live long enough, it will get the job done.
By the end of that lesson, you’ll wish you had chosen the easier path of learning when someone tried to offer it to you, but you’ll have learned the lesson. I did. It took many years. I wish it hadn’t.
I was allowing myself to be acted upon, rather than acting.
Because acting can be scary. Actually doing the thing you know you need to try carries with it the risk of failure, of judgment, of ridicule. There’s the possibility that you’ll lose a chunk of self respect, and more of your precious time along the way.
So yeah, it’s safer, and a lot easier, to sit in that little place of darkness in the corner that you’ve carved out with your story, and not act, allowing life to act on you.
But eventually, that leads to regret, remorse and revulsion at the knowledge of all that you gave up.
Every moment in your life is a choice. You breathe on reflex, but you don’t have to think that way. If you open up your mind, and start to see through the prism of self awareness, you’ll be amazed at the ways you can train yourself to think differently, feel differently, and act, rather than reacting.
Imagine being in control of yourself to such a degree that the only things you said were in alignment with your highest ideals, your strongest ennobling emotions, the very best person you know that you can be.
If you wish to act rather than react, you have to find awareness in self-contemplation, knowledge through self-study, peace through self-acceptance, and love through self-worth.
Once you have become you all over again, you can act from the very best of yourself.
And know peace.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings