December 15, 2015
What would happen if I didn’t cave in to the hard-wired compulsion to be right that seems to live in me and in almost everyone I know?
- If I didn’t need to be right I might ask more questions and offer fewer declarations – which might open the door for you to offer your ideas and expand my thinking.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might stop noodling around the worn-out ideas that I’ve been rehashing for years and make room for new ones.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might be excited and open to looking for novel ways of doing familiar things.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might brave new adventures. I could do with a few more brain cells at this point and I understand that any new activity keeps them coming.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might view the world differently. More like a tapas bar that tempts me with lots of small bites, and less like a sterile cafeteria of repeating Wednesdays with meatloaf and potatoes.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might become more interesting. Especially to myself. I’m stuck with me so this one seems especially important.
- If I didn’t need to be right I might actually see you. There’s a word that is used as a greeting by the Zulu tribe in Africa. The word is Sawubona. It means ‘I see you’.
- If I didn’t need to be right, maybe I would be more real? Maybe that would help you see me? What would it be like if just for a moment we were totally present and seeing each other? Behind the masks, facades, defenses?
This particular Seedlings comes from my recent increased awareness that I know so very little about what makes the world act the way it does, or what makes people act the way they do. Everywhere I turn someone has ‘the answer’. Someone is offering their ideas about how things should work. Oddly, so far, no one has come up with the perfect answer for who I should be, how I should act, and what I should think or feel.
So I’m pulling off my blinders and setting aside my opinions, and coming home to my own discomfort. That’s the place where I can see what feels ‘right’ to me. Not the definitive ‘right’ as in ‘I have the ultimate truth’. ‘Right’ with myself.
What feels ‘right’ to you? Do you have a still small voice inside that’s calling you to come home to yourself and invest some time in finding your own ‘right’, a way of being that reflects your best and most generous and courageous self?
I’d love to hear your voice and your personal ‘right’.
Much love,