by Jenny Rose | Jul 20, 2024 | A Flourishing Woman, Self-Love
The more battered I feel by the news cycle and the daily externals of my world, the more important it is to spend time in solitude, focusing inward and practicing love and trust with myself.
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
(It sounds delightful, doesn’t it? So wise and functionally adult! It doesn’t read like tears; trauma; dumping feelings onto the page; wrestling with fear, despair, perfectionism, heat, humidity, housework, and (most recently) a fiery case of athlete’s foot while the garden turns into a steaming jungle outside my locked and blinded windows and the air conditioner gently roars.)
I recently reread The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. I haven’t read it in a long time, but it was next on the shelf, so I cracked it open. I came across a line I don’t remember and evidently didn’t remark on previously: “…I’d never done anything that took my own breath away …”
The speaker is a middle-aged woman and that line grabbed my attention.
We are consumed by externals. The male gaze. The public eye. What others think of our looks, our words, our actions. Is our virtue signaling adequate and prominent? Are we pleasing the right people? Are we flourishing our flags with sufficient outrage and hostility? Are our masks and identities firmly in place?
The more we focus on externals, the less we pay attention to our relationship with ourselves and the more broken we become.
Why don’t we think about taking our own breath away?
This might not seem important. After all, what’s more exquisite than the feeling of being in love? The sight and smell, sound, taste, and texture of the loved one. Every expression. Every word. Every insignificant detail, past and present, is breathtaking. For a time. How could we ever hope to compete with that feeling, that excitement?
But what happens if we never take our own breath away?
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Some of my favorite stories are oral tales about the selchies; creatures who are men and women on the land and seals in the sea. Most of the time the old stories are about a woman whose sealskin is stolen by a man; she is coerced into staying with him, often raising a family, with the promise he will one day return her skin. Though the captured selchie may love her children and even the man, as time passes she begins to lose her vitality and wither, for she is cut off from the sea, a part of who she is. She must have what she is made of to be whole.
As a young woman, I had no thought in my head beyond finding a husband, someone who wanted me and would love me. I didn’t think about the love I needed to feel for him; I assumed I’d do whatever it took to be a “good wife.”
Two divorces later, much older and wiser, I realize how sad this is. Now I know no child or lover, no matter how wanted or beloved, can ever leave us breathless in the same way we can ourselves. Not only that, when we rest all our being on external love, when the object of our love leaves and the feeling is gone we are left more impoverished than before, more embittered, more lost.
Taking our own breath away gives us something we never lose; amazement for our own courage, or determination, or creativity. We always remember that thing we did, and marvel at ourselves. We develop confidence and trust in ourselves. We know we can struggle through obstacles, defy odds, learn a new skill, finish a big project, or take a leap in the dark. We know we can face our own fears and beliefs, and challenge them.
I believe this is a big part of what a midlife crisis is about. If we don’t push ourselves beyond our comfort level we wake up one day bored and apathetic, and wonder if this is it. Is this all life is, the familiar round of work, home, family, and friends?
Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash
We begin to think and dream about something more, that milestone we never achieved, that place we never visited, the opinion we never expressed, the art we never created, the truth we never dared tell.
We want … something. We need … something. Typically, we spend a lot of money trying to fill our craving, but nothing works for long because we’re looking for some intangible piece of ourselves, something stolen, something lost, something rejected. Perhaps we’re searching for our own permission or courage. Our quest becomes internal rather than external because (to our shame) we have a good life, a good job, a good-enough spouse or lover, a beloved child, yet we are not satisfied.
We want what we are made of.
No one can tell us what that is. No one knows. We have hidden it successfully from ourselves all our lives, after all. If we are lucky, one day we know what to do and have the means to do it. The outcome doesn’t matter. What matters is that we do it, we leap without a net, we create in a frenzy, we open our throats and speak our truth at last.
We take our own breath away.
Moving to Maine from Colorado was like that for me. How did I do it? I have no idea. I do remember my determination, though. I remember saying to myself I was going to do this thing no matter how impossible it was, no matter what others said about it (and me), no matter how many obstacles I encountered (I borrowed money from a friend for the first time in my life), no matter how terrified and anguished I was, I was going to do it. If I had to crawl on my belly all the way, I was going to do it.
And I did (in a U-Haul, not on my belly). And it took my breath away. Still does.
In general I’m a cautious, even conservative person. (In spite of my friend who affectionately calls me a dirty hippy!) I think things through carefully. I research all the options. I consider consequences. But sometimes this longing to find and express what we are made of is so strong we can’t think about it calmly and rationally. We are compelled beyond all that, pulled helplessly by the strength of our need to reclaim and express some lost part of ourselves. We don’t care about consequences. They are less important than finding ourselves.
I wonder if it’s a human need to experience this riptide at least once, to operate only on instinct, intuition, passion, and raw determination. Maybe it’s at least as important to follow our creativity and curiosity as it is to set concrete goals and make plans. Maybe the ability to be impulsive and unreliable is as important as dependability and careful planning.
In taking my own breath away, I’ve lived with a bad boy/man, had an unplanned pregnancy, and caught an STD. I’ve learned to dance. I’ve created visual art. I’ve written 2 books and started a third. I’ve become an oral storyteller. I’ve started and later redesigned my blog and published my fiction serially on Substack. I’ve moved to Maine. I regret none of these, no matter the consequences, which in some cases were painful.
What will I do next? I don’t know. But I’m not afraid to take my own breath away.
Questions:
- What’s the most breathtaking experience of your life?
- What part of what you’re made of are you longing for?
- How have you taken your own breath away?
- Who or what are you waiting for to take your breath away?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here: 
by Jenny Rose | Jun 22, 2024 | Emotional Intelligence, Needs
In a recent conversation, someone asserted to me that ultimately everyone does what they want. I felt an immediate fury. That does not describe my life at all. I chewed on my outrage and resentment for a few weeks, simmering, until I decided to get over it and figure out why I was so hijacked.
I was immediately lost in the puckerbrush. Making choices about what we do and don’t do is intimately tied to needs and wants, and I have yet to be able to distinguish between the two once beyond the level of survival needs, or find any kind of clarity from someone else. Needs and wants are unpleasant territory I don’t want to explore. (See? There it is. I don’t want to. Yet I am, and I might need to.)
Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash
Then there’s the whole actions versus words aspect. People say they want things but don’t act accordingly. If we really want something, our behavior reflects it. If our behavior does not reflect our stated wants, we’re deceiving ourselves, or someone else, or both. I deeply distrust mixed messages. More unpleasant territory and old trauma.
Choice is in there, too. Choice is a big subject and a major theme in this blog. As I’ve mused on the statement ‘we all do what we want to do’ and made notes (you know I always make notes), I’ve wondered how we can compare a parent in some war-torn place attempting to keep their starving child alive another day with a wealthy person trying to decide if they want to fly their private plane to Paris for dinner or stay in and watch a movie in their in-home theater and have their chef prepare a seven-course meal. With wine, naturally.
One person has limited choices, all excruciating, to achieve continued survival for a few hours. The other has almost unlimited choices, all luxuries. How can I possibly compare the two? Can we say the parent trying to keep their child alive is doing what they want to do? Come on! Yet they do want to keep their child alive, right?
Perhaps it seems complicated and confusing because it’s complicated and confusing.
I wound up with a page full of notes, some sobering personal revelations, and a hairball.
On an internet search, I found articles pointing out the distinction between doing exactly what we want to do in any given moment (a toddler or a hedonist) and doing things we don’t want to do in service to an outcome we do want. That made sense to me.
If we focus on wanted outcomes rather than individual actions, we must have the ability to plan, look ahead, anticipate, and understand possible consequences of our actions. We also must attempt to predict the responses and reactions of the people around us to our actions, which means we have to understand something about emotional intelligence …
Photo by Manuel Sardo on Unsplash
… and now we’re back in the puckerbrush. I hate predictions. I don’t like leaps of faith. (I have a magnet on my fridge that says “Leap and the net will appear.” I don’t know why I keep it. It makes me mad every time I read it. Show me the warranty on that net. Show me the weight testing. Show me the damn net, in fact. Who will set it up when I leap? Are they paying attention or looking at their phone?) I trust my intuition, but I know I can be wrong. People are unpredictable. Life is unpredictable.
And yet we humans, including me, make choices all day long every day based on what we think will or might or could happen next. I’ve written about attachment to outcomes before. As I get older I’ve replaced a lot of my desired specific outcomes with simply wanting to know I did my best, regardless of outcomes. I may not like the outcome I get, but my integrity remains intact.
And then there are the people who don’t seem to understand actions and consequences in any kind of relationship. They choose what they choose in the moment and are hurt and/or outraged to discover the downstream consequences of that choice, especially in the context of many other choices. I observe this is a frequent divide along male/female lines. Women generally see everything as connected. Men generally see most things as discrete, in their own box. This is just one reason why I think “romantic” male/female relationships can be so devastating. We are often on different pages without knowing it.
If it’s true that we all do what we want in service to a desired outcome, what happens when my choices collide with yours? If you perceive me as blocking progress to your desired outcome you’re going to feel angry, and vice versa. We’re going to want each other to make different choices aligning with our personal desires. Most of the time, people won’t do that. We’re all attached to the outcomes we want.
A big piece of this for me is emotional labor, that hidden torrent winding through my life, sweeping away incalculable energy, time, and innocence. One of my priorities is healthy relationships. Close healthy relationships require time and attention; the ability to make choices for the good of the relationship rather than considering only our own wants and needs. This is an ongoing practice, not doing something we really don’t want to do once every six months and expecting applause. It means we have to face our own demons, learn to communicate clearly and honestly, negotiate, share power, and problem solve. It means boundaries and respect. It means reciprocity.
Having learned about reciprocity, I now prioritize my relationships to the degree the other does. I will not sign up to do all the emotional labor. I’m not interested in a close relationship like that. The price is too high. I’d rather put my energy into my relationship with myself. At least I appreciate my own efforts!
My conclusion about this ‘we all do what we want’ thing (gritted teeth – it still makes me mad), is it may be true if we consider our choices in the context of outcomes. I’ve made a lot of choices out of the clear knowledge that they were simply the right thing to do, too, choices that have been terrible for me, terrible in some of their consequences, yet ultimately still were the right thing for me to do. I had no outcome in mind. I don’t regret those kinds of choices, but they left permanent scars.
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
I want to blame others for all the time I’ve spent doing things I didn’t want to do, but it seems what we do and don’t do are entirely in our own hands, our own responsibility. Our lives are built on the choices we make, big and small, every hour of every day. If we don’t like our lives, we need to pay attention. Perhaps the useful question to ask ourselves if we hate what we’re doing at any given moment is, “Why am I doing this?” If we’re focused on a particular desired outcome, we may need to stop and think about whether our actions are effective in getting us there. Spending years of our lives desperately hoping and trying to reach an outcome and doing things we hate is not effective. I know this from personal experience. Our wants and needs change over time; what we once longed for may no longer be something we’re interested in. Sometimes we need to reality check ourselves. If we’ve been trying to get loved, for example, or please someone for a long period of time, it might be time to acknowledge our goal is not attainable or not worth attaining. Sometimes no matter how hard we work for an outcome it’s not achievable.
Then there’s the flip side: None of us do what we don’t want to do. That one is equally hard for me to swallow, but that’s a conversation for another day.
Questions:
- How much of each day do you spend doing things you don’t want to do? Why?
- What desired outcome(s) in your life requires you to do things you don’t want to do?
- Do you see your daily choices as isolated or part of a larger context attached to your wants and needs?
- Do you feel forced to labor emotionally? What would happen if you stopped?
- Who in your life reciprocates your level of emotional labor?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here: 
by Jenny Rose | Mar 2, 2024 | A Flourishing Woman, Mind
A couple of weeks ago a discussion I was involved in touched fleetingly upon the idea of an internal locked room, where we keep our most private thoughts and feelings. I’ve been thinking about the concept ever since, fascinated by the metaphor.
Photo by John Salvino on Unsplash
What’s in my locked room?
I don’t know. I don’t want to know, and I don’t want anyone else to know. That’s why I lock that stuff up!
But what’s in there?
I can’t let it go.
As a storyteller, I immediately recognize this common theme running through oral stories and folklore from all traditions. Something is locked or hidden. It’s forbidden to look. Lovers make a bargain. Authority demands obedience. The consequences of looking are not fully revealed, but it’s forbidden to look!
Someone always looks. Remember Pandora? Consequences ensue.
I’ve never really thought about an internal locked room until now; never considered how big it might be or what’s behind the door. I haven’t realized whatever my room contains is locked away from me as well as everyone else. All the memories I don’t want to remember. The hurts, the fears, the terrible thoughts, my unforgiveable deeds. The things about myself I can’t love.
Is it unhealthy to have a locked room? I assume everyone has one, but maybe not. I’m not uncomfortable about the presence of mine, but I question the wisdom of locking myself out. The road to self-love is long and arduous; can I practice it if I still don’t want to face (and accept or forgive) parts of who I am? That doesn’t feel like self-love.
Is a locked room adaptive or maladaptive? Could it be both? Does size matter? (You know what I mean. The size of the room!) Maybe the size is irrelevant and it’s the contents that count. 
Why do we put things in our locked room? Why did I put things in mine?
Well. I’m ashamed. Or I’m afraid of emotional pain, conflict, or of hurting others. Maybe it’s something I’m not ready to forgive myself or others for. Maybe I lock it away to fester?
Ugh.
So is the locked room about keeping me safe or others safe?
Both, I think. Others safe from me and me safe from others. But it’s also a holding place where I keep things I don’t want to deal with.
I’ve read Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton. It gave me the horrors. I’m unable to see radical honesty as a pathway to healthy cooperation and collaboration. For me, privacy is a need, not only in an external sense of spending time in solitude, but also in the internal sense. This is unsurprising from a highly sensitive, empathic person who has experienced emotional trauma and abuse. I need my privacy and I’m intensely protective of the privacy of others.
I think a locked room is an essential piece of healthy functioning.
However, we as a species have a dreadful propensity for carrying things too far.
Not me, of course. I never do that.
How do we decide what’s appropriate to share and what’s not? Working with patients and patrons at the pool facility where I’m employed, I constantly feel battered with oversharing. People, especially seniors, are lonely. They have a lifetime of memories and experience. They have health issues that frighten them. They need to talk. My team and I do our best to be compassionate listeners.
But sometimes I wish I could forget what I’ve heard. Secrets are safe with me, but the feelings that come with them are burdensome; as an empath I’ve struggled all my life to avoid taking on the emotions of others. Mostly not very successfully.
Does everyone need some privacy? Is it a continuum? Do I need too much privacy? How much is too much? Who gets to decide? Is there such a thing as being too open, too un-private, if you will? Or does everyone have a locked room, even if it’s only the size of a mousehole?
Rooms. What happens in private rooms? Clutter. Dust bunnies. Cat hair. Hoarding. Loneliness. Despair. Death. Birth. Love. Sex. Creativity. Cooking. Self-care. Self-harm. Sleeping. Using the toilet. Distraction. Playing out addictions. Violence. Weeping. Exercising. Entertainment. The human activities of daily living we all engage in.
A locked room could be a dark and bitter dungeon or a light and airy penthouse. What kind of a locked room do I have? What kind do I want? 
I hate clutter. Is my locked room cluttered? Surely not! Well, maybe. There’s 60 years’ worth of stuff in there! It’s spring. I kind of want to unlock it, open a window, air the place out. Maybe tidy up a little? Let go of some stuff? Sort? Organize? Would that be so terrible, so impossibly painful?
I have a sneaking suspicion some of what’s in my locked room is not even mine, but things given to me. Or imposed on me. I inherited toxic beliefs, experiences, and feelings from generations before me and believed it was my job to carry and preserve them.
Why am I storing what doesn’t belong to me?
Perhaps my locked room contains parts of myself I tried to get rid of and now need. Treasure, if you will. Maybe exploring it could be in part an act of reclamation.
Maybe if I open the door a tower of horror will fall on top of me and I’ll be smothered. Maybe if I don’t open the door green slime will ooze out from under it.
What’s in there?
I have some answers. My relationship with a cat named Ranger is in there, and no, I don’t want to talk about it. Every room needs a cat, in any case.
Health struggles (not serious) I’m largely unwilling to share are in there, although I have recently cracked the door and let some of them out. Carefully. Nothing bad happened.
My relationship with my children, one in particular, is in there. Now and then I’ve let a small amount of that out, too, but not often, not much, and only to my most trusted female friend.
My locked room is filled with passion. Passionate feelings of all kinds I’ve been hiding and repressing all my life. They’re strong and intense and I’ve been brutally taught they’re ugly, frightening, and obscene.
This has lately become a problem because rage is finding its way out of my locked room with disturbing results. Having escaped the room, it has no intention of being stuffed back in there and restrained. It’s a daily challenge at home, at work, and in the most unexpected contexts. It has stories to tell and I’m listening, reluctantly, but it frightens me and I’m ashamed of it. I thought I would always be able to keep it locked up and controlled. It appears I was wrong.
What else? I don’t know. These are the only specifics I can come up with. I’ll probably become conscious of more, now that I’m thinking about it.
I won’t fling the door of my locked room open and do a thorough cleanout because it’s the wellspring of my creativity, any small wisdom I’ve gained, and my empathy. As a gardener and a writer, I believe in compost. Something wild and primal in me, nurtured by Baba Yaga, loves the stink, the rot, the death, the blood, because these are the cradle of life. Nature does not waste. It’s all recycled. My experience of pain and passion empowers my writing, power I would not lessen in spite of its high price. Such power is born and rooted in fecund darkness, in muck mixed with blood and tears, in the edge of chaos, not in a bright, shining, passionless, well-aired room.
Yet I fear the passion the most. It feels like too much to release or keep contained. I fear its power to tear me apart, which is why I locked it away in the first place, and I fear its potential to hurt others. Much of it fuels my writing. I bleed some off with exercise, especially dance. But those are safety valves rather than open doors. Part of me wants to set my passion free. But for now most of it will stay in my locked room.
Questions:
- Do you have an internal locked room? How do you feel about it?
- Do you believe emotional privacy is essential, or do you think it’s unhealthy? Is it a need on a continuum?
- Are you familiar with the concept of radical honesty? What do you think about it?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here: 
by Jenny Rose | Nov 12, 2022 | Choice, Power
I’ve dedicated the last decade of my life to reclaiming my personal power, each step on the path made visible on this blog in the hopes that others might also find their way into a healthier, happier, more effective life.
Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash
It’s been an extraordinary journey, one I hope will never end as long as I’m breathing.
At the heart of personal power is our ability to choose.
I’ve always been aware of how uncomfortable I am choosing for anyone other than myself. For years I wasn’t able to choose effectively for myself; nothing in me wanted the power to choose for others. Hand-in-hand with this part of my experience is an automatic, knee-jerk stubbornness and opposition to those who try to choose for me or anyone else. It’s been a longstanding family joke: Don’t tell me what to do!
I’ve never been friendly toward this kind of authority.
As a parent I was unwilling to take on the role of a policewoman. I wanted my sons, as teenagers, to use their excellent brains and make their own choices, then deal with their own consequences. As I raised them, it slowly dawned on me the choices I made as a mom, though I always believed they were in the best interests of my sons, might have been wrong for them. I began to realize how much time we all spend in frustration over what those around us should and shouldn’t do, including our kids. I decided to stop discussing what others should choose. I still noticed the commentary in my head, but I got better at not letting it out of my mouth.
One day, I looked at my eldest son, who was going through a bad patch, and heard myself say, “I want the best for you, but I don’t know what that is.” I recognized that was the truth, and felt humbled. It broke my heart to see him struggling and unhappy. I would have done anything to have “helped.” But I didn’t trust my motives. Of course I knew what I thought he should do, but was I looking for him to feel better or for him to make me feel better? I couldn’t be sure. I just wanted things to be better. Wanted it desperately, but I also wanted him to figure out how to help himself.
Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash
I’m very aware of the word ‘should.’ I cut it out of my writing. I cut it out of my thoughts and speech. I’d even go so far as to say it’s a toxic word. I don’t apply it to myself and I don’t apply it to others. It never fails to appear when I’m arguing with what is or have otherwise stepped out of my own rightful power and am trying to control a situation that’s not mine to manage. It also shows up when I’m being mean to myself.
Now, suddenly, I find myself in a position of needing to make choices for a loved one who at this moment is not able to choose for themselves.
This is not like choice-making for my children. Kids are pretty resilient. I knew I would made mistakes as a parent, and I did. But I could always choose again. With small children, there’s a long future in which to reconsider, make new rules, learn in real time. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it. As they grew up, I gave them more and more power to choose for themselves and stepped back while they experienced the consequences of their choices.
Now they’re adults, and it’s harder. Now I really have nothing to say about their choices as men in the world. It’s not my business. Some of their choices are, to my mind, tragic and self-destructive, and I’m afraid for possible consequences. I’m afraid for my own pain and grief if some of those consequences occur. But I accept the only power I have is to love them and make sure they know it.
And making choices for an aging loved one is different again. The fear I’ll do it wrong is terrible. I’m working in a lifetime context where I never did do anything right, so I’m fighting that old dynamic every minute while I calmly go about gathering tools, resources and information. I know I’ll do my best and I’m confident in my own abilities and the strength of my love and intention, but choice is dynamic. It takes time to choose, observe outcomes, consider what could be better, and choose again.
I don’t know how much time I have. I don’t know how much time I want.
Working with a frail, injured, confused senior feels brittle. I may not have time to manage choice and outcome. Not only that, but when I choose for myself if I’m unhappy with the consequences I only have myself to blame; I bear all the outcomes, which is as it should be. But if we must choose for someone else, they must experience the consequences of our choice. And that’s a heavy burden for me. I feel enormous pressure to choose well, to not make anything worse, while at the same time I can’t see choices that will make anything much better.
Photo by roya ann miller on Unsplash
As I struggle with all this, mid-term elections have occurred and the final votes are being counted. The news is full of debate, discussion, and violence revolving around limiting choice and forcing “choice.” As always, I cannot get my head around people who think it’s okay to impose their ideology on others. I support freedom of personal choice (as long as it doesn’t harm others) in most circumstances. I wouldn’t impose my beliefs or choices on others. The idea is appalling. But I also don’t accept anyone has the right to restrict my access to vote or what I do with my reproductive ability. I refuse to comply with such imposition, even if it becomes law. You might as well arrest me right now.
A conversation recently took place at the pool facility where I work between a woman of child-bearing age and a male senior. She asked him why he thought it was okay for him to decide she couldn’t get an abortion when the choice was personal and had absolutely nothing to do with him. He said such a choice would hurt his feelings.
This drops my jaw. I don’t know whether to let rage catch my hair on fire or laugh. It hurts his feelings when people make choices incongruent with his belief system and ideology? Or it hurts his feelings when women are empowered? Or it hurts his feelings when he can’t control what others choose? Or he feels entitled to never have his feelings hurt?
Wow. Just wow.
Choice. It’s so easy to say to others, or to think, they should do this, or this, or the other. So easy. But I never wanted to run the world. I only wanted to be in charge of myself. Now a loved one needs me to be there for them, and I will be there every step of the way, giving it my best, just as I always have. But it’s not fun. I don’t want the power. I accept I’m the right one to have the power, but I never wanted it. How can I possibly know what’s best for another human being? How can any of us have the arrogance to think we know what’s best for everyone in every circumstance, let alone anyone in any circumstance? At times I can barely choose wisely for myself, let alone anyone else.
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
by Jenny Rose | Sep 11, 2022 | Choice, Power
Probably every child is told we all have to do things we don’t want to do.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
Children are concrete, and I was no exception. When I heard we all have to do things we don’t want to do, I thought it meant that’s what life was supposed to be about, a kind of slavery to all those things we don’t want to do. No one talked to me about balance, or doing the things we do want to do.
It made life seem like an unhappy business, years and years of unending duty, responsibility, and doing what I didn’t want to do. No recess. Or maybe what I really wanted to do was bad and wrong? Maybe I should want to do what I didn’t want to do. I wasn’t sure. A part of me went underground. I didn’t want anyone to know how bad I was, how flawed. I worked hard at the things I didn’t want to do and hid the things I did want to do, in case they were wrong.
But I couldn’t conceal the feeling of wanting and not wanting from myself. I used to make hidey holes in whatever house we were living in at the time and go to ground with a book, but I always felt guilty. I wanted to read. Doing what I wanted to do was bad. I should have been helping my mom do all the things she didn’t want to do.
The pronouncement that we all have to do things we don’t want to do is stated as a Cosmic Truth, especially as an adult tells it to a child. It’s loaded with feelings and experience a child can’t possibly understand, but the subtext was clear to me:
Life is not much fun.
I can’t resist picking apart Cosmic Truths as an adult, and as I think about this one it occurs to me it really has to do with personal power more than wanting or not wanting. It’s not framed in terms of personal power because our emotional intelligence is so low. Making choices based on whether we want to do something or not is childish. Power resides in the act of choice, not in the wanting or not wanting.
Steering our lives solely by our desires is hedonism, a belief that satisfaction of desires is the purpose of life. Desire, though, is so shallow, so fleeting. And it’s never permanently satisfied. No matter how well and pleasurably we’ve eaten, we’ll be hungry again. Desire is a treadmill we can never get off.
This is not to say we shouldn’t ever choose something we want or say no to something we don’t want, but our desire is easily manipulated. That’s why advertising works. If we can be easily manipulated, we’re not standing in our power. Addiction is based, at least in the beginning, on wanting and not wanting.
A more useful question than What do I want to do? is What would be the most powerful thing to do? We might want to eat a carton of ice cream, but a walk feeds our health, well-being, and thus personal power much better. After all, one carton of ice cream leads nowhere but to another. Personal power can lead us to joy and experience a carton of ice cream never dreamed of.
- If we don’t choose to do difficult, frightening, or new things, we’ll never grow.
- If we don’t choose to take care of our bodies, they won’t function well.
- If we don’t choose to be self-sufficient and resilient, we’ll be dependent.
- If we don’t choose to learn anything, we’ll remain ignorant.
- If we don’t choose to plan ahead, prepare, or manage consequences, we diminish our choices, waste resource, and weaken the contribution we’re capable of making.
- If we don’t choose the responsibility of commitment and making choices, someone else will make our choices for us.
And so on.
I’m changing the frame. I’m less interested in what I want and what I don’t want and more interested in how my choices affect my power, and the power of those around me. I’m willing to do what I don’t want to do if it’s a step on a road leading to integrity, power, healthy relationship, or anything else important to me. At the same time, I can exercise my right to say no to things that won’t take me where I want to go.
It’s about power, not desire. Any three-year-old can want and not want. It takes an adult to manage a healthy balance of personal power.
Photo by Deniz Altindas on Unsplash
