Who do you Be?

One of the most interesting conversations I have with myself while taking personal inventory is about who I “be”. I believe that who I be is always a choice and never the result of my circumstances. Please don’t take this to mean I’m a master of my emotions. I’m actually quite horrible at remembering to choose my way of being. Just picture an unpredictable roller coaster and put my name on it. Despite that, there is still a sense of empowerment in knowing that with practice, we can choose who we be in any moment or situation. For instance, maybe I’ll choose to be loving today, or inspirational, or silly. Maybe I’ll decide that my goal for the whole day is to grin like an idiot at everyone I see and watch their reactions. Don’t you just want to run out and test that? Unfortunately, we can also choose to be in a negative pattern of being. And that, my friends, is where I have been for a very long time. I’ll admit it…I felt sick and broken and I wanted people to recognize I felt sick and broken. I wanted people to get my pain so I didn’t feel alone in it, thinking that if people felt sorry for me just a bit I would feel better. You know what? I didn’t feel better. All I felt was more negativity with a side of guilt for being a complainer and an energy vampire. I want to be someone who breathes life into people I come in contact with, not the sucker of their life-force energy. I realized that I was stuck in victim mode. Oh I talked about getting out. I even had brilliant bursts of relief where I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But traveling upwards is difficult when there is no action involved. I was all talk and no action. Yeesh.
I remember several (as in like 6) years ago a time where I was much more conscious about who I was being. I created a “Be” jar with my friend/roommate. We typed ways of being on individual slips of paper and put them all in a decorated glass jar. Every morning we would each draw a slip and that would be our assignment for the day. It was fun and very freeing. It took work to maintain it throughout the day…some days were successful and others weren’t. But it was practice and inspired awareness. The lesson here is this: We have choice. It is the way God designed it to be, for us to have agency. We have the freedom to choose good things and positive energy or victim-mode and darkness. And we can choose no matter our circumstances. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we can control how we react and our thought processes. And it is ours. People can always take away our stuff, but they can’t take away who we are. Not ever. Maybe I’ll go make a new “be” jar….