Your Path Should Do No Harm to Others
An important truth about the choices and decisions we make.
There is a major false narrative that dominates many aspects of modern society. It’s this: Lack, scarcity, and insufficiency.
The entire MAGA movement is based on this. Those who buy it believe that many of the basic elements of life are in short supply, and if you don’t grab yours, someone else will. There’s not enough for everyone, which is why the gays/immigrants/liberals/communists/socialists and whatnot must be stopped.
The reality is that very little is truly in short supply. Most lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are artificial. The limitations have been placed by someone trying to gain control, power, money, and so on.
Unfortunately, this creates another major false narrative: That to succeed, get to the top and win, you must crush the opposition, leave a wake of lesser people you overcome, and take no shit along the way. Stop at nothing because everyone else is a loser.
This is complete and total bullshit. Take a close look at most of the right-wing leaders of the world. Notice how all of them appear humorless, joyless, and perpetually wanting? Is that success? I can’t imagine that it is.
Any path you walk in life should do no harm to others. And it’s easy when you apply active conscious awareness when making choices and decisions.
Choose to do the right thing(s)
No matter who you are or where you come from, there will be choices and decisions to be made. Most are seemingly inconsequential. When will you get out of bed? What will you wear today? Are you really going to eat cold pizza for breakfast? Small and minor, yet not without consequence.
Hit the snooze too many times – now you might be running late. Wear that light top without checking the forecast – now you might be chilly and wet. Eat the cold pizza – you might get indigestion or feel unsatisfied. Each carries a reaction and a consequence.
That’s just minor things. Bigger choices and decisions come with similar outcomes. “For every action this is an equal and opposite reaction.” That’s Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion, but it applies to most choices and decisions, too.
When you allow yourself to live by rote and routine, a lot of choices and decisions get made automatically. Unchecked, this can lead to dissatisfaction, uncertainty, and questioning many aspects of your life experience. Granted, it’s not a bad thing to put some decisions and choices on autopilot. However, checking in on them from time to time gives you more control.
Active conscious awareness comes in 2 parts. The first is recognition and acknowledgement of your immediate surroundings via your 6 senses. The second is recognition and acknowledgement of your conscious mindset/headspace/psyche self by checking in with what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, the positivity or negativity of your current approach, and your actions.
By doing this, you practice mindfulness, which allows you to make conscious choices and decisions. That, in turn, helps you distinguish good from bad and right from wrong.
However, this is only applicable to and for you.
Your path should do no harm to others
I can’t tell you who, what, where, how, or why to be. Yes, I can offer advice, share my own experience, and make suggestions. But you alone choose for yourself.
Along this line, I recognize that my choices and decisions for myself can, will, and do impact others. Knowing this, I must take into account if hurt or harm will come to anyone from my actions.
BUT, and this is super important, this is about intent and malice of forethought. Genuine selfishness. Because in truth, being your most authentic self will cause others to possibly feel hurt.
When you set boundaries that weren’t there before, say no instead of yes to things you don’t care to take part in, protect your mental health rather than be someone’s good-natured doormat, others might feel hurt. And you can do nothing about that. That, however, is not doing harm.
To do no harm on your path means actively choosing to recognize and acknowledge others. You don’t make choices that will cause harm, like taking more than your fair share, kneecapping your competition to hold them back, intentionally destroying someone else’s work to prop up your own, and so on. Do no harm means rejecting the fear evoked by lack, scarcity, and insufficiency.
Maybe you desire to be wealthy. You see paths you can choose to get there. But is it worth it to get there by tossing aside your friends, destroying the environment, ruining another’s reputations, and thus reaching the end with a trail of literal or metaphorical bodies in your wake? Seems pretty lonely and unpleasant to me.
Make choices and decisions to do no harm
Every little bit counts. I’m a sci-fi and fantasy writer. There are thousands of other sci-fi and fantasy writers in the world. I, for one, would very much like to be a bigger success.
There are choices and decisions I can make to help me grow my readership. Some do no harm while others are rather ugly. I could, for example, give shit reviews to other authors, talk trash about their habits and personal lives, and similar harmful acts. Most political ads take that approach nowadays, don’t they?
Even if I succeeded via those ugly approaches, is that true success? Does anyone really want to stand alone, untouchable, and cold as ice at the pinnacle of success? Of course not. Why do you think Trump needs to put his name on everything? Because that’s all he has.
You can and should do no harm when you choose your paths in life. That’s because nobody is truly alone. All of us exist among other people and don’t live in a vacuum. Sure, our desire to interact is wildly variable. But does causing harm to succeed truly lead to success? I don’t think so.
This is why I’m on a Discord server with a group of other independent sci-fi authors. Together, we share resources and do things to help one another, prop each other up, and work together for greater individual success. Thanks to them, my blurb writing has improved, I’ve gained content for my newsletter, and I have a sounding board for ideas.
It’s beneficial to do no harm on your chosen paths because what you give is what you get.
One last, important note.
Nobody is more or less deserving and/or worthy
There are over 8 billion people on Planet Earth. Is there anything at all that makes any single one of them more worthy or deserving than anyone else? No.
Choices and decisions consciously made impact who, what, where, how, and why you are. When you do no harm, you keep your frequency high and potential and possibility more open. This opens you to abundance and more, not less.
In general, nobody is more worthy or deserving than anyone else. For that reason, knowingly inflicting harm on someone via your intentions and actions does everyone a disservice. The notions of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency, especially applied to intangibles, are utter and complete bullshit.
There is more than enough of nearly everything in the universe. What’s more, even the tangible, material things tend to be more abundant than not. Also, when one thing runs out, something new usually presents itself to take its place.
When you recognize and acknowledge how bullshit lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are, you see that doing no harm is best for you and everyone. There is zero reason to knowingly inflict hurt or harm to walk any given path. You don’t get there sooner or achieve more. In fact, doing intentional harm will come back and hurt you.
The world needs more people to recognize and acknowledge this. Only then can we genuinely begin to undo the fear-based nature of our society and change the world for the better. That starts with you and me and the choices and decisions we make.
Can you see why it matters that you do no harm when choosing any given paths you take?
This is the seventh-hundred-seventy-first (771) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share my philosophy because I desire to make a difference in the world and help as many people as I can to find their empowerment with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to share and/or repost where it might do good for you and others.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
Also, please check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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