Pathwalking 256
I will do what I have to do when and if the time comes.
In the meantime, I cannot live my life anticipating possibilities. In especial, focusing on worst-case scenarios. There’s a terrible idea – get fixated on awful, no good, scary things, and consciousness creates reality.
We are now living in particularly uncertain times. We are witnessing an unprecedented situation in America due to our President-elect’s vast unpredictability, and his particularly vulgar, hate-spewing supporters (I am being specific here in regards to the KKK, neo-Nazis, various white-supremacists and other hate groups openly celebrating and feeling empowered). There is an unbelievable amount of fear, concern, and hopelessness because no one knows if they’ll be interred, deported, lose their health benefits, retirement benefits, state aid, or be a victim of a hate crime.
A part of me feels guilty in continuing along my own path. Shouldn’t I do something more? Isn’t there something I can do to help people in this situation? Is it totally selfish of me to continue as I’ve been? Is it not more important that I seek to do something that will benefit others more than myself?
Well, the answer is yes and no. Put simply, I cannot do anyone else any good if I am running on empty. If I am not empowering myself how on earth can I empower or help anyone else?
These forces are all about disempowering us. They want control, for themselves and a select few. They want us fearful, powerless, and cowed. They prefer us worried because in worrying we are more prone to chew on our fingernails and fret over what happens next rather than to take action of any kind.
Pathwalking is empowering myself. I am making the necessary effort to expand my life and achieve my goals, the main one being to help inspire and empower others.
So while I may be feeling somewhat selfish in working on my own empowerment, I also recognize that if I do not empower myself, I can do very little for anyone else. Coming from a place of strength and hope and positivity will produce vastly better results than coming from a place of weakness and fear and negativity.
Still difficult not to feel guilty about keeping focus on myself. But this is not selfishness nor narcissism, this is working on my own self-love and self-respect, so that I can share that with others.
Despite all this uncertainty, for the most part life is unchanged. In the world of social media and instantaneous information we are completely overwhelmed with a constant stream of negative information. This terrible thing that awful business those atrocious people and so forth. In the immediate here-and-now I still have to live today, and go to work and take various actions for my life experience.
There are actions we can take now. We can express that we will be beacons of hope and light standing out from the darkness and despair. We can call our Congresspeople and remind them that we are who they actually are supposed to be working for, and that we would really prefer they help us. We can stand together, ignoring race and gender and sexual orientation and religion and skin color, and show them we will not be intimidated. We can write blogs about finding our own empowerment, and show them we will not be victims.
I think to some degree our present matters are due to people living in the past, real or imagined, fearful of the future, uncomfortable with progress they think is leaving them behind. But each and every one of us can be accountable for our own thoughts and feelings and actions, and we can choose to work in the here-and-now to empower ourselves, do what we can and be prepared without being intimidated.
I am grateful for my life. I have fantastic friends and loves, a roof over my head, technology at my fingertips, abundance and stability. If and when these things are threatened I will take action, but right here, right now, they just are. Rather than allow myself to be swept up in the tide of negativity with my own negativity, I need to be empowered so that I can share that with you and everyone.
Empowerment of the self is in no way selfish, it is akin to weightlifting at the gym. When you are empowered, you are stronger spiritually, and when your spirit is strong you can do more for yourself, and for those around you. As such I can and must continue to walk my paths, because anything else would be denying my empowerment…and that’s precisely what they want.
It is not selfish to live in the now, and to be focused on things that will empower. I encourage you to remain vigilant, but don’t get so caught up in the dark possibilities that you help collectively manifest them. The anti should be met with the pro, negativity with positivity, hatred with love, disempowerment with empowerment.
Stay strong. Stay grateful for what you have, but don’t deny what you are working towards for fear of uncertainty. The future is not yet written, and we cannot live in it or be fearful of it. We need to be stronger than that, we need to be empowered and to know that we can still choose our own way.
Here and now be prepared, but be present. My paths are many, and in empowering myself to walk them so are the possibilities.
What are you doing for your own empowerment?
GOAL LOG – Week 46:
Diet: I’ve gone a bit off the rails. I am eating too much and more poorly. Need to reign this back in.
Exercise: Fencing happened once last week, and I spent more-or-less a whole day on my feet as well.
Writing: The three blogs got written.
Meditation: I meditated only on 1 day last week, for 9 minutes.
Gratitude: I wrote five or six things I was grateful for two days last week.
I am striving to get back on this.
This is the two-hundred fifty-sixth entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas and my personal experiences in walking along the path of life. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
If you enjoy Pathwalking, you may also want to read my Five Easy Steps to Change the World for the Better.
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