You are Special in Your Service: You are Needed
Understanding the value of my own output and how it can optimally be in service to the world can help discern how I spend my resources: time and energy. If what is inside of me can be in service to the world, it is beneficial for me to spend time creating, releasing, responding.
Motivation is everything and only you can exert awareness on the intention behind your sharing. I know that for me personally sharing used to be driven by a need for external validation. ‘I want you to think I am brilliant, look at me, look at what I am saying.’ Sometimes that ‘rejected little girl’ shadow still takes the driver’s seat. For the most part however, these days I am clear: my gifts are a persistent drive to learn all I can from my own human experience (and the human experience at large), and an ability to digest and articulate that experience to others.
Yesterday someone asked me, ‘What is your purpose?’ I thought for a minute and said,
My purpose is to help others remove those things that are preventing them from seeing and living their own brilliance, and to help create and set up systems within community that support people doing this for each other every day.
I am as special as EVERYONE ELSE, which is not at all in the way our ego desires to be special. Our desire to be special is largely based on ideas of Power-OVER. ‘I must be greater than someone else to experience value. I want to rank higher in the hierarchy. I must dominate to be successful. I must be noticed and acknowledged as ‘more’ than someone else to be special.’
What dissolution of culturally generated ego must happen to truly recognize your own worth and unique value without comparison? Without the need to be ‘greater than’ someone else? Can you hold that you bring something no one else can bring to this planet at this point in time, like EVERY other person on this planet, and STILL feel special?
The greatest current tragedy of our human experience is that the cultural systems in place have focused on dominance as necessary for survival and success. Fueled by capitalism, trends emerged in global culture that exercise a complete disregard for the long term effects of the instant gratification of greed, the bystander effect on the suffering of our fellow humans, and the disassociation and rejection of the entirety of our human experience that inhibits deeper interpersonal connection, aliveness, and creativity.
Bluntly, the tiny boxes we are shoving ourselves into in order to live ‘successful’ lives and feel that we have value, is at the expense of each other and the singular entity that sustains our humanity as we know it, Mother Earth.
The dire truth is that if we continue this way we have maybe 30 years. We have headed into collapse and crisis points systemically, environmentally and interpersonally. AND, the brilliance of humanity is that we have the ability to access and mobilize quickly toward innovation when necessary.
It is necessary. NOW is the time. Not tomorrow when Saturn aligns with Jupiter in Aquarius on the Solstice, but TODAY.
What is one small action you can take today to begin to create a world in which your time and energy are dedicated to sustaining and nurturing the planet, your fellow humans and the creatures inhabiting it?
Does that sound daunting?
Though the impact may be large, the actions can be quite simple. They only require a minute of focused intention: ‘How can I serve today? How can I make my immediate world better today?’ AND the conviction to carry your actions all the way through.
What this means for me today is giving $25 to a charity I believe in, showing up for my community house by taking leadership in what needs to be done for the house, writing this blog, putting more work into a podcast project dedicated to cultural anthropology, innovation and articulating the human experience, and reaching out to loved ones to give them support and encouragement.
One day, one moment at a time, we are creating a new paradigm. YOU are special because your choices affect all those you come in contact with, or miss the opportunity to come in contact with. Your absence has as great an impact as your presence.
This is a CALL TO ACTION. We need everyone, now, this moment, NOT in the moments we have relegated to a tomorrow that runs an astonishingly real risk of not existing.
