I just had an experience with an asshole giving me a “look”. Now, in the “old days” that look might have rendered him a bloody, probably incoherent mess on the floor, or at the very least he would have gotten a verbal ass whooping that would have left him stuttering and stammering like a fool. My hands would have been sore, and I’d be making calls for bail money, and I’d feel horrible about my lack of control, but that would have been the outcome.
I would have heard the voices in my head that would have told me I was not strong enough, tough enough, or worthy enough to be superior to this person. I would have reacted violently in order to prove them wrong, and that reaction would ALWAYS lead to other voices telling me I was not strong enough, tough enough, or worthy enough to be my sincere, loving, compassionate self. The first set of voices belonged to other people, the second set were mine.
My choice is ALWAYS, “which voices are the one you wish to listen to?”
While I do get angry when pretenders scratch the surface of my insecurity, I realize that the reaction is truly my own that has nothing to do with them. That reaction leads ME into fantasy; fantasy that suggests I am something different from who I am, fantasy that causes me to create outcomes that are contrary to the person I am, fantasy where I listen to voices not my own.
I am grateful for the physical strength I have been given, but I’m more grateful for the mental and physical strength I have developed. That’s the value I find in the past. The past is, for me, like some long-forgotten workout that helped make me a little bit stronger today than I would have been without it. I value it in the place it has gotten me, but for little else. The real value is in the exercise of Now, the boundaries I am pushing in the asanas I am trying in the present tense of my current state of being.
This experience, too, will only serve to get me to another. It has no other value except in where I am and where I am going. I can assign certain values in it if I choose. I can create importance in it if I so desire, but those choices, too, are for me and only me to make. Things become important, moments gain value, only in the minds of the people who have them. Beyond that, they are nothing more than vehicles to another moment, another time, another choice.