Who Do You Want to Be in the World?
I got rear-ended two days ago - Happy Mother’s Day to me. I was sitting in traffic, on the freeway, with my 10-year-old son and 9-year-old dog (or is he 8?). Somehow, with four lanes going westbound, our lane was the only one that had stopped. I admittedly came sorta close to tapping the SUV that was ahead of me because the flow stopped somewhat abruptly. And as I was mindlessly enjoying the feeling of the ease of not having hit someone, I watched a truck roll up on me, dangerously not seeming like it would stop on time, but this seems to happen every day at some point, so I didn’t get worked up about it. And then… tap. We got hit. My little dog who was sitting on the console hit the floor. My head hit the back of my seat and immediately started to hurt. My kid yelled out, “I’m okay!” But what occurred is that I had instantaneous flashbacks of the time we got rear-ended at a red light only 9 months ago. The woman looked my 14-year-old in the eye and then took off. Sadly, this time, my immediate reaction was to prepare for a hit-and-run, so I thrust my phone at my kid and told him to be ready to take a picture of a fleeing car. In all honesty, I was so proud of myself for thinking so quickly. However, in retrospect, I was simply living out a past experience which takes no thought at all. Not living out those patterns takes way more effort.
Anyhow, she didn’t flee. We pulled over, and as I stepped out of the car, I realized I was pretty shaky. She approached me with such immense genuine concern that I began to forget that I was shaky and just wanted to soothe her. Next thing I know, she’s meeting my kid, I’m meeting her partner and dog, and we are parting with smiles and the deepest hug I’ve received in a while.
I continued my 35 minutes of driving thinking about how concerned she was and recognizing that the the fear of being sued is very real in this part of the world. My heart was simply not okay with any possibility of fear when there was clearly so much love involved. When I stopped driving, I sent her a text just to assure her that we were fine. We have exchanged kind texts daily since.
I’m still processing this experience, so bear with me. I am grasping at the messages that feel clear but that are less easy to articulate with my limited vocabulary. My dominant thoughts are around who I am being in the world. It’s easy for me to be kind and loving when my world is working the way I want it to, when I have a full belly, when it’s sunny, when I got a good bike ride in, when I’m surrounded by chirping birds, when I wrapped up an amazing coaching session, when my children are being kind to one another, when my dog isn’t barking incessantly, when I got great sleep… when I haven’t just gotten rear-ended. It’s a whole other deal when shit ain’t right. I have often jokingly said that I will know I have reached Buddhahood when I am no longer triggered by my mother. This experience felt like…. well, like a sense of Buddhahood. It never occurred to me to be angry or even annoyed. All I wanted was for everyone to be okay and for no one to feel fear, and somehow it was my natural inclination to act from that place (once I stopped reliving my hit-and-run experience). And what is so beautiful is that my bumper-tapper matched my energy. I mean, who the heck ends a car crash with a hug?!
The mention of Bumper-Tapper’s energy match is a great segue into my thoughts on the law of attraction/vibration/frequency/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. You can call it woo-woo all you want, but this shit is for real, and anyone who is paying attention won’t deny it - we may call it different things, but so what? People probably call me different things, but I’m still me all the way through!
So here’s the deal: when I leave my house in a crap mood, it’s almost guaranteed that someone will cut me off on the road, the cashier at the market will be rude or indifferent, someone will step on my new white shoes, my poison oak will start to itch really badly… you get it. But if I leave my house feeling good and vibrating at a high level, one of two things will occur: either none of those things will happen or they will happen and I won’t even notice them. Go ahead and do an experiment if you’re a naysayer. However, if you have any compelling experiences around this that you’d like to share, shoot me a note; I’d love to hear about it!
So, the questions are:
Who do you want to be in the world? How do you want to show up?
How are you actually showing up?
How can you bridge the gap?
Sure, we slip up, and that’s okay. But if we don’t know how we want to be, we can’t aim for it. It’s important to have a target, even if it’s a moving one. I’d like to invite you to get quiet with your inner self and really envision how you want to show up. How do you want to be when you’re feeling great? How do you want to be when you feel like hell?
Here are the most basic instructions on the planet:
Get quiet
Envision
Decide
Get quiet with your decision
Remind yourself daily
Allow for the plethora of opportunities for practice to come into your life
Practice
Practice
Practice
