There are only two paths in life, the differences between individual journeys are just graduated shades of grey between black and white, the slavery of false comfort or the freedom of the true power which lies in accountable agency.
The core issue is choice: Do we choose to accept responsibility for our lives and actually have power to control what lies within our grasp, or do we use blame to shift responsibility for our actions and emotions onto other actors and circumstances that we cannot control?
Do we live as victims of circumstance and slaves to our emotional surges, or do we choose to live as independent persons who control what we are able to, and let the rest go?
My wife put it this way: We point our fingers in blame at all the outside things in our life, and waste our time trying to control things we have no control over in an effort to make our surroundings and life comfortable so we don't have to look into the mirror and deal with our problems. The irony is that our life and surroundings are things we cannot directly control!
It really helps to know there are only two paths and why we make the choices we do...
The more rational and accountable way is to to control ourselves so that whatever circumstance we find ourselves in...we are at peace inside and comfortable accepting the life we have. That is true power. The wonderful news is, we all possess that power of agency and self-control!
Remember that I said there are only two paths? That is because we live in a binary world where we can only think of one thought at a time and two possible outcomes to each choice based on that primal thought. Therefore we can only make one choice at a time. Just like a Facebook post: We can like it or flame it, respond to it or ignore it, but we cannot move on without responding in some way to the immediate post.
Every moment of our lives we are choosing between two courses of action. Implicit in our choosing is also an acceptance of our responsibility for that choice, or an abdication from our power of agency. If we refuse to validate our agency by accepting responsibility for our choices, we give control of our lives to outside forces but the responsibility still stays on our head. It is the worst of all possible outcomes, so we try to mask our part in the play by using terms such as," Victims of circumstance, slaves to passion, chained by addiction, cursed by fate... and on and on ad nauseum."
In other words, we give away our true power of controlling ourselves to instead cloak ourselves in the false comfort of victimhood and irresponsibility. It is negatively reinforcing course of action that does not end well.
Stoics teach that true power comes from focusing only on those things we can control and letting the rest go. We accept where we are in any given moment as a culmination of our previous choices. We choose to be content and happy in the present moment, with whatever we have right now. After all, if we are unable to be happy right now in the present moment which we control (remember, one thought to choose happy/unhappy?) when will we ever be happy?
As an example in real life: My son refused to go to school this morning because he said he is sick. He has been truly sick and missed 4 days of school last week but has been healthy enough to go skiing with the school yesterday. Today, however, he is supposed to turn in all the homework he had let pile up that he did not do...so he uses "sickness" to evade responsibility but at the same time creates more problems for himself in terms of getting farther behind in school, loss of privileges, and being grounded from electronics. He is seeking temporary comfort at the expense of true power and control of his life. One choice, two paths.
Now I as a parent also have a part in this drama, in that do I choose to uphold consequences to his choices and thus teach him that he is responsible for his agency? Or do I let him slide and enable his dependency on false comfort? Note that if I choose to force him to go to school I am damaging my own integrity and giving him another villain that he can be a victim of, so he can gain sympathy from his peers and avoid responsibility for his choices/actions.
I do not, cannot, control him. It is a pernicious falsehood to think I can bring about a good outcome through an evil method..., and coercion is evil. It is just another way that our pride tries to blind us and not look in the mirror at who we truly are.
Do we want to be powerful and free? Or do we want to be powerless slaves that, in the end, still bear full responsibility for our choices?
We create our lives through our choices. The full acceptance of our responsibility for those choices leads to happiness in the present moment, because we choose it to be so.
Agency is power. Use it wisely:-)
Namaste.
As always images are from Google and should have links/credits imbedded in the image. If you like my work, please upvote, resteem, and leave comments...especially leave comments! I know this is a short treatment of a very deep topic, and I would love to continue our conversation:-)