I was bemoaning to myself the weight of responsibility today and wanting to resort to one of the many acts I play to avoid it.
Ahhh, I don’t care.
Ahhh, find someone else.
Ahhh, I’m going home.
Etc.
A quitter? Definitely. That fits with my whole stick-in-the-mud act, the only way the runt of the litter could get attention.
I was an obstruction – always. And all my other views of life were colored by this role that I chose for myself. The runt from hell.
But the price of playing this role keeps going up. It gets costlier and costlier to play either stick-in-the-mud or one of its many derivatives.
Long story short, I found myself launching into this act today – Ahhh, it’s too much for me. Ahhhhh, I’m taking a holiday. Ahhh, I don’t wanna play any more.
And another side of me …. finally … showed up. The cavalry came. I saw, as if electrically shocked, that I can no longer afford the luxury of even making believe (which is what I was doing – selling myself a point of view, making myself believe) that I can shuck my duty any longer. It simply is not an option (Period. Full stop).
Give up the pretense because you can’t shuck your duty, another part of me told the stick-in-the-mud.
I was impressed. Who was this masked man?
And then I realized … it was me … and, when I realized it, I became it. I assimilated it. Now I can speak for it.
Yes, I can no longer shirk my duty and I can no longer make believe that the situation is otherwise.
That means I can no longer run my stick-in-the-mud routine.
But that has been my best defensive weapon of all time. Call the whole proceedings to a halt, stop the whole shooting match, general rebellion. I earned a lot of karma this lifetime, I’m sure of it.
But now all that needs to come to a stop. Let the chips fall where they may, I can no longer afford to run my number.
If you were sitting on a verandah on Cortes Island, British Columbia, after a three-month encounter group in 1976, what I just said would have been called “calling myself on my own number.”
It’s one of the paradigm-breaking skills taught by the human-growth movement.
Once an act is raised to awareness, it becomes much more difficult to run it.
And the relief that comes from dropping one more secret way of being is wonderful.
To those committed to dropping their own numbers, acts, and routines, the value of calling one’s self is undoubtedly crystal clear. To others, why not try it? (1)
Footnotes
(1) Trying it on, testing it out, and seeing if it fits, and then owning it (calling oneself on one’s own number) if it fits is another growth-movement precept.