Why You Do What You Do
Why is it that you feel the way you feel? Why is it that you’re a quiet person or a gregarious person? Why are you an introvert or an extrovert? Momentum.
We are all born into a soul that is. It’s easy to recognize this with babies. Newborns come into this world and ‘are a way’. It’s immediate. And as they develop over that first year of life, they start developing little personalities. We all see this and comment on it, and yet we sort of forget about this natural flow as we move through life and age.
We are also neurologically conditioned by the people around us - caretakers and parents. These adults mold the physical and emotional network of our mind to be a certain way. If you’re parent continuously points at clouds in wonder and says in a sing-song positive voice, “look at the clouds,” you will grow up thinking clouds are wonderful. If a parent recoils from a bee and says, “watch out for that bee!" you will grow up watching out for bees and recoiling.
We know this. You know this in the belly of your being, you know this to be true. And THIS combination of inherent and learned traits and behaviors is what forms our momentum. The more we engage in the behaviors, thoughts and systems, the more we enforce the teachings.
A disconnect happens as we age, and start exploring our independence. We whip through our 20s - most of us with this hands-off approach from our parents (hey, their job is done, right?), and we start making our own choices. We find jobs and relationships and homes to live in. We decorate to our own tastes. We cook food “we” like. Most people would agree - I can feel the collective nodding their heads.
THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
But here’s the thing…..we DON’T do what we want. We are NOT independently thinking. We are simply in a current, being swept along into the things we know, have been taught and are conditioned to. We have a feeling of freedom and choice, but that actually doesn’t exist. We never had it in the first place! We were born into this world being, someone handed us a map, and now maybe we’re off the map a bit but we’re still in the same terrain.
“You don’t follow a map in a desert and then suddenly find yourself in the tropics!”
MOTIVATION TO DO
When you can recognize that you are not the one who is actually making the choice, you can start to undo the conditioned mind. It is in this space of exploration and grace that there is an opportunity to step back from self and ask why. Here are some common questions to explore:
Why is it that you’re doing what you’re doing?
Who does it serve?
Does it serve you? Do you think it serves another?
And if you think it serves another, how do you think it serves them?
Do you believe they’ll understand precisely how it is you think it will serve them?
“Understanding WHY you are doing and saying whatever it is you are doing and saying is a tool for healing.”
We see how people use momentum when we pause and observe how a collective is behaving. This is easy to recognize on social media. On my own channel, I follow friends (in collectives of “white”, “democratic”, “educated”, “creative”) and the collective tends to act collectively. Texas bans abortions and everyone posts about it, pulling quotes from the same public influencers and posting them to their channels. As you scroll through, you see the same messaging over and over. What does seeing the same messaging over and over do? You know it conditions your brain to believe the message.
PERSONAL POWER
Recognizing WHY you’re doing something is a way to step out of the small perspective of our personal life and see the motivation behind the action. The next time you’re about to post the same tragic news to your social channel, ask yourself. Why am I doing this? Do you WANT people to also feel bad? Do you WANT something to change? Does posting what you’re posting succeed in doing either of those things? Why is it that we need to build on collective trauma and exploit it? And then villanize those you don’t have the same voice as the collective?
If the motivation is to make change, than you must make change. You must recognize you’re not a unique voice with a clear message, you’re simply part of a collective who is also operating on momentum.
It’s a personal choice to continue on a path that is laid out or to bushwack you’re way to a new way of being. THIS is the only real choice we can make. Otherwise, we’re in the current of the stream with all the others, repeating learned patterns of the past.
