40 Years of Power

A reflection on the gifts of mistakes and the powerful choices & opportunities thereafter (40th birthday reflections!)

What I’m sharing with you is my own relationship to Power through stories and practices. May it serve you in recognizing and moving with your own power within your sovereign integrity.

Like most people, I learned about my Power from relationships: friendships, housemates, work positions, romantic relationships, casual social contracts and outright strangers.

I define Power as my capacity to be who I want and know myself to be within a given context. From there, by being who I want to be, I can influence what I do and what I have as a result.

That’s right. So many of us believe that if we just do what we need to, we can have what we want and then we will become who we want to be. That makes some logical sense, I suppose, but I’ve never seen power actually work that way. Have you?

I used to believe it too. That belief system is what I inherited and what most people under capitalism inherit as well. It sets us up for a chronic internal power famine. We’re always DOING something, hoping for more power to become ourselves - to give us permission to stop doing things.

Example: Joe works from age 16-60, primarily in hard physical labor. His goal is to retire “on time.” The goal is to not do anything….. so he keeps doing lots of things for a long time in order to stop doing things and finally relax and be himself. Anyone got the math on that? It doesn’t add up with what I know. How about you?

“But Candis, we all have to make a living. You’re ignoring the context….. and therefore my unique suffering within it.”

I can hear it in the back of your head right now. I hear you. Capitalism teaches us scarcity for the sake of fattening someone else’s pocketbook. It preys on our brains’ capacity for managing crisis by 1) predicting the future based on the past. We repeat how we fix our scarcity! and 2) telling us how to “fix” our scarcity by working/doing/buying more!

Yes. We created a system wherein we have to work to live. I hate it. I bet there’s a part of you that does too. So what does Joe do? What do you do?

Trick question - did I get you?

I apologize. That was a little rude, eh?