Each day, we cross paths with a wide range of people. Some are angels of kindness, some are knuckleheads. At each crossing, we can choose how we meet them, and our choice affects the direction of our growth and theirs.
We can choose to interact based on how they treat us. If they are nice, we are nice; if they are obnoxious, we push back. This is the typical way people act and can be perfectly appropriate, especially in our early years when we are forming a healthy ego and learning to set boundaries.
But there is another choice we can make that is not based on the actions of others, but on our internal compass and the energy we want to radiate. We can choose to act with kindness, friendliness, with charity toward all regardless of the circumstances, because that is who we are.
The first choice sets up an ego-to-ego interaction, where both of us retreat to the brittle shells of the ego. Very little honest communication can happen in this exchange. In the second choice, I can realize my ego self is triggered but choose to remain centered in my higher self, where I have greater awareness and can access higher skills.
The second choice is hard for me. When I feel offended or attacked, the mother bear of my ego self rises to defend me. I want to strike out, to win the argument, to tell them off. But it’s good to recognize that when acting ego-to-ego, we are reacting out of our past conditioning and our defenses only harden. If I can pause in the moment and touch my higher self, I can have empathy for the knucklehead and create an opening where escape from our mutual conditioning is possible.
It helps me to remember that we all have wounds we are running from. What was this person’s childhood like? Where are they hurting? What is provoking their need to attack and defend? And, what wound is excited in me, that wants to retaliate? Obnoxious behavior comes from unconscious choices. I want to steer us both toward more conscious choices, and that is hard to do when I am inflamed in my old patterns of attack and defense.
I want to be seen as an angel of kindness. When someone is acting out the hurt of an old wound, I want them to have a new experience where they are not met as an ego but as a soul. When someone in pain encounters a healing presence, creative change is possible.
Today is Christmas Eve, 2024, a day we can surely envision ourselves acting with charity toward all. But what if we committed to this course not as a promise for the day, but as a way of being? How far would our energy ripple? What strings across the universe would hum with joy?
Let’s set an audacious intention together: to meet all beings with kindness, regardless of their actions, without assessing merit, like the rain that falls on fertile and fallow fields alike. Let’s aspire to be a model for what humans can be and watch for the world that kind of human can make.
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