It Isn’t Your Job To Play Someone Else’s God

If you’ve never asked yourself the following question(s), now may be a pretty solid time to do so:

How much of who I am, what I do, and what I choose is based on what I believe is “supposed to be”? What I think “society” expects? What I think my family expects? Therefore, what I have to do to feel accepted by people who should inherently accept me unconditionally? How much of what I do is only because “that’s just what you do”? 

In trusting that the overarching, withstanding powers-that-be are all-knowing, benevolent, and righteous, we’ve tuned out of hearing ourselves.

Or, more accurately, we are anxious and stressed and lost because we do hear ourselves, but we refuse to align our actions with what we really want.

So while we enforce these rules on ourselves, ones that other people made up and we just had to blindly adopt because we were never told to think otherwise, we end up policing others into doing the same. And in an effort to remain part of the group, to be safely accepted (we’re survivalist animals, after all) we allow those pressures to perpetuate our disingenuous beliefs.

It’s not your job to decide whether or not someone else is worthy of your respect.

It is not your job to decide what’s right for someone else, and it’s not your job to judge them based on what you perceive to be wrong for your experience. You can only choose whether or not you are going to allow that presence and energy in your life. And we allow mostly by dwelling.

How often do we sit and toil through all the things that the people we know are doing wrong, how often do we decide they’re on the wrong path, even though for all we know, the right path is the hard one; the difficult choices the most important. We spend too much time deciding whether or not we’re going to respect the people we inherently don’t harmonize with, and not enough time knowing the grace of walking away.

There are few people you ever really get to genuinely know. Most people are lost in a shuffle of actions and intentions that are not their own. They’re shut off because they’re scared and they’re closed because they’re vulnerable. People act for reasons you cannot fathom; not unless you were in that exact situation, in those same circumstances, having the background and mind and body and spirit of that very person.

It’s not your job to assume things of others based on what you can only truly understand of yourself.

The things that resonate most strongly with you about others are what you identify most in yourself. Everything you feel and see and understand and contemplate and judge is a direct reflection of you. Your entire reality is an illusion of which you are the centre of control. Everything is a matter of your projections.

It is not your job to speak outwardly, negatively, disagreeably, with the things that seem to you to be “wrong.” It is your job to question your beliefs again and again until you find the soundest, firmest, strongest compulsions within you, and then from those, you derive love and logic and understanding and you grow those into forces that encourage other people to do the same.

It is not your job to follow the tide. It’s your job to float on it, not swim with it. You don’t need to go to school, there are dozens of ways to get educated. Most people will tell you: the majority of their college classes could have been accomplished as easily by them going to their local library and reading. Not to get a passing grade. But to understand. You don’t have to get married, you don’t have to have children. You don’t have to settle. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to read. You don’t have to do anything you don’t feel compelled to.

It is not your job to try to change that which you dislike about the world. It’s your job to change what you dislike about yourself. Fighting the bad makes it bigger.

You don’t owe yourself to the things you left behind. You don’t have to worry about the people who don’t worry about you. You don’t have to be fighting an upward battle to have a life that has meaning. You aren’t worthier for having suffered.

It is not your job to try to save the world without saving yourself first. There is nothing you can actively change but who you are. There is no more important or noble task than to do so.

Because everything else is a deflection from it.