An Absolutely Brilliant Way to Be Yourself

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I have been preaching the be yourself sermon for eons, but I realized that I haven’t been practicing it very much, and we all know how successful preachers who don’t practice what they preach are.

So I decided to do a meditation (write my Morning Pages) on what being me really means.

It went something like writing a page of Gibberish, and then BAM!

What am I supposed to do now?

Nothing! The question is what do you WANT to do, Rasheed? Not what you think you can, not what you should, not what is good for everyone else according to everyone else, but what YOU want to do?

That followed by some more Gibberish, interrupted by a phone call, and shopping for a replacement phone, since the screen on my current one went dead, followed by grocery shopping and mandatory email reading. Which led to reading blogs and Facebook comments and yada yada yada, you know the routine.

But somewhere along the way I picked up a gem and decided to write it promenantly on the white board in front of me to remind myself of it often. It was an affirmation: “I now receive large sums of money just being myself.”

Went back to reading emails and blogs came across this gem by Naomi Dunford, which reminded me I needed to reset my goals in an unstupid way.

So there I was, meditating again about what do I want to do.

However, this time I got the answer which I believe know to be the right answer, and the right answer is…

Absolutely Nothing

So, there I was, doing absolutely nothing, sitting in front of my computer, when that pesky voice from within interrupted me again, “What do you mean nothing? You gotta be doing something. Even sitting in front of the computer doing nothing is actually doing something.”

Don’t you just hate it, when you know that someone is right, even if that someone happens to be the real you?

So, I was faced with the dilemma of defining what it means to be doing absolutely nothing. Fortunately, that turned out to be easier than I thought. It simply means you decide what you want to be doing as you go. There are no routines, no boundaries, no oughtas, no shouldas, just do what you feel like doing in the moment. Live life in the NOW!

Whoa! That is profound. I am not used to coming up with profound ideas on my own. I guess I better get used to it, since I have made a commitment to be doing Absolutely Nothing from here on, like I am doing right now.

And when I am done doing this absolutely nothing, I’ll find some other absolutely nothing to do… or not.