The average adult makes 35,000 conscious decisions a day. That’s A LOT of responsibility. I never really thought of how many daily decisions we make as adults until mid 2018. In fact, for the better part of 33 years I thought control and decision making was the true testament of manhood. If I was able to make sound and good decisions I could control my universe, my happiness, even my love life. But that is so abundantly untrue! True manhood is not about decision making and certainly not about control. It is about abundant guidance, unencumbered freedom, but above all else, true manhood is about discernment.
As the divine feminine has intuition: the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. The divine masculine has discernment: perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding. If we are to break these 2 things down they are simply put, mission and vision. Masculinity is about mission while femininity is about vision. Take any story of a great man in religious folklore and you will generally find two things, the masculine’s mission and at some point, a feminine’s vision to bring it to fruition. From the story of Aminah, the Prophet Muhammad’s mother in Islam, to the Virgin Mary in Christian text, as far back as Ausar and Auset, and even in many African traditional belief systems such as the Ifa/Yoruba culture, the balance and necessity of both masculine and feminine energy is apparent.
Of course “his”story plays a major factor in masculine and feminine get boxed into gender roles, gender norms and hierarchies. However, I choose to define the masculine and feminine for myself. As my philosophy, beliefs and communities need only collectively believe for truth to be. What I mean by this is that my personal discernment teaches me more than any history book, learned educator or religious doctrine ever could. MY discernment does not need validation or praise. It need only guide me to being my best self and doing my best good while on this earth. This for me, is fundamentally where good decision making comes from. Specifically my ability to make decisions as a black man.
The black man, in this lifetime has adopted far more than he has created. He has built, constructed and developed based on OPP, other people’s perceptions. As such, many of the norms we find as positive or negative are only such because someone, somewhere, once said so. Think about it, of those 35,000 decisions made daily, how many do you think are influenced by people and not by a higher power? For a black man in America, completely separated from his roots, his lineages legacy, his purpose as defined by God an no one else, it’s likely very few of those 35,000 decisions are God lead. While this is no excuse for the shortcomings or mistakes the black man has made and or not accepted responsibility for. This is simply a statement of facts as I see them. For me, this leaves me with two choices: find bliss in ignorance and work towards OPP’s achievement principals or, fight tooth and nail for, something else. Something else I may never actually find, but am fully OK dying for. “Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die” always reminds me to follow God’s voice and my discernment more than anything else. I’m willing to die to figure this thing out. I’m willing to die to have my seed’s minds be free’er than my own. I'm willing to die, for defining my own damn sense of self. What else am I really here for otherwise?
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