“My greatest enemy is my inner me”
~ Wasulu Muhammad Jaco (Lupe Fiasco)
Everyone has heard the phrase “pick your battles”. It’s a cliche with SERIOUS emphasis towards self care and valuing your time spent. But we rarely say “why am I even in this battle to begin with”? Why was THIS the battle I chose to be in a position to choose? I know, it sounds way to Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole deep but, it’s actually not. Society has largely tooled us to ask horrible questions based on ego, vanity, and validation. Often, we don’t even realize we are asking completely sub par questions as this is why we receive sub par answers back from the universe. I’ve viciously struggled with this myself: “What will make you happy?” “How can I make more money”, “when will I be better at intimacy and relationships?”, all questions that once meant the world to me that I look back on and SMDH with a vengeance. What I changed to ask better questions wasn’t my wants but what I fed them. My Pops once told me “a want, is nothing more than an idea that you feed” feed it right and the right things will happen. So, during a spiritual initiation that largely constituted a year of solitude, I had TONS of time to focus on my wants and what I was feeding them. This Iyaworaje (year in white) of enlightenment became more so a year of removing entitlement. My concepts for how others were “supposed” to behave was hurting me more than it was changing them. I learned that I should never even worry about what others are suppose to be doing, and that I have more than enough responsibilities within my journey as it is. As the great philosophical historian Sean Corey Carter (Jay Z) once said, “what you eat, don’t make me shit".
When my spiritual initiation year was up I had made some seriously hard decisions. I ended a marriage, and shutdown the business I thought was my purpose in life, to name a few. I also threw away my many of my concepts of manhood, fatherhood, happiness, love, and pain. To sum it up I was stripped down to the raw, essential, most vulnerable me possible. I was necessity, nothing more, nothing less. What's more, I was greater than I had ever been in my life! I was 33 years of experiences, failures and lessons at day 1 of finally accepting and experiencing who I am when there’s nothing left to judge,blame, rebel against, or fight for. I could literally chose to do/be (or not do/be) anything and everything as I was in full surrender to the universal principle of, “come what may”. It was an incredible moment. June 24, 2018 is the day I first introduced me, to myself. It was at this same moment I realized that I had been fighting battles most of my adult life that I had poorly chosen (see the above concepts I threw away…). I told myself I would conquer my fears first, so that I would have battle experience in the fights to be the provider, protector, and healer I had now defined myself to be. This of course came with a heavy burden as I realized (for the first time) that everything had a toll to be paid. A give, in order to get. And more so, that pain, is a necessity and not a choice.
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