My view of things is so low-level right now.

Drink water.  Eat a salad.  Do a meditation.  Attend a jiu-jitsu class.  Fold this piece of laundry. Put the dishes away. Finish this task.  Send this email.

I think I’d like to pull myself upward a bit.  Outward.  Higher-level.  This means assessing where I’m going – not that I really get to know where I’ll end up.  But more like, who do I want to be?

“Be” is my word this year.  I am taking advice from Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies, and host of the podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin.  Her and her family get together over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and choose a word to focus on for the year.  Gretchen’s word is “Delegate.”  Clearly, she likes to do everything on her own, and sometimes she can find that delegating her tasks out can help her be happier and more productive.  Her sister, Elizabeth Craft, chose the word “Growth.”

I was intimidated at first to choose a word.  My A-type, Upholder tendency (see The Four Tendencies book or Happier podcast – episodes 35, 36, 37 & 38) sounds off, “What if I choose wrong and I commit to this word and then am stuck having to fulfill this expectation I set for myself and striving for fulfilling the wrong word and doing myself a disservice and making myself even more unproductive???”  (Yes, sometimes it can be incredibly exhausting being an Upholder/A-type moron.) But, after listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast with Terry Crews… I knew what my word would be.  And it was “Be.” It comes from a book he read, The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel: “In order to ‘have’ you must ‘do,’ and in order to ‘do,’ you must ‘be.'”  So this plays out to the tune of… You want to be fit? Be fitness.  Once you take on that identity, you will do fitness and you will have the results you want.  You want to be wealthy?  Be rich. Then you will do what the rich do, and you will have wealth.  As you shift your mind into being that thing, you begin to think like they would think and you begin to do what they do and then you have what they have… Have, do, be. Ok, cool.  Got it.

“In order to ‘have’ you must ‘do,’ and in order to ‘do,’ you must ‘be.'”

So I meditated on this for a while.  I came up with a few things I wanted to be.  For example, I want to be jiu-jitsu.  When I think of it like that, it makes me go, “Okay, so what do people who ‘are’ jiu-jitsu do?  Well, they go to jiu-jitsu class.  They put in the time.  They train and they seek development.”  So, I started back up at my local MMA gym, got my boyfriend to start going again as well, and we now do jiu-jitsu.  We now are jiu-jitsu.  Of course, my A-type self also arranged for private lessons every other week or so.

However, so far I have only attempted to focus on low-level stuff (and even still, some of my “be’s” aren’t faring out as well as others – mostly because I haven’t given them the proper attention as of yet).  But, the low-level focuses: Be jiu-jitsu.  Be strong (as in weight lifting). Be 15% body fat (ehhh, this one isn’t going so hot at the moment). Be meditation (yup, yup – got a daily practice in play).

But I am now haunted with the question, “What about the bigger ‘Be’s’?” BE Love.  BE Grace. BE Honesty. BE Truth. BE Kindness. BE Integrity.

I’ve been so scared and overwhelmed about the little “be’s” – what to do, where am I going… That I have completely failed to acknowledge, that my path isn’t guaranteed. I can make plans all day long about where I want to go – as in, where my direction in life is headed.  i.e. I want to be an artist and a writer.  Something about the mountains is calling me lately.  I know that could be taken as other “be’s” (artist, writer, mountaineer), but that’s not the intent of those thoughts.  The intent is directing my path and life to an envisioned destiny. Where I truly end up?  That’s the Lord’s business.  That’s in the palm of the Universe.  I don’t know where my path will really lead and I don’t agree with 5 year plans because that shit never works out.  Ever.  Well, maybe it has for you.  But it’s been a constant “nope” in my life.

So, the Big “BE’s.”  I can only control at this time who I am. I get to decide that.  I can still attempt to show up everyday and do things to help me along my path of writing and art and seeing if the Universe wants to grace me with the life I would love to have… but until then, I have to get a little higher-level vision of my life in the type of person I want to BE.

I want to have those out of world experiences with people where they leave refreshed, comforted, encouraged or truly felt love.  I want them to leave my presence knowing they are something significant.  Something magnificent. I want to BE love.  I want to give of myself to people, because they are truly amazing.  Miracles in the flesh filled with these worlds in their hearts and minds of incredible options and capabilities and possibilities.  God, people are amazing.  I want people to walk away from an encounter with me thinking, “My god, what if I really am capable of this?”,  “What if I really do have those gifts?”, “What if I truly believed that about myself?” or, “That’s just what I needed to hear to take the step, take the leap, and go and do.” Of course, I don’t want to offer fluff.  I want to truly see them – where their potential lies, who they are and what their unique view of the world is. And then I want to scream out their goodness to them. I want to always have a heart to give, to hear. I want to be an overflowing source of goodness out to them.  I want to fight the lies that they have in their heads about themselves.  I want to let them see their strength, offer whatever tools I have to give them if I have them (and freely, without expectation that they need to use them).

I want to BE goodness. I want to hold it, have it, do it and be it.  I can’t let my guide be these little goals of “Oh, I want to live in the mountains. I want to have my own art studio and I want to make money from my writing and art sales.” Well, I can, but I can’t strong arm the universe into offering that to me.  But what I can do?  I can join the Universe in it’s beauty, kindness, goodness and abundance and dole it out to every human I come into contact with as I am able.

be. Be. BE.  All are important.  But the Bigger BE can be your true north.  It can be your compass.