No no and no. Mostly having to tell that to myself. A key stickie that sits near my computer is: “How does this activity get me closer to my target?” I find it harder to tell myself no, at this stage in life, than to tell others. Perhaps a sign of some dysfunction? LOL.
Hi John, I am glad you can relate to what I was trying to express in the post. It is a struggle to attempt to have our own actions match up to our most important goals and dreams isn’t it?
I applaud your sticky note selection! Thanks for reading the piece and for your comment.
Georgia O’Keefe’s message is extremely important; it gets down to the soul of our identity. I found a provocative (and closely connected) term in Sam Keen’s “The Passionate Life.” His term: the “Sacred No.”
Keen writes, “Without the sacred ‘no,’ the power to negate, the courage to oppose, the audacity to cut ourselves off from the past, there would be no freedom, no spirit, no love. The urge that moves us toward at/one/ment with matrix and patrix will always be in tension with the impulse that moves us toward in/dividuation. To gain our freedom, we must us the knife of de/cision. We come to a fork in the road, either/or. We must choose.”
I love this term. We utter our Sacred No’s when we are two years old and begin to rebel against our parents. Achilles uttered it in The Iliad when Agamemnon took his concubine Briseis away from him. His Sacred No was a refusal to fight. He refused because Agamemnon had pulled rank on him and had not respected his dignity. The Sacred No is the fundamental principle that lies underneath the concept of nonviolent resistance. It is a tool of communication that is available to the smallest and the weakest of us, every day of our lives.
Steve this is such a moving an informative response to my post. It’s possibly better and deeper than the post itself, lol!
I have been thinking about Keen’s “Sacred No,” since I read your comment and I agree, our biggest personal no’s may seem crazy for us to utter, at the moment we speak them, but in retrospect they turn out to be these rare, positive, liminal moments where we take the road less traveled. And that road allows us to go in the direction of a more personally meaningful life. ( That’s been my experience at least.) It’s cool to zoom out too and see the big picture “Sacred No’s” in the form of social movements taking place in the U.S. and other countries at this time, and in other eras of history as well.
Thanks for taking the time to respond and voice your take.