“Being the Board” is an invaluable lesson. It means you must be accountable for your place in the world, not as victim, but realize your place in it, as a whole, as life moves around you. Zander also talks about relationships and blame, “when I blame you, I seek to establish that I’m in the right” and he goes on further to explain that one loses their own power when you seek to blame. I have found this to be very accurate. When you point fingers at others, you take the responsibility off of yourself, thus shutting the door to a deeper self-awareness. If however, you take responsibility for looking at things objectively, or perhaps from another person’s perspective, you might learn a valuable insight about yourself and how you interact in the world.
Zander also discusses the uselessness of anger, and blame for things beyond our control. This has been a valuable lesson for me on my sometimes very traffic lased commute in and out of NYC daily. I used to be enraged by the traffic, and now I’ve let go of any of that anger realizing I’m wasting my precious energy on something completely out of my hands. Another incredible insight, “grace comes from owning the risks we take in a world by and large immune to our control.” My risk in the situation is knowing that NYC traffic is intense, yet I choose to commute in it daily.
The hard part for most of us is that we do have choice in our lives. Many of us don't think about it because we don't want to have to think about it. Life does require some level of risk, but most don't think about it for a wide variety of reasons. But when we feel stuck or when we're overwhelmed by tragedy, it may be that the only way forward is to take claim of our lives, and take back our power of choice. It's not about what might be fair or assigning responsibility, it's about integrating the new chapters and continuing the story. Even just sitting in traffic can be seen as a complete waste of time or an opportunity to listen to a good audio book, or bug a long-distant friend on the phone. :-)
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