Owning your agency means that you take conscious responsibility for your experiences, whether they are pleasing or distressing and whether or not they seem to be of your own doing. Recognizing your emotional reactions, acknowledging habits of blame or self-pity (we all have them, even if kept silent), and owning up to the fact that you play a major role in how you internalize, process, and react to experiences all contribute to your agency responsibility. As an agent of your experiences, you may not always cause them, but you facilitate your experiential part in them. Claiming this ownership will put you more in charge of yourself and more in touch with the larger reality.

This is significant because it keeps you emotionally involved and spiritually responsible. Though you may not invoke all the outcomes in your life, it is your agency that determines what you do with them. Owning your agency expands your choices and allows you to get out from under being a victim or passive recipient.

Consider that you are the interpreter of your own experiences and what you choose to do about them. In addition to being the reader of your story, you are also the writer. You are audience and actor, always. You have a significant say in how the story unfolds and how the audience views the characters. How will your character develop?

Let It Go

What is in your heart will eventually reveal itself in your words and actions. Though we are not transparent, what’s inside manifests on the outside sooner or later, even as it eats away inside. A heart and spirit that cling to grudges, resentments, and negative emotions make for dissatisfaction, poor health, toxic relationships, and a restless alienated spirit and personality.

Just as we must excrete unnecessary physical waste from our body, we must find ways to neutralize or get rid of negative emotions. Keeping score of personalized injustices and collecting grudges and offenses are sure ways to make yourself (and others) miserable.

Letting things go does not mean that you accept everything “la-di-da.” Rather, it means that you habitually find ways to forgive and stop brooding, fulminating, resenting, or overthinking. You can hold people accountable along with releasing the emotional debt that only serves to keep you in bondage. (Consider that this may run against the grain of your assumptions or habits.)

There is abundant freedom in forgiving—which means canceling the debt: when you forgive, they no longer “owe you”—so that you are not held captive by resentment, negative dwelling, and anger.

Letting it go is a skill, a practice, and an emotional and neurological mindset. It becomes a way of life that will make you grateful that you’ve transcended the shackles of holding things against the world and the people in it.

Letting it go is a lifelong progressive process. It can be developed and enhanced through various mindfulness techniques and practices and through brain training with neurofeedback. I recognize that traumas cannot automatically be dismissed through will. However, you can take steps to heal and release yourself from adherence to the debilitating and constricting effects of trauma.

Ultimately, you must choose to let things go, even as you need help in so doing. Appeal to your creator through supplication and prayer. You’ll not be ignored.

Justly

In the Old Testament Book of Micah, the prophet wisely advises:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

Let’s examine this triumvirate:

Acting justly means following the rules—God’s rules and man’s rules (as designated by God’s authority through those he appoints). Doing what is right is a noble and pressing responsibility—one that often conflicts with our preferred self-interest and natural inclination to counter and resent authority. Most of us don’t like being told what to do, and many reflexively bristle and rebel against authority. Though we can find many psychological explanations and other justifications for complaining and resisting authority, making excuses for breaking the rules simply backfires.

Doing what is right and just requires persistent attention, honesty, self-examination, and adherence to a code of ethics. When you cut corners in this regard, you are tearing the divine and worldly fabric of cooperation, consideration for others, law, and conscience.

A respected mentor told me in my youth to “live your life as though you are in the window of Macy’s department store.”

Another wise friend recounted to me the conscience that kept him from cheating: “I may get away with it because the other person will never know—but I’ll know.”

As contemporary technology whittles away the ability to hide, our communications and actions are increasingly and widely recorded and exposed. This may be helpful in catching crime and providing safety, yet costly in personal privacy. But exposure in the world can barely represent what’s in our hearts, minds, and consciences.

Moral rectitude and right acts may start with fear of exposure, sanction, or punishment. The core of acting justly, however, emanates from another fear, awe, and respect: that toward God, fellow man, and oneself.

Human nature inherently has a conscience. However, this can be eroded through the repetition of sinful acts, justification, and desensitization. Habitually doing the right thing preserves your conscience, integrity, and the sanctity of your fellow beings.

Mercy

The words grace and mercy are often used together. They connote different aspects of compassion and consideration. Grace refers to getting or giving something that someone doesn’t deserve, whereas mercy means not giving or getting something one does deserve. Grace indicates gifts or extensive unmerited blessing.

When you receive mercy, it means you are relieved of the just consequences for your trespasses. Consider the many times you didn’t get punished or even caught for things you did wrong. The harsh words, the cut corners, the questionable acts and decisions, the speeding and illegal parking, the breaches of contract and broken promises, the aggression, the unpaid debts, the teasing or snide remarks—they are too many to count or recall for all of us.

Mercy lets us off the hook: it is forgiveness made manifest. In practical terms, you show mercy by forgiving others the adverse consequences their actions may merit. Mercy can take the form of withholding or canceling negative consequences for someone who has wronged you. More widely, being merciful is an act of your heart: you release someone from payback you may be owed. Moreover, in your heart and your mind, you give people the benefit of the doubt. This involves earnestly trying to consider the other person’s point of view, needs, and feelings, even if you disagree with them. You make an effort to “explain” their trespass in the wider context of universal selfishness and human frailty.

When you are affronted or violated, when someone cheats or disrespects you, consider that you have the power of choice in how you response, both outwardly and inwardly. In your heart and in your actions (or inactions), you may hold the person accountable while also forgiving or minimizing what you expect from him in consequence. You can do this even in the absence of direct interaction, with events that just happened or that happened long ago.

Mercy involves “making excuses” for the other guy. You justify his trespasses as not bad enough to warrant your ire or retribution. This may seem like denial, blindness, injustice, passivity, or foolishly looking the other way. However, it is a conscious decision to offer forgiveness instead of requiring payback. It is your choice, power, and goodness to favor the needier and more brotherly side of your fellow man. By showing mercy, you mitigate the impact of the offense, even if was done deliberately.

Why do this? Why give up what you are “owed?” Because it makes you more flexible and compassionate; because you are honoring the untold times you were given mercy; because you are creating the space to draw closer to people instead of more alienated and suspicious; because you are developing a more God-like character; and because it’s a powerful way to change lives for the better.

Humbly

Practicing humility is a constant and daunting challenge. Fortunately, it becomes easier with practice. Though we are told that humility is a high virtue, it goes against most of what comes naturally and instinctively: to put ourselves first. In the quest to survive, we are taught in so many ways to stand up for ourselves. Competition is a natural order and it hones and reminds us to fight and strive to get ahead. Losing or failing achievement, recognition, or material goods signifies inadequacy and insecurity. We always want to get.

Yet, each of us is very small and transient in the scheme of things—a reality reminder that’s sobering, perhaps painful, but true.

What does acting humbly mean, and why should we do so?

With humility, we recognize our finiteness and limited significance. Each of us is important to mighty God—this means you and everyone else. You matter, but in the scheme of things, you do not come first. This awareness should translate into a pervasive attitude and practice of considering others as just as important as you and putting their interests ahead of yours. (I realize you must eat and pay bills, etc., but this is doable and compatible with consideration and humility.)

You may take pride and satisfaction in your virtues and accomplishments, but with humility, you do not boast. When it comes to priority, you render yourself and your needs lesser than others. You rush to the back of the line, deferring to others in action and self-regard. When the other guy cuts in front of you, you may politely notify him, but you let him do so. Others come first.

How is it possible (or even right) to live this way?

Humility occurs in a context, a broader realization of your finiteness and the understanding that whatever you have, materially and in personal capacity and fortune, has been given to you by God. These gifts are transitory, bountiful way beyond your efforts, and ultimately temporary. Your life is wholly on loan, and any part or all of it may be taken away at any time without your consent or approval.

This humbling awareness should make you constantly grateful, careful, and respectful. Putting others first makes you gentler, calmer, and more appreciative of everything you have. This practice will most certainly improve your relationships and reputation. When you routinely put others ahead of you, this becomes more natural and you’ll receive any consideration, positive gestures, and sacrifice as gifts and extras, rather than as payment of obligation. Living humbly means living without entitlement. The results of this practice are honor, satisfaction, gratitude, contentment, peace, better relationships, and less guilt and anxiety.

Love

Love melts boundaries, those that harmfully divide and separate us from the connectedness we are meant to have with others. There are many types of love, of course, and they include attachments to passions that may be detrimental. The love I cite here is the force that unites each of us with fellow man and allows us to transcend the natural tendencies of self-interest to prevail.

Many are the contributions to experiencing and giving love. It is “lovely” when these occur with resplendence and without effort. We may experience chemical or spiritual attraction, compassion or pity, empathy, desire, or affiliation.

Ultimately, love is a choice, a willing, persistent recognition and deference to the value of others. The apostle, Paul, summarizes love magnificently:

We want and expect love to feel good; often it does. However, love goes beyond hormones and sensory rewards. Love requires duty and sacrifice. Love reminds us that we are not and cannot be alone. Love brings out the better parts of ourselves and pushes us to become more than a biological collection of feedback loops, needs, perceptions, and drives. Though love nourishes the self, it opposes selfishness.

In essence, love is caring for others, elevating them in importance and priority. Love is giving, regardless of what you get in return.

The many episodes of hurt, trauma, and disappointment damage the flow of trust and love. Perhaps you need more love than you get, and maybe your flow of love is compromised. Still, try to put your neighbor’s interests and value at least on par with yours. As you aspire to such a standard, you’ll not take pride in your magnanimity, but at least progressively recognize and diminish your own selfishness. And you’ll be rewarded.

Ten Words to Live By

Remembering these highlighted ten words can provide you with guardrails to keep you in safety and on track with habits and to destinations that make your life and the lives of those around you more enriched: