We’re voting right now in Canada, but aside from going to polls, I’ve truly already voted. So did you. We vote every day with our focus, our attention, and our choice of how to view, experience, and swim through our time/space experience.

We vote every time we make a decision on what to pay attention to.

When abdicating our responsibility as a co-creator of this reality, we let go of your control. There is always some type of control. If we abdicate it, someone else picks it up. That can hardly be blamed on them. They’re just picking up what we didn’t want, what we weren’t valuing or using. We can’t blame them for that; they’re just filling a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum.

If we want to be angry at someone about losing our control, we only need to look in the mirror.

I’ve been teaching students for a decade that every morning is a choice, a vote of sorts if you will, between proactive and reactive, offense and defence, striking first or blocking first. Striking first is how we control the dance. When we’re striking first we set the tone for the dance. We wake up early, make a list of things that we are grateful for, review it, feel it, then review our list of big hairy audacious goals, visualize them with clarity, then sketch out our day and how we want it to unfold, then visualize all the optimal outcomes we expect. The outcomes visualized are filled with joy, laughter, ease, synchronistic coincidences that make us fall in love with the co-creative process all over again. After that, a brief meditation puts the body at ease and into proper alignment. Then we go and allow the day to unfold. Sometimes it unfolds flawlessly, sometimes it works well but less than perfect, and sometimes we get punched in the nose by life and it doesn’t work as well as we hoped. This doesn’t mean you stop getting in the ring. It just means you learn the dance a little bit better for next time. The point is the day is unfolding according to us. When you do get punched in the nose, your responses are different. They are creative, synchronistic, and they teach you something, and the effects of that punching are much easier to shake off. This is the art of striking first.

Sometimes it works perfectly, and sometimes we learn.

On the other side of this vote, we have being reactive. This is where we vote to get up in the morning and let someone else tell us how to feel. Before using our creative mind, we tune in to someone else’s story. The story may tell us to be afraid. It tells us to be afraid of things beyond our control. It further convinces us to abdicate control, and that abdicating control is safe and secure. It reminds us of where the conflicts are and who we should be angry at. This sets our focus for the day. We are much less likely to be creative on days like this. We are simply going out and reacting to whatever the five senses pick up. We experience only what physical reality has beat upon our five senses every minute. Like a monkey, we swing from one reaction to the next, hoping to avoid danger or pain. Nothing unfolds the way we expect because we set no clear expectation; we can only anticipate based on monotonous patterns. This is what we have been voting for. The more often we vote for this co-creative abdication by giving it our focus, the more power we give it, and the more influence it gains. It then influences our decisions. It influences where we spend our dollars, which expands this mental vote to the outer material world and solidifies it into the physical that we all experience together.

Every day we make this vote, and for the last little while, we may have been voting wrong.

By all means, we can go and vote in our federal government’s election, that’s fun, and just fine. It seems kind of silly and superfluous when you consider the real vote that we make every day.

I usually vote daily for the first proactive example, but over the last year, I’ve been voting for the latter example too often; abdicating responsibility. I’m changing that as of right now.

I am hereby changing my vote.

I hope you will join me.

Red Sash Renegade