Exercising FREE WILL

Survival is a discipline of attitude, knowledge, skills and actions; survival is not mandatory!

For starters this is a test to check and see if I can post to my blog

via email. If it doesn’t work you will never know, if you are reading

this post then I have succeeded.

I think that occasionally the people in my office think that I am

stark raving mad. I have an impulsive personality because I trained

my brain to be non confirmative in a sense, to cope with all the

conformity necessary to function in the military. Just as an example:

when I came out of my morning meeting this morning and headed back to

my workspace I punted my coffee cup across the parking lot. To the

casual onlooker this looks like a tantrum or the act of an insane

person, mostly because I was giggling when I did it. The reason that

I did it is not because the meeting was bad. It actually had nothing

to do with the meeting at all. I did it because I have free will and

I like to exercise it occasionally by doing things that are not

normally done. Does this make me crazy? Maybe. We are so accustomed

as a society to doing the Politically Correct (PC) thing and to

actually care what people think. The problem is that political

correctness is not one of my core values. Honor, Courage, and

Commitment are my core values or Corps Values if you prefer. PC is

contrary to those values in almost every way.

Honor, how can you be true to what is right if you are concerned about

what everyone else thinks? It is not possible. It is even harder to

be true to yourself if you put everyone’s perception above your own

self awareness. Honor lies in what is right, not what is popular or

socially acceptable.

Courage, There are two types of courage, Moral and Physical. You need

only look at the majority of “career politicians” to prove that

political correctness is contrary to courage.

Commitment, yea right, unless you are committed to being on the fence

this is also a no brainer.

So, I exercise my free will often but I have put certain rules on

myself for these exercises.

1. I will try not to destroy anything that wasn’t already going to be

destroyed or thrown out.

2. I will not hurt anyone in this practice.

3. I will try not to create so much extra work that it interferes with

my normal routine.

So if what I do follows these rules what is there to lose. Have you

ever thrown out an old TV or table and just for the hell of it,

smashed it to pieces? I look for opportunities to do stuff like that.

Have you ever walked by a mud puddle in the rain and just decided to

stop and splash around a little? I do it as often as I can. What is

the cost if I am already wet and stuck in the rain? I might as well

have some fun. And it teaches you to not worry so much about the

small things and those things that you cannot control. It will give

you more attention to focus on the stuff that you actually have a

degree of control over.

Although it fits the model of my rules, how does kicking a coffee cup

across the lot help me? It trains the brain to follow MY rules not

the norms of society. I set my values, I forge my own path. Look at

Ben Franklin and many others like him through the history of the

planet. How many things did he invent that “could not be done?” I am

willing to bet that he, and men like him constantly did unexpected

eccentric things that made “normal people” scratch their heads. I’m

not saying that I’m the next Ben Franklin. I’m no smarter than the

next guy, I just have an attitude and a guiding set of principles that

don’t allow me to accept the impossible as impossible. This may one

day be the end of me but so far I am having a pretty good ride. NM

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