You have three great powers:
- the power to ask dangerous questions, the answers to which may only be findable if you leave the comfortable space you’re in
- the power to declare what is so (it is a horrible rainy day; it is just the kind of day I need to finish writing this article; it is a perfect day)
- and finally, the power to choose, not just from the choices that lie before you, but also from choices that you did not know about, or that others did not tell you about. You can choose off the menu entirely. That means, for example, you can choose beyond just following or not following an order. You can choose to take a stand for a culture where the order would not be necessary. You can choose that there are no orders, only proposals. You can choose “octopus-kerflooey!”. You can choose anything at all, but importantly, in order for this to be your power, your choice must be made for no reason at all.
I recently watched The Greatest Showman where the main character, P.T. Barnum (of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame) is utterly unaware that he has no choice in what he does. His every action is driven by the compulsive need to prove himself better than his humble beginnings. When his wife presses him about this, he turns to pinning the origin of his need on his daughters. All of my hunger for a better, more opulent life, is for them so no one will ever look down on them. It is a good reason. It might even be partially true. And, it gives him no actual power. He makes things move in the world, building a popular circus, and it is not him that is powerful. It is his reason.
It does not matter how authentic the reason is. He could admit “This is all so I can feed my never ending insecurities about growing up poor” and it wouldn’t change the fact that the reason has the power. The reason is the engine and he is the piston. His never ending insecurity manifests through the world through his particular way.
Becoming a Being happens when you choose for no reason. That is because there is no hiding. There is only what you do.
In 1883, a decade or so after P.T. Barnum founded the Barnum and Bailey Circus, another show started sweeping the country. This was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, started by Buffalo Bill, a former US Army scout who had returned from war with the Native Americans. To join his circus, Buffalo Bill scored a most unlikely collaborator – the man he had fought against nine years prior, the great Lakota leader Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull joined the show and toured the US cities. He performed in front of large crowds that romanticized him, including in front of President Grant, where he is purported to have cursed in his native tongue “You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts.” (No amount of legal justification or reasoning by the government has ever, will ever, or can ever change the unjust consequences that American governments stripped Native Americans of their homes and livelihoods time and time again. On a moral level, or a dignity level, the legal reasoning doesn’t really matter.)
After four months, Sitting Bull left the show and returned home. Soon, the Ghost Dance movement, where Native Americans danced for days to experience a trance like state before collapsing, and which was prophesied would end the invasion of white people if enough people danced, began to spread. The US Army believed Sitting Bull to be instigating this movement, and made plans to arrest him.
An Indian policeman who was part of the arresting party, Red Tomahawk, ended up shooting and killing Sitting Bull.
I was a Sergeant of the Indian Police. Sitting Bull was my friend. I killed him like this…
We opened the door and went in. Sitting Bull was there and he got awake then. He had been singing and dancing and was tired and sleepy, I guess. We told him to go with us. I had hold of his left arm and I had my gun in my hand, too. I told him not to make cry for his people. We would kill him first. We got outside and he made a loud cry as his son came around the corner of the house, and then the hostiles came. His son, Crow Foot, came and was killed right away. He went down these tracks and died. (Pointed to the trail depicted on the map). I shot Sitting Bull in the left side. He fell with his face down. I shot him again in the back of the neck then. He was dead then…
I was under orders so I killed him. He should not have hollered.
It is terrifying to know there are people who operate with that little agency. I was under orders so I killed him. Red Tomahawk cannot deal with what he has done because he has not separated himself from his reasons. It is tragic that such a noble man as Sitting Bull died this way, at the hands of a man with no authority, in a space with no responsibility.
Sitting Bull knew how to move, and he knew how to choose. He did not choose with haste or because he saw only the options in front of him. He choose with purpose. He created his own choices. When his people were fighting the construction of a railroad across their land, Sitting Bull, rather than running or shooting back at the US Army force led by General George Custer,1 walked within shooting range, sat down on the ground, pulled his pipe out, cleaned it, and began smoking.
Sitting Bull left us with this quote:
Inside of me, there are two dogs. One is mean and evil, and the other is good, and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, “The one I feed the most.”
Who has the power? It is Sitting Bull, not the dogs. It is you, not your reasons.
I leave you with a dare, to experiment with this power by choosing someone in your life whom you have every reason not to love. Write your reasons down. Read them twice. Decide that your authority does not lie on the page or with them or with the past or with whatever they did. That does not mean that you forget the past or pretend what happened did not happen. But it means that you decide that love comes from you. Begin to love them. It does not need to look any way. You will know when you are choosing how your life goes, not your reasons.
- A few years later, it was against that same General Custer that Sitting Bull prophesied he would win a great victory. He saw soldiers “falling from the sky like grasshoppers, with their hats falling off.” Acting on this, he then won a complete victory against them at The Battle of the Little Big Horn. ↩︎