What is YOUR “Superpower”?
“Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese proverb
If I have a superpower, it is that I won’t quit if I can sense that there really is a payoff. It took me 23 years to earn my first black belt, because I was dealing with so much fear from past bullying. But it was worth it: the OBSTACLE became the OFFERING. Meaning that on some level I knew that if I could overcome my issues, I’d learn things that would be incredibly valuable…and ultimately valuable to others. Students and mentees. Knowledge I could integrate into characterizations in my writing. Something I could offer my children.
And as it was reasonable to assume that my fears were exacerbated by my broken home, and social issues we’ve discussed at nauseating length, IF I could function “as if” those problems hadn’t existed, I would be healing myself…for all practical purposes.
And it turned out to be true. But I’d never have known if I didn’t have this strange capacity to just keep going, and going, one step after another, after everyone else has quit, after exhaustion, after I lose enough respect for myself that there is no joy in that day’s process.
It is a commitment to things larger than myself: healing my family’s genetic line.
It is a refusal to let my opponents win: I know with a certainty that I was never supposed to get this far.
It is a clarity that I have something divine and wonderful within me. I am no less than a galaxy. I am also no more than an ant.
It is a FAITH in my companions, my essence, and the universe. I believe that the universe wouldn’t give me a goal I can hold in my heart over time, without the capacity to accomplish it.
It is GRATITUDE for all I’ve experienced and accomplished, with a humble sense of unfolding.
It is LOVE for myself, and seeing myself in all around me, knowing that people who cannot manifest this have simply been hurt. Knowing that all anyone ever wants is just to feel safe and loved.
All of this connects into my sense of self, and the threads I have to twine together every day, expressing in my working out, my family connections, and my career actions. In that order of action.
What is YOUR superpower? How do you use it? And if you don’t think you have one…what observable human characteristic, something that is possible to acquire, would solve YOUR issues? And no, “luck” ain’t it, unless you look at “luck” as an emergent quality of the MAGIC formula.
Which it is.
What is YOUR superpower?
Steve