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The Power of Power: The Making and Gaining of Choice
“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
–Plato
The Power of Power: The Making and Gaining of Choice
Dictionary.com defines power as the ability to do or to act, the capability one has in doing or accomplishing something.
This simple and seemingly innocuous definition does little to encapsulate the full weight and meaning of power – the power of power – in shaping who we are and defining almost every aspect of our life and identity.
Our relationship to everything – ourselves, other people, and the world – is not only shaped and defined, but very often consumed, by our understanding and feeling regarding the scope and breadth of our personal power, both private and public, or lack thereof: the power we have, the power we desire to attain, the power that other people may hold over us, or the power that we feel we may stand to lose.
This struggle to gain and maintain power – the eternal human struggle – is fundamental to understanding the nature of human experience, human life, and ultimately, human strife – and lies at the very heart of every human conflict engaged, every human war waged, and every human truce made.
(Even a perceived disempowerment or anticipated loss of possible power can spur in people an astounding and unrelenting action.)
And, because we can only see the world through the lens by which we perceive ourselves. And, because we interpret that world in our own image, it makes sense then, that in order to better understand the world around us – its measures and its parameters – we must better understand ourselves – our origins, our journey, and our personal story – who we are and how we are, what we think and why we think it, where we are going and where we have been.
Because when we understand ourselves, and feel powerful or empowered by that understanding, the universe is a place of endless joy and wonder – a literal technicolor dream of endless possibility and exploration. But, when we are disempowered or feel powerless, that same joy and wonder ceases to be real or perceptible to us.
Instead, we become trapped in an existential crisis to understand that which is largely incomprehensible – a world made callous and cruel by our own man-made human systems of inequity and inequality, propagated upon and maintained by, oftentimes, alarmingly basic and simple human corruption and shallow self-interest; horrific atrocity and inhumanity, perpetrated and advanced, ad nauseam, against our fellow human beings, our brethren; and all manner of oppression and injustice, committed in the name of the good and righteous, rationalized and justified, parsed and then re-parsed, upon the thinnest sliver of human distinction or slightest hint of difference between us.
Yet, ultimately, none of us, not a single one of us, arrived in this world without a larger context that connects us all to one another.
After all, we were all born of someone – a mother and a father, born of their mothers and their fathers before them. And, whether we delight in or despise that association, we cannot change the fact of, nor deny that, we are, all of us, imbued with a legacy and a history that can never truly be just ours alone.
The very nature of our chemistry and our biology, our DNA itself, and the physical and chemical bonds that holds us, and this universe, together, serves as a powerful testament and record of the web-of-life that envelops us all and that connects us to everything else – all living things – everything that ever was, has ever been, and that ever will be.
We are powerful simply because we are. We are powerful because we are here. Because we are alive. Today. In the present day. With no tomorrow or future guaranteed. And thus, the power of life is both imbued in and imparted by the living of life itself – the fundamental gift and burden of being.
The gift, of course, is our consciousness – our thinking and feeling sentience. But the burden, that terrible burden, is the living of life, the enduring of life, and the inherent distress and tension that comes from our being able to anticipate an ending to what seems to be, in the grand scheme of this universe and when compared to the scale of time, a shockingly brief and perplexingly insignificant existence.
Our burden in this life is the infernal struggle we must feel inside in trying to understand a world that we can never truly ever comprehend or reconcile.
Thus, the power of life is really the bearing of witness to life, and our ability to perceive it – to see it, to hear it, to smell it, to taste it, and to touch it – while we can – to feel both joy and pain, to laugh and cry, to be both happy and sad.
If our presence in this world could possibly be made powerful or significant, it may be in having the audacity to aspire to be powerful at all. And, perhaps, to endeavor, against all odds, to use our individual experiences and personal power in the service of empowering ourselves and others – to leave behind some kind of legacy, some kind impression, to make some kind of impact, and to take some kind of meaningful action that could possibly last beyond our momentary and physical selves.
Ultimately, the power we have lies in our ability to choose – this or that, right or wrong, to be or not to be – the very reality we live in – and the permissions, obligations, and freedoms, or lack thereof, that we construct for ourselves and commit to, within that reality.
Do we act? Or, do we stand still? Do we do nothing? Or, do we do something?
What choice will you make? What will you do with your power?