This is the 14th quote of 16 in a series called, 16 Principles of Happiness from the 16th President.
Quote #14:
“You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
Do you know your family line? Do you have someone famous perched in your family tree? Do you come from colonial stock? Did your ancestors hobnob with kings and queens or rock stars and movie stars? Do you have a rich uncle? A dad who is regularly featured on the cover of Fortune 5oo? If so, well, I guess that’s wonderful.
I have to admit to getting some satisfaction knowing that I have an ancestor who was part of the Underground Railroad in the U.S., helping to shuttle runaway slaves to northern Free states prior to the Civil War.
But here’s the question: Just how does this ancestral bit of inspiration serve me? Let me put it another way: Do my ancestors (or parent’s) greatness (or depravity, as the case may be – I mean, someone, is related to historical thugs like Stalin and Hitler) add or detract from my personal character or purpose or happiness?
I hope you don’t think so.
Genetics, family dynamics and family culture, even ethnic or national identity are not permanently defining. There is some evidence that genetics may set a range of happiness, but even if true, it doesn’t peg us at a particular level of joy. Still, family and culture are often quite branding. But here’s the point: They don’t have to be.
We allow the past to define the present by choosing to live by default.
Living by Default
When we coast through life on automatic pilot, resting on the laurels (or excusing ourselves for the ugliness) of those we’re genetically linked to, we miss opportunities to grow and develop and create a self-identity different from the one we were raised with.
Genetic association is a poor basis for constructing a life.
We also miss out on opportunities to increase the joy we can feel from a happy life that is the result of people turning off cruise control and gripping the steering wheel of their lives with both hands and giving life a little gas!
Who your grandparent was, or who your father or mother are, or who they failed to be, or how they raised you, or treated you, or that they may not have raised you at all, can have tremendous pull in our lives. Deep scars and wounds and imprints are left. Dirty parental hands leave finger prints everywhere on our hearts and minds and character. They set the stage upon which we live our lives and build our relationships and work and play and laugh and cry.
Often the image we see in the mirror when we look deeply enough is the image they cast us in. They painted the background and colored (or discolored) the glass so that we see ourselves only indistinctly.
But it doesn’t have to be this way!
Re-scripting Life
We can re-script our lives, rewrite the ending to the play, ad lib the music that is the soundtrack to our lives as it plays in the background of what we think, what we value, how we live.
Re-writing and re-scripting requires that we delve deeply into the inner workings of our hearts and souls, discovering what’s there and where it comes from. Only then can we begin the process of deeply rewriting the content of our souls so that it becomes more than surface graffiti.
Then we can overlay a new set of values, a new set of priorities, a new set of realities and interpretations on life, erasing the garbage underneath at the same time. “Overlay” is really the wrong word here, I suppose. You might call it Identity Replacement Therapy. The old way of seeing the world can be replaced by the way you choose to see it, to interpret what others say and do.
But remember, these kinds of internal replacements can take time and lots of work reprogramming how we habitually think.
The past has tremendous pull. It will take consistent practice and honest appraisal to fully rewrite what has been scripted for us.
Try this:
5 Steps to Rewriting Your Inner Dialogue
1. Write your eulogy (I first came across this concept in Stephen R. Convey’s writings). How would you want others to remember you? What traits and characteristics would you want eulogized at your funeral.
2. Rate yourself. How do you stack up to the ideal. Self awareness is important in this process.
3. Read deeply from wisdom literature. The Bible, the Torah, Buddha’s Dhammapada, the Upanishads, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and so forth. Drinking deeply from such literature can help you begin to see yourself through more spiritual or enlightened eyes.
You can then begin to awaken something inside that recognizes itself as partly divine, as part of something much larger than the flesh and the past and your history in an imperfect family. You can begin to see something very different reflecting back at you when you look deeply in the mirror. The shades and hues that discolor your self-image can start to fall away, burned off by the new light you begin to discover softly glowing somewhere inside you soul.
4. Write out a new self-identity based on what you wrote in the eulogy. See this part as a sacred ceremony of sorts, a sacrament or rite of passage. Take it seriously and think deeply about who you will be. Draw from your “eulogy.” Speak in the present tense. This is something you ARE.
5. Read it daily, hourly if needed. Remember, you are re-scripting your role, your identity, who you are and what makes you tick. That is the eternal beauty of life. We are the masters of our own souls. We choose what we will be, who we are inside, what will motivate us, what will impassion our lives.
But remember, we all fall short of our ideals. We are flawed and imperfect. It is expected that old habits will rear their ugly heads from time to time. That’s okay. Just get back up, regroup, refocus, make whatever amends need to be made, and shove off, keep going, course correct as needed.
Afterthoughts
In the end, it really doesn’t matter how noble or ignoble your ancestry was. It doesn’t matter where you come from, on what side of the tracks you were born.
You see, what your past is all about is not what life is all about. Your happiness is not tied with unbreakable bands to yesterday.
What matters, what really matters, is where you are going. I don’t care so much about where you’ve been as much as where you plan to go, who you are and who you are evolving into. Who your parents are is of little consequence. But who you choose to make yourself into, well, that is the key.
Are you sitting in stagnant waters, in the dark pools of liquid memory? Or are you swimming in the vibrant river of hope and faith and possibility? Are you actively climbing to new heights, filling life with imagination and creativity and activity? That, my friend, is the secret to a happy life.
So break the pull of yesterday by living and doing today what will create an amazing tomorrow!
I hope M2bH and this post can serve you in that process!
What Do You Think?
- If you like this post, don’t forget to share. Sharing is caring! See the social media buttons below!
- But most importantly, please share your thoughts in the comments below.
- Have you had to do much re-scripting yourself?
- What helped you rewrite your self-image?
- Share your story and the secrets you’ve discovered or the thoughts you have to living the life you were meant to live!
Click on any of the posts in this series for further reading:
- 16 Principles of Happiness from the 16th President
- We’ve Seen Lincoln on the Penny; Now let’s hear him on Happiness!
- Tearing Down and Building Up: Envy and Success
- There’s More than One Way to Live Forever … Leaving a Legacy
- 5 Enslaving Habits We Must Avoid
- 10 Practical Ways to Develop Self-mastery
- You Have To Do Your Own Growing No Matter how Tall Your Grandfather Was
- 10 Ways You Too Can Stop Being So EASILY Offended
- A House Divided is Happiness Diminished
Photo by Pixabay
“But it doesn’t have to be this way!” That is incredibly powerful and true. When we own our past and take responsibility for wounds and how they impact our life we can create a beautiful life.
Hi Wendy!
Thank you so much for your comments, kind words, and insight. I like that phrase you used: “Own our pasts and take responsibility for our wounds.” Those words seem so difficult for so many people to accept. We want to point fingers and blame and find the culprit, the person or persons who “did this to me!” who “made” me mad or sad or took this or that away from me.
And yet such thinking drives us deeper into the mud of anger and despondency and despair. Negative thoughts pile up on negative emotions and we end up suffocating under the weight.
You are so right that we need to own our pasts and take responsibility for our wounds. We thereby are able to summon something inside to recognize the power we have to choose, to be, to become, to learn, to grow, and to rise above our pain and suffering, even transform our suffering into something profoundly meaningful, the results of which can be that beautiful life you mentioned.
I just saw you are also a high school teacher. That is great!! Thank you for the motivation to get moving today 🙂 We are going on vacation tomorrow and my brain is already there, lol! Have a great holiday weekend!
Have a wonderful holiday weekend yourself! And enjoy the vacation — so important for a balanced life — I need to go on them more often!
Hey Ken, how are you? Thought I’d formally introduce myself 😉
That’s a great quote from Lincoln to discuss, and it’s something that I feel is very important in defining who we are as individuals. Because what we all are, at our core, is individuals.
We’re influenced by our family, especially parents, as we grow, and this is inevitable in our shaping of our personalities. But once we reach a stage in our lives where we realise what has been happening, what this shaping has done to us, we then have a choice – we can either continue the way we’ve been unconsciously living, or we can make a change and live how we want to live, regardless of our parent’s, or family’s influences.
Fascinating stuff Ken 🙂
Thank you so much for stopping by, Stuart. It’s really good to see you here. And thanks for the kind words.
Lincoln really is a treasure trove of great quotables. I have two more to go in this somewhat disjointed series, 16 Principles of Happiness from the 16th President.
You are absolutely right about the role our families play in our lives and about the choice we have once we hit that stage of understanding, as you said.
I like to think of it in terms of the proverbial Book of Me. My family wrote or co-wrote the first several chapters. But at some point, we pick up the pen and do more and more of the writing until it’s all in our own hand.
Some people continue to write into those chapters the same theme that was set in the first several. But we don’t have to.
We even have the editing authority to go back and add interpretive commentary in the margins of the chapters our parents wrote, redefining what everything they wrote means. The most exciting part, though, is the authorship and creative license we have over the rest of the book, taking our life story in whatever new and meaningful directions we choose to take it.
It helpes me to look at it like that, anyway.
Stuart, thanks for the added value you brought to the post. I especialkly liked the idea of “unconsciously living.” So true! That’s part of what we try to do, I guess: wake up the living-dead!
See you soon on your awesome site!
Excellent 5 steps. I have tried them all, but in other form 🙂
While I believe step 5 is an excellent one, I also have experienced this is not practical if you want to do this for a long time. I’m doing this for almost 3 years and I don’t believe you can read your new script hourly or daily for longer than 1 month. In the beginning, it is fun, but after 3 weeks it becomes work. For me there was a serious need of more organized structured, and it only works if there is enough detail, regular update ( 3-6 monthly) and a regular time in my schedule – in the morning and sometimes in the evening to do it.
It is work and requires perseverance, but the fruits of this work are very, very, very powerful.
Thanks for sharing
Awesome insight. Marc! Thanks for the clarification. I left a lot unsaid on #5 with the words, “as needed.” You improved and clarified what needed to be added and I thank you for that. I like the idea of needing more detail to have longer term relevance.
Good to see you again, buddy!
You have made these themes very simple, clear and practical. Great and again good feedback from the others.
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