The nature of Importance

Some of the fondest memories I have of my mid twenties were of Sunday mornings spent having breakfast in bed with my kids and then husband reading the Sunday newspaper. It was Ireland and the newspaper was called The Guardian. 

It was so full of good stuff! I love those memories. That was before it was sold to a monopoly and became filled with ads from cover to cover.  All my kids had their favorite pages, my husband used to take the sports pages, and I would get the rest. 

So, a few weeks ago when Larry said he wanted me to write something longer than a newsletter, something we could release weekly or monthly so that a person could sit down with a cup of coffee or tea, and settle for a good read, the memory came flooding back to me and I said, “absolutely! Let’s do that and see how it goes.”

We are calling it Woo For Thought. It may start with an essay, but it may develop into something much larger. We already have some folk at our platform (walkwithmenow.com) who are germinating an idea of something closer to that old fashioned Sunday paper, with cartoons for the kids, daily living columns, world news, art, photographs and interviews. But this time, all relevant to creating this brand new world we are stepping into. Wouldn’t that be amazing? I think it would be. For now, we are going to use Substack to release these more in depth reads as the platform is pretty perfect for it.

I am also thinking that I will be reading and commenting on other people’s work and teachings. This is something Larry and I do quite a lot, but the views on other people’s material rarely sees the light of day. If you have a favorite work, or article you would like me to comment on, post it here in the comments.

In my mind, I sometimes go back to those days when I was in my 20s with my pretty little children on my bed, engrossed in their pages of the newspaper. I think about those wonderful Sunday mornings, when sometimes the sun would be shining, and sometimes the strong sound of rain would be hitting the windows and the air would smell of toast, bacon, eggs, baked beans and fried tomatoes. The newspaper would end up covered in breadcrumbs and other yummies. 

And the strange thing is that none of my kids, as adults, have ever mentioned the years of beautiful Sundays, our traditional morning together in bed, reading and talking about what we had found. 

It is almost as though their higher selves didn’t allow them to keep those memories. Or perhaps for them it was not as wonderful and as important as it was for me.  Or perhaps other things became important that hog all the bandwidth.

And this is what I want to write about today, and for you to read and ponder over. 

What’s important to us? And Why? What should be important?

Love, connection, children, family, work, career, the health of those we love, of ourselves, our 

pets, accruing wonderful experiences and the wealth to make those happen, enlightenment for some, a good and rich life for most.

But where do those importances come from?

Are they ours? Are they placed there by our family? Our parents? Schooling? Society? The television? Our government? Our religions? Superstars? Musicians? Books? The Internet? Facebook? Twitter? TikTok? 

And how is it that we keep them?

That’s a lot of questions, let’s answer some of them.

Are they ours?

Absolutely. Of course they are ours. Even if they did come from somewhere else, at some point in our lives we decided to keep them. We made them ours.

I often think of a young woman I know who worked her entire life (yes, from kindergarten to 19) to get into Stanford and how all she wanted to do was to go to that University. She’s Native American, but her mother is Asian. We may think, in the USA, “oh, that’s why she wanted to go to Stanford, because Asian mom’s really push academics into their kids.” And maybe it is indeed the reason. This particular mother had two of her kids go to Stanford. The other two were not as academically inclined. 

When I think of this young woman, and feel the energy of her drive to go to Stanford, I get all the feelings of achievement, congratulations, acceptance, worthiness, meaning, making her mother happy, showing everyone that she’s top of the class. 

And I wonder to myself, when and why did those things become important to her?

Her mother aside, where did those drives come in? After all, two of her siblings, who were brought up by the same mother, didn’t have that drive, interest or importance on education. So it’s not just the parent, right?

I got an inkling when looking at the energy of it of “I am special and I am going to show the world and myself that I am special.” And when this energy was tapped into by the mother and the teachers, the path to express that specialness was… a top University.

How the rest of us feel about a good college education is not the issue here. I could go on for hours about the positives and negatives of a college education.  My parents were University professors, and I myself got myself a nice top notch degree in Dublin, Ireland. So, I can see many sides of the equation. But this essay is not about the goal or value of a University education or career.

Larry and I have been talking in our Podcast, “Driving to the Rez”, about our prime importance in life. The real reason to be here on Earth.

Did this young woman come into Earth to become a Stanford Graduate? Maybe.

Did you?

Probably not.

Did I? Definitely not. Although, academic life has always called me like a siren out at sea. Waiting for me on deadly rocks, which if I follow the song will crush my life in so many ways, it would not be at all fun and games anymore.

I was born to academics, and I swam that sea with ease and fabulous results. Yet, I knew to step away. Again, importances. The whole thing didn’t fit into my “prime importance” in life.

One might think, how does a woman in her early twenties know in a deep and solid way that following a path of academia is filled with turmoil and stops her path in life? Well, there is a skill we all have that, if we use it, can guide us in the highest possible path.

And I say “possible” because often our true path is something we have moved so far from, that to get back to it we have to take paths that are not really our highest choice, but are the only ones available to us from where we are. If we are discerning and steadfast, we can get back on our true path.

For me, in my twenties, University was a path towards delivering the message of empowerment to the masses. But staying in academia would have been a path away from delivering that message, it would have been a path of research and the reaching of a very small audience, other researchers. Highly addictive and satisfying in an egoic way, but not very effective in doing the job we came here to do.

Let’s go back to the young woman in Stanford. To find out if her whole life's drive is of true importance, she would have to test it out with the prime importance of her existence on Earth. If it supports it, then she’s set to have a very happy life. If it doesn’t, then the results for her life are not going to be pretty.

Why will it not be pretty? We may ask. And the answer is because when we base our decisions on egoic satisfaction, once those goals are achieved there is nothing left for us to build upon. She already compromised her physical health to be allowed to enter that institution. And she is in a constant state of stress. As a high-school student, whenever she received or achieved below perfect grades or results, she would be depressed for a week. Seriously upset, not the kind of upset that can be talked away.

“Driven” was the word that many adults used to describe this young woman. And pushed away all the negative signs of her decisions because of that label. But, when we are driven by our main purpose in life, there is no stress. There are only challenges that are high-frequency and inspirational. Yes, we do have to push ourselves hard sometimes, but failing our challenges in that path doesn’t throw us into the pits of depression. We get ourselves up, brush our bruised ego away and try again.

OK, so we have some data, now let’s test it on you.

Think of something major, something important in your life. The thing that you spend most of your day doing. Is it looking after your kids? Is it studying? Is it your day job? Is it a relationship of some kind?

OK, do you have your item?

Good. Now do the following exercise:

First of all, you will make a statement: 

• “My prime purpose to be here on Earth right now is to embody and express my true frequency and allow the environment to reflect it back to me in the form of experiences of that same frequency.” 

Secondly, you will ask, “Does (the major thing - the thing you spend most of your day on) experience fully reflect back to me my true frequency?”

That’s it! How does that feel to you? Is the thing you spend most of your life on reflecting back to you who and what you truly are? Or is it doing something else?

The answer to that question is a data point you can use to shape your life going forward.

I can ask myself, did my University experience reflect my true frequency? And the answer would be, “only a little bit”. I wasn’t born here on Earth to go and have a University experience. It wasn’t my path, so yeah, not so much. It didn’t take away from my path, and at the time it was a really positive thing to do. But it was not my path past the moment I graduated.

How about my Sunday morning experiences with my tiny kids? Well, those experiences are way closer to my true frequency. They are filled with expansion, joy, laughter, curiosity, connection and satisfaction. All things that are at the core of my expression. But again, they stopped as we moved countries and the passing of years separated us all into many different directions on the planet. 

Often when we find out that our importances were ingrained by others; the tv, the government, Facebook, or whatever, we think we have to drop them because they are not truly ours. But guess what, our higher self may have prompted us to accept those importances for a time. We have been receiving billions of programs from every direction in our lives. Yet we have only integrated and absorbed a handful (relatively) of them. Not all of them. 

What makes some programs, the ones that say what’s important in our lives, stick and others don’t stick? 

The balance of influence between our higher-self and our “smaller self” the identity, personality, the person we know ourselves to be. The us that has a limited awareness field.

What is our higher self? Well, it’s our expanded awareness and consciousness. But we can talk about that in another essay.

Our higher self does its best to ingrain importances that will move us forward on our soul’s and body’s chosen high-frequency path. We, however, our limited or small self, often run around like a headless chicken accepting importances that are not aligned with our higher self choices at all.

But guess what. You are reading this because you are now listening to your higher self. Congratulations, you now have a clear way to listen to what your higher self is telling you is important.   

To end this essay, I want to let you know that often we look back at our lives and think that perhaps we could have done better. We can think of choice points, important ones, that if only we could go back and change, then everything would have been more aligned in our lives.  Then, we often say something to ourselves in the nature of “it was meant to be, though.” Or, “I wouldn’t have my kids now if I had done that.” Or, “I would never have met the love of my life.” Or, “I would not be such a good person had I not had that experience.”

In other words, as we look back we can often have regrets, but then we make excuses of why it was the right choice in the first place.

I am here to tell you that it is ok to look back and realize that we made mistakes. It is ok to see that we took decisions that took us away from our prime purpose and maybe even disabled us and made us less capable as people. What is not ok is to think that these things give us the excuse not to recover, to make a change in life now that brings us back to our prime purpose path. 

It is never too late to get back to the reason we were born at this time on Earth. Literally.