SMALL BUT SIGNIFICANT ACTS
No joke. Hip hop really did set me free!
For several years, I was married and lived with my mother in law, sharing both a home and a car with her. When I would get home from work, she would take her turn with the car, going out to run her errands for the day. But, on my way home during my hour long commute, I would tune in to 104.5 “The Beat”, a local Dallas hip hop radio station. Without even thinking, I would change the car’s radio station from 104.5 to 104.9, Dallas’s local Indian radio station, trying to give my mother in law the impression that I was listening to that.
One day, however, as I sat in the garage listening to the ending of Nas’s “If I Ruled the World”, I started to think about what changing the radio station for my mother in law really meant.
Why was I was hiding what I was listening to on the radio?
Why was I wanting to create a perception of something that wasn’t true?
It was in that exact moment that my whole world began to unravel. I spent the next hour sitting in the car, contemplating this seemingly benign action in my mother in law’s garage. I was compelled to examine my actions further.
If I was hiding something as simple my music choice from my family, what else was I subconsciously hiding?
I ended up creating a long list of other areas in my life that I was concealing or working hard to hide the truth about. The list was long, ranging from simple things such as hiding a new pair of jeans after going shopping to complex subjects such as childhood trauma. At that moment, it really did feel as if everything in my whole life had become a lie.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t overwhelmed by this truth. Instead, I embraced a surprisingly “matter of fact” mentality about the new revelations of my lifelong patterns to hide or conceal the truth. I recall feeling as if I was seeing for the first time and, now that I could finally see, torn with the internal question of how to choose.
It was then and there that I made my first conscious decision not to hide my truth. I felt empowered as I began my journey to set my soul free.
Before leaving the garage that day not only did I not change the hip hop radio station, I turned it up just a little bit louder. This small but significant act of keeping the radio station on the hip hop station and asking myself “why” became the catalyst for me to examine all of my actions. And, in doing so, I have been led down the path of seeking truth, finding myself free from hiding and free from old patterns of behavior.
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