AGENCY

Reflections On: Agency

In the theme of Foundation, I was immersing myself in the idea of letting go of tension and pressure as the organising force in my life. So if I’m no longer organising myself around tension, what do I choose to allow to rise from my heart and soul instead?

The answers brought me into the realms of agency, our next theme.

What allows me to sense into my own agency? What allows me to flex that muscle?

I began by asking what I’ve discovered actually makes me feel secure:-

Shared responsibility. Connection without engulfment. A home that suits me. Nature. Enough money. Privacy. Writing. Creative time.

So perhaps agency is partly about standing up for those things that I already know support me.

The new territory for me is learning to build a practical life around what I’ve already heard, rather than abandoning what I’ve heard whenever practical fear becomes too loud.

It’s being more discerning about what is mine, what is ours, and what I am genuinely responsible for.

Where is my energy being spent because of fear, guilt or obligation?

What am I carrying because somewhere along the way I decided I should?

And what becomes possible when I trust myself enough to stop carrying what isn’t mine?

I realise that I amplify my agency by giving my energy to what is mine to live, create and contribute.

That doesn’t mean I stop caring about other people or become completely self-contained. Shared responsibility and connection matter deeply to me.

But connection doesn’t have to mean engulfment, and responsibility doesn’t have to mean carrying everything.

My pessimistic shadow mind still wants to use the past to calculate whether the future is safe. It wants evidence. It wants to know what happened before so that it can work out what is likely to happen next.

But agency asks something different.

It doesn’t ask, “Can you prove this will work?”

It asks, “What are you going to do with what you’ve heard?”

I don’t need to know yet exactly how everything will unfold.

I can listen to what I know now and respond from there.

This journey has shown me how much of my energy has been organised around tension, anticipation and trying to prevent difficulty.

Agency feels like giving that restored energy direction.

Not controlling what happens next.

Not forcing an outcome.

But recognising that I have choices. I have preferences. I have limits. I have things that matter to me. And I have the capacity to respond.

Perhaps that’s agency for me now:

Moving from difficulty being the organising principle of my life towards the possibility of response.