The things you do in life are largely determined by who you decide to be

By David McElroy · March 2, 2012

It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart Wednesday night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

My point here isn’t to pat myself on the back for being such a good boy for putting my cart away. That’s not the point. I felt compelled to put it up, so it wasn’t really a conscious decision that night to “be good.” The point is that I acted in the way I did because of what I had decided — a long time ago — to be.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it can be good when you like the behavior that flows from being the person you’ve decided to be. But it can be a bad thing when you don’t like the behavior you exhibit because of what you’ve decided you are.

We think of ourselves making decisions every day about what to do — who to associate with, what to do with our lives, what to do with our time and what to act like around other people. But I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I think we instead decide what we are — we decide what to be — and that automatically takes us down the path toward the things we do.

The best news is that if you don’t like your life — if you don’t like the things you’re doing and the results you’re getting — you have the power to change that, by changing your conscious (and subconscious) decisions about who you are.

Sometimes, these decisions are small things, such as my decision that I’m not the sort of person who leaves a shopping car in the wrong place in a parking lot. (It left me soaking wet. I didn’t care for that part.) Other times, those decisions can be much bigger ones. I’ve had opportunities in politics sometimes to make money in ways that I didn’t feel were right, so I’ve turned them down — leaving me with a bit less money, but feeling better about myself.

Still other times, you’re faced with making bigger decisions, even when you don’t want to make them, simply because you realize that your prior decisions are no longer applicable or no longer working. For instance, I’ve talked before about why I had to change my political beliefs a couple of times as I came to understand things I hadn’t understood before. That wasn’t pleasant. One of the most painful changes for me was to decide about 12 years ago to divorce. My ex-wife and I had known for about three years that we didn’t belong together, but we both had made conscious decisions years before that we didn’t believe in divorce for ourselves. We weren’t going to be divorced people. We weren’t going to disappoint other people. So we stayed together for three unhappy years before finally accepting that we had to consciously change our belief and accept something we hadn’t wanted to accept. In the short run, it was painful. In the long run, it was better for both of us. (And letting her go allowed her to be in a very happy marriage and have a son that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.)

As you watch yourself go through life, ask whether you’re happy with what you’re doing. Do you like the things that are going on? If not, you have the power to change them, but not until you figure out what it is that you’ve decided to be that has led you to do what you’re doing.

I’m sure I looked pretty silly Wednesday night as I pushed that empty cart through the pouring rain. It’s OK, though, because I like being the guy who puts his cart up every time. I might have to change some of what I am along the way — in order to get results I like better in other areas — but I think I’m going to keep the one about the cart, even if it does mean I get soaked every now and then as a result.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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