Talk and Tales from Coco, Optimist in Charge at The Shiny Butter Blog
On BEing
It sounds trite, Reader,
The other day I posted a six-second video on Instagram and Facebook. Click on one of those and take a look. I'd like that.
I say again and again and again to BE what we want more of in the world.
To not wait for someone else to go first.
To not wait for the okay from someone or some place. To not expect a trend to start so that it's okay to go next.
I keep repeating that tired old platitude to "be the change we wish to see."
I might as well be saying to live, love, laugh.
I insist, though. I keep insisting.
Here's why
"BE what you want more of" shouldn't be one of those cute sayings repeated on end in a home decorating aisle full of plaques and pillows made in places where people get paid a tiny fraction of what they would where you and I live.
SURE! It's all the things like smile at people, be kind, be understanding, be generous. They're important! Obviously!
Yet this isn't just church lady stuff I'm talking about.
I'm not just talking about charity, and giving from our wealth and abundance.
Nor am I talking only about being a nice person.
I'm talking about walking our talk.
Erasing
If I had to name a pet peeve, it would be when people say they're all about Peace, or Love, or Compassion and Kindness and Understanding, but with zero irony they verbally, heartlessly blast some person or persons.
They identify an enemy and verbally assault, insult, and outright hate a person and whoever they associate with the person.
This is the "Them vs. Us" thing.
And it's the metaphorical rash that spreads wildly when individuals become a mob by way of the bandwagons we've joined.
Mob mentality takes over.
People we don't even know become an object of disrespect, judgment, hatred, and mistreatment verbally, energetically, and physically.
When we use our opinion about politics, society, religion, and culture to determine how to treat others—whether directly or from afar, whether individually or as a group—we might as well be in another era talking about women or Africans or Irish people or Italians or peasants.
It's the same thing.
Dehumanizing is the same thing across eras.
Dehumanizing is what we do when we have a blanket opinion about people, maybe based on a leader, maybe not.
It erases the individual. It erases human dignity. And somewhere in our mind it removes us from responsibility to the human family.
Radiating
When I say to BE what you want more of in the world, for me that means respecting the dignity of every human, whether I like them or not, whether I like their religion or not, whether I respect their politics or not, whether I want to even be around them or not, even whether I respect their opinion or not.
I can't possibly contribute to the awakening of human consciousness if I make it my business to decide who gets to be Us and who gets to be Them.
I can't contribute to the goodness I want in the world if I'm eat up with some version of hatred for any individual or group of people or both.
I'm not walking my talk when I'm blaming someone or someone-s for what's wrong in the world.
It's my deep belief that what we have right now, what we're living in, the world as it is in this moment, is all co-created by the collective that we humans are.
Greed, power, deviance, destruction, even hate itself—it all comes from within us as a collective being. It's not outside of us. We all carry this together, and it's within our power to be what we want to be, even if that means changing to our collective core.
It's my deep belief that there is no Us and Them, because we're all in this together—as if we're not?
It's my deep belief that what we're experiencing (and have always experienced) is of our own doing, and that only by UNdoing old paradigms and habits of thought will we have and be the world we say we want.
The person who will fix all that's wrong isn't coming, because they're already here.
It's you. It's me. That's it.
When YOU are what you want in the world, it begins. It exists.
The universe radiates from where you're standing.
Being
Because I want this human life on this planet to be beautifully, fully alive and real, that's what I'm aiming to BE: beautifully, fully alive and real.
And because I'm socially conditioned to not go tapping into the divine within me too much, but instead to stay within a culturally approved range of thought and opinion, I find myself afraid to say too much.
I find myself keeping my thoughts to myself. I find myself withdrawing. Shrinking a little.
Then I end up with the throw pillow version of what I really mean to say.
Which is that it is your responsibility to right what's wrong. And it's my responsibility.
It's not someone else's. There is no someone else, in fact.
There's no one else left.
When we blame someone for this mess we make ourself powerless.
When we expect someone else to take responsibility we make ourself powerless.
When we point our boney, blamey fingers at Them not Us, we make ourself powerless.
"Them" is just a facet of "Us." We are one collective, one being.
This is what I mean by BE what you want more of in the world.
We're passive and powerless until we ARE what we want in the world.
BE.
Thanks for reading today
I appreciate you very much.
Shine, my friend,
Coco
p.s. If your aim is to be beautifully, fully alive and real, and you'd like to work deeply toward this, I'd be honored to be your one-on-one life coach. Respond directly to this email, or go to LifeCoachCoco.com, and we can schedule a one-hour consultation as an initial conversation.
Important note about ai
Every email I send you (and everything I write) is a one-of-a-kind, written-by-just-me-and-my-own-brain-power original.
I do not use AI for writing.
My aim in all my writing is to be as real, human, and fully alive as possible—and to share my very real, human, fully alive experience with others.
I love me some shiny things, but with all of AI's promises and assurances, I still choose the slow, hands-on, manual, analog, self-reliant, old-school, defiantly non-plagiarized path of writing—without asking any form of AI for ideas, inspiration, or even proofreading and grammar correction (because I've discovered it's not as good or "intuitive" as it claims to be at those, either).
[Also, as of 5/6/25 all photos are my own (not stock) unless otherwise stated.]
