On Power, Human Nature, and the Freedom to Choose
In November 1922, after years of searching Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries in history. Objects preserved for more than three thousand years offered a glimpse into a civilization whose understanding of life, death, and eternity differed profoundly from our own.
But discovering something and understanding it are two entirely different things.
Archaeology is, after all, an exercise in interpretation. We uncover what remains, examine the evidence, and attempt to reconstruct a story whose authors are no longer available for questioning.
And sometimes, despite our most careful efforts, pieces remain missing.
I’ve come to think that examining our own lives isn’t terribly different.
We spend years excavating our histories. We study the relationships that shaped us, the beliefs we inherited, the patterns we repeated, and the decisions whose consequences we’re still trying to understand.
We search for explanations, hoping that understanding the past will somehow illuminate the future.
But eventually, we have to put down the shovel.
Because no amount of excavation can tell us what to do next.
The Stories We’ve Been Telling
When I began writing this series on karma, I wanted to explore a question that has fascinated me for most of my life: How much of our existence is determined by forces beyond our control, and how much remains ours to decide?
In Part I, The Stories We Inherit, I explored that question through astrology. Does our birth chart reveal a life already written in the stars, or does it describe the tendencies, challenges, and possibilities we bring into this world?
In Part II, The Lessons We Repeat, I examined the patterns we develop, the behaviors we revisit, and our curious tendency to repeat experiences even when we understand their consequences.
And in Part III, Love Is Not the Same as Attachment, I considered the difference between loving someone and remaining attached to them, particularly our desire to preserve relationships, explanations, and endings that may no longer belong to us.
Which brings me to the final question.
What do we actually do with everything we’ve learned?
Because understanding why we behave a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll behave differently.
Sometimes we know exactly what we’re doing.
We simply do it anyway.
The Scorpion and the Frog
There’s an old fable about a scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river.
The frog is understandably reluctant. What if the scorpion stings him?
The scorpion points out that such an action would be irrational. If the frog dies, they both drown.
Satisfied by this reasoning, the frog agrees.
Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him.
As they begin to sink, the frog asks why.
“It’s my nature,” the scorpion replies.
I’ve always loved this fable, perhaps because I’m a Scorpio and have a certain appreciation for the darker implications of our reputation.
But the older I get, the more interesting I find the scorpion’s predicament.
He understands the consequences. He’s already articulated them himself. Yet reason proves insufficient to overcome the compulsion.
And compulsion, I think, is the important word.
This isn’t necessarily about pleasure or gratification. Some drives feel almost primal, powerful enough to override our judgment even when we recognize the cost.
Sometimes we’re entirely willing to accept those consequences.
We’ll deal with them tomorrow. Perhaps we’ll exercise better judgment next time.
Or, if we’re particularly optimistic about reincarnation, in the next lifetime.
The trouble, of course, is that tomorrow has a remarkable tendency to become today.
And there we are again, halfway across the river.
The Ki-Rin and the Scorpion
There’s another fable I find deliciously unsettling, The Ki-Rin and the Scorpion.
In the story, a young Ki-Rin has been warned by her sister to beware of the dangerous scorpion. But she’s far more interested in playing than paying attention to warnings about creatures she has never encountered.
While wandering through a field, she meets an unfamiliar creature who introduces himself as Truth.
Delighted to have made his acquaintance, she asks whether he knows anything about the dangerous scorpion she’s been warned to avoid.
Of course he does.
In fact, Truth offers to help her find him.
As they travel together, he describes the scorpion’s sharp pincers, many legs, and poisonous tail.
Occasionally, she notices that her companion possesses the characteristics he’s describing. Yet rather than recognizing the danger, she marvels at the resemblance.
How fortunate, she concludes, that she’s encountered Truth instead of the scorpion.
And the scorpion says nothing to correct her.
Now, there’s a rather magnificent piece of deception.
The scorpion never needs to overpower the Ki-Rin. He simply allows her distractions and assumptions to do much of his work for him.
And here’s what makes the story particularly unsettling.
The truth isn’t necessarily hidden from her. She’s simply not paying enough attention to recognize it.
She’s been warned. She’s been presented with evidence. She even notices the similarities.
But she’s distracted, and the reassuring explanation she’s accepted is easier to maintain than the uncomfortable possibility standing directly in front of her.
And isn’t that a wonderfully human contradiction?
Sometimes we don’t fail to recognize the truth because it’s been carefully concealed.
Sometimes we’re simply too preoccupied with something else to look closely enough.
But perhaps there’s something even more unsettling about this story.
We like to believe that people eventually learn their lessons. That repeated disappointment will produce insight, that painful consequences will inspire reflection, and that sooner or later, the truth will become impossible to ignore.
I’m not entirely convinced.
Some people spend their lives repeating the same patterns, convinced that this time the outcome will be different. They change the circumstances, the people, perhaps even the explanation, without ever examining the choices that keep bringing them back to familiar territory.
And sometimes the truth isn’t merely standing in front of them.
It’s following them.
Walking alongside them. Describing itself in extraordinary detail. Practically introducing itself by name.
And still, they don’t recognize it.
Perhaps that’s because recognizing the truth would require something more uncomfortable than simply acknowledging it.
It would require changing what they do next.
But here’s where I have to be careful. It’s remarkably easy to recognize someone else’s patterns while remaining blissfully oblivious to our own.
Perhaps we’re all the Ki-Rin occasionally, happily playing in the field while the scorpion walks beside us.
The question isn’t whether the truth eventually catches up with us.
It’s whether we’re willing to recognize it when it does.
And there’s another distinction worth examining.
In the first fable, the scorpion seems unable to resist his own nature, even at the cost of his life.
In the second, he’s patient, calculating, and perfectly capable of allowing someone else’s assumptions to do his work for him.
One acts against reason.
The other appears to use reason in service of his darker intentions.
Is the second scorpion any more enlightened?
Or has he simply become more sophisticated in expressing the same nature?
There’s an enormous difference between mastering our impulses and becoming extraordinarily skilled at serving them.
And that, unfortunately, brings me to a rather personal confession.
Before Love. Before Money. Give Me Power.
I’ve decided I need a T-shirt that says, “Before love. Before money. Give me power.”
Preferably in black.
I’m a Scorpio, after all.
And while that might sound like the personal manifesto of a particularly ambitious supervillain, I’ve always found the subject of power fascinating.
I appreciate restraint. But I also appreciate precision.
The perfectly placed observation. The final word delivered at precisely the right moment. Something almost surgical in its execution.
There’s a certain satisfaction in allowing someone to believe they’ve won, only to discover that the story isn’t quite finished.
And I have very little appreciation for what I would call performative aggression.
The shouting. The posturing. The barroom theatrics of someone determined to demonstrate to everyone within earshot just how dangerous they can be.
There’s something terribly unappealing about needing an audience for one’s anger.
Perhaps my education and a lifetime of reading have influenced my preference for strategy over spectacle.
I’ve always been fascinated by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the teachings attributed to Lao Tzu. Both offer perspectives on strength that have very little to do with making the most noise.
Sun Tzu understood that winning a hundred battles wasn’t necessarily the highest achievement. The greater accomplishment was overcoming opposition without fighting at all.
Lao Tzu explored the paradox of softness overcoming hardness, of yielding without necessarily surrendering.
And somewhere between those two philosophies sits a Scorpio who still occasionally enjoys a perfectly executed mic drop.
But here’s an uncomfortable thought.
Is my preference for a carefully placed final word actually any more enlightened than someone else’s desire to make a public spectacle?
Perhaps we’re simply approaching the same need from different directions.
One person wants the room to witness their strength. Another wants a particular individual to recognize that they’ve been outmaneuvered.
Both may be seeking validation through someone else’s perception.
And perhaps the difference isn’t wisdom at all.
Perhaps it’s merely style.
That’s a rather inconvenient realization for someone who prides herself on excellent timing.
A Little Mud Never Hurt Anyone
Scorpio has a reputation for darkness, and frankly, I think we’ve earned some of it.
As an astrological archetype, Scorpio is fascinated by the underside of human nature. The uncomfortable truths. The hidden motives. The desires people would rather not acknowledge, even to themselves.
I’ve never been particularly interested in a version of enlightenment that requires pretending those darker aspects of ourselves don’t exist.
We can wallow in the mud without living in it.
Carl Jung devoted considerable attention to what he called the shadow: those aspects of ourselves that remain outside our conscious self-image, often because we’ve learned to regard them as unacceptable.
Anger. Jealousy. Ambition. The desire for control. The occasional delicious fantasy of delivering a perfectly executed verbal assassination.
I think Jung would have found Scorpio season rather entertaining.
But shadow integration isn’t permission to behave destructively. It’s an invitation to recognize what exists within us rather than allowing it to operate outside our awareness.
And there’s an important distinction between accepting our darker impulses and surrendering to them.
We can acknowledge that revenge occasionally appeals to us without pretending it’s an especially enlightened quality.
We can appreciate the precision of a well-placed sting while recognizing that its consequences may extend well beyond the moment.
We can even admit that sometimes we might choose the sting anyway.
That doesn’t necessarily make it wise.
It does make the choice ours, along with whatever follows.
And perhaps that’s where the real question begins.
Are we exercising power over our nature, or have we simply become more sophisticated in the ways we surrender to it?
The Endgame
But what, exactly, is our endgame?
Are we here to endlessly confront the same aspects of our nature, hopefully exercising a little more wisdom each time?
Do we take the lessons we’ve learned into the next lifetime, only to begin again with a slightly better understanding of ourselves?
And if so, how many trips around the wheel does it take?
In Buddhism, samsara describes the continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, conditioned by ignorance, craving, and attachment. The ultimate objective isn’t simply to accumulate better karma and secure a more favorable existence next time around.
It’s liberation from the cycle itself.
Nirvana.
And I find that possibility extraordinary.
Because perhaps the ultimate purpose of these lessons isn’t simply to become better at navigating our circumstances. Perhaps it’s to reach a point where we’re no longer compelled to recreate them.
Consider our scorpion.
Does he spend lifetime after lifetime learning to exercise a little more restraint? Does he eventually develop the patience to wait until the frog reaches the opposite shore before delivering his sting?
Or does he finally recognize that his need to sting is the very thing keeping him trapped?
And what happens when he no longer needs the satisfaction of having the last word?
Has he surrendered his nature, or has he finally transcended the part of it that held him captive?
I don’t pretend to know.
But I do think the more difficult question is how we learn to relinquish something that still provides us with a powerful sense of satisfaction.
Because we become conditioned by the rewards of our own behavior.
Anger can feel powerful. Retaliation can feel like justice. Vindication can provide a sense of closure, even when it changes absolutely nothing.
And sometimes we’re so invested in winning that we never stop to question the nature of the prize.
What if the thing we believe we’re winning isn’t worth having?
What if our desire to deliver the final blow is simply another way of remaining attached to the very situation we’re trying to escape?
And what if refusing to participate isn’t surrender at all?
Perhaps one of the most difficult lessons is learning to recognize a different kind of satisfaction.
Not the exhilaration of getting even, but the freedom of no longer needing to.
The Audience We Cannot Control
But perhaps the most difficult part of walking away isn’t surrendering the satisfaction of the fight.
Perhaps it’s surrendering the audience.
There’s something undeniably gratifying about the perfectly placed final word. The moment when the person who believed they’d won realizes they haven’t.
And when we refuse to engage, we lose control over that recognition.
Our silence might be mistaken for weakness. Our departure might be interpreted as defeat. Someone may walk away convinced that they’ve won a battle we consciously chose not to fight.
And perhaps that’s what makes nonattachment so extraordinarily difficult.
Not simply relinquishing our desire for a particular outcome, but relinquishing our desire to control how other people understand our choices.
How much of our behavior is shaped by our need to be seen as strong, intelligent, capable, or victorious?
How often do we deliver the perfect comeback not because anything meaningful will change, but because we cannot bear the thought of someone believing they’ve gotten the better of us?
And as long as we require someone else’s acknowledgment of our victory, haven’t we surrendered some measure of our power to them?
Perhaps that’s the distinction I’ve been searching for.
There’s power in restraint.
There’s power in precision.
But perhaps there’s another kind of power that deserves considerably more attention.
The power to let someone misunderstand our silence.
To allow them their interpretation without feeling obligated to correct it.
To recognize that their perception of our strength neither creates nor diminishes it.
And perhaps that’s the hardest lesson of all.
Because when we deliver the final word, someone else knows we’ve won.
When we walk away, sometimes we’re the only ones who know we never entered the competition.
And we have to be willing to let that be enough.
From the Chariot to Strength
In tarot, my personal year card for 2026 is the Chariot.
I’ve found that rather fitting.
The Chariot represents direction, determination, and the challenge of bringing opposing forces into alignment.
It’s not necessarily about eliminating contradictions. It’s about learning to move forward while holding them.
We can be compassionate and angry.
Confident and uncertain.
Capable of extraordinary tenderness and an equally extraordinary desire to have the last word.
The question is who’s holding the reins.
In 2027, my year card becomes Strength.
And I find that transition particularly meaningful.
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, Strength depicts a woman calmly holding the jaws of a lion.
She doesn’t appear to be conquering the animal through violence.
There is something gentle, almost intimate, about the encounter.
The lion hasn’t disappeared. His nature hasn’t been erased.
But neither is he in command.
I like that image because it suggests that mastery doesn’t necessarily require domination.
Sometimes the most profound expression of power is the ability to remain present with an impulse without immediately satisfying it.
Other times, it may involve acting decisively, establishing a boundary, or accepting that a consequence is necessary.
Wisdom doesn’t always look like silence.
And restraint isn’t automatically virtuous simply because we’ve chosen not to act.
We can avoid difficult conversations just as easily as we can rush into unnecessary confrontations.
Perhaps the real question is whether our choices arise from discernment or compulsion.
Whether we’re holding the reins or merely convincing ourselves that we are.
The Hand That Holds the Pen
I’ve spent much of this year reconsidering what it means to have power over my own life.
And I’ve come to believe that personal agency is considerably more complicated than the reassuring instruction to simply let go.
Letting go of what?
The person?
The expectation?
The need for an explanation?
Or the desire to determine how the story ends?
Those aren’t necessarily the same things.
There are circumstances in which walking away is an extraordinary act of courage.
There are others in which remaining, speaking up, demanding accountability, or refusing to surrender something important requires just as much.
And sometimes we discover that what we’ve mistaken for power is actually our inability to relinquish control.
I don’t think there’s a universal answer.
Nor do I think spiritual growth requires us to become endlessly agreeable, perpetually forgiving, or indifferent to injustice.
I believe in consequences.
I believe in boundaries.
I believe in compassion.
And, apparently, I still have a soft spot for a well-timed mic drop.
The challenge is learning which part of myself deserves the final say.
Perhaps that’s what I’ve been trying to understand throughout these four essays.
We inherit stories, but we aren’t obligated to preserve every one of them.
We develop patterns, but we aren’t necessarily condemned to repeat them.
We love people, but that doesn’t give us authority over their choices.
And we can be profoundly influenced by our histories without surrendering authorship of our futures.
Most importantly, we can recognize that our lives need not be dictated by the expectations, judgments, and perceptions of other people.
Because as long as our decisions are governed by how others perceive us, we remain attached to something beyond our control.
Their approval.
Their recognition.
Their understanding of our intentions.
And sometimes, their acknowledgment that they’ve lost.
But what happens when we no longer need any of those things?
What happens when we can allow someone else to misunderstand our story without feeling compelled to rewrite it for them?
Perhaps that’s where genuine freedom begins.
Not because we’ve finally won every argument or learned how to deliver the perfect ending.
But because we’ve stopped allowing other people to determine what winning means.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck explored the Hebrew word timshel, which he rendered as “thou mayest.”
Not thou shalt.
Not thou must.
Thou mayest.
The possibility of choice.
Even when the choice is difficult.
Even when we know what we ought to do and find ourselves wanting something entirely different.
Even when the scorpion is halfway across the river.
Perhaps karma isn’t about discovering why our stories intersected, but understanding what we choose to write after they diverge.
And perhaps the most meaningful thing we can learn from excavating our past isn’t that every mystery has an answer.
Some don’t.
There will always be things we don’t understand.
People whose motives remain unclear.
Relationships whose endings refuse to make sense.
And chapters we’d write differently if given another opportunity.
But the past isn’t the only story available to us.
The next page is still blank.
And whether we choose to write with compassion, courage, restraint, or the occasional flourish of Scorpio ink, the responsibility remains ours.
Perhaps enlightenment isn’t about becoming someone who no longer possesses a stinger.
Perhaps it’s about reaching a point where we no longer need to prove that we do.
And while I may still have a few lifetimes of work ahead of me, there’s something rather liberating about that possibility.
Of course, I still want the T-shirt.
I’m pursuing enlightenment, not a complete personality overhaul.
The hand that holds the pen was ours all along.
Thou mayest.