You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘learning’ tag.
Is it honorable to feel pain?
I know, big question for an opening.
Somehow, though, I don’t feel like the preamble..
Not now, not tonight.
Is there a reward for coming home to an empty flat?
Sitting. Hurting. Calling no one, escaping nowhere..
no tv, no fantasy, no novel.. no sex, no drugs, no food.
Just alone. Just pain.
Is there a truth here? Is this all of us? All humanity?
Am I experiencing all it is to be truly human?
Am I really.. (you say I am).. but am I really, really, more broken than most?
Or just more aware?
or neither?
(or delusional.. or wanting..)
I find no peace here, no honesty.
No joy or salvation in the truth. Just pain.
Hence the question..
Is it honorable to feel pain?
*Socrates
I write to all entrepreneurs; all creators, builders, visionaries and makers of things, a note of warning you will not heed.
No one,
… no one …
can make you believe: how much it will cost, how long it will take and how audaciously difficult and achingly lonely the path you are taking is going to be.
No one can make you believe you’ll willingly hold your head under the guillotine, time and over again; or the single minded determinism with which you’ll pursue your long term goals to all but the cataclysmic collapse of your short term welfare.
No one can tell you that having risked all you had, all you have found, and all you think you might be able to get – you’ll begin to risk that which is not yours.
No one can make you believe the strength you’ll find or the odd places you will find it, how often you can lose it, stress-test it to breaking point and (seemingly irreparable) find it intact again when you need it most.
No one can explain that not only will this occur, but you’ll come to enjoy it, rely upon it, almost. How expert you’ll become in tying a neat tourniquet around each wounding disappointment and riding right back into battle as if unscathed.
Oh, don’t take my word for it of course.
Plenty of others will tell you too, and many more qualified than I. God knows, it was told to me enough times by the life-weathered and wryly amused, those who’s arrogance had eroded down to a blunt bedrock of skill and experience.
Even if you could know, if there was some way to see, you’d go ahead, you’d do it anyway. No sooner than you had would you begin to give the cautions you couldn’t perceive to others you know will not heed them.
Keats had it right, and I know it well and through enough.
It’s likely to be the next credence I get needle-inked into my skin:
“Nothing becomes real until it is experienced, a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it.”
This morning I wrote a post over at my ‘work blog’ on the perceptions we have of our selves, skills and roles and the huge impact these have on the wider world; specifically via the manner in which we accordingly interact (or don’t interact) with opportunities in life. All this, of course, got me thinking about the manner in which I go about (re)defining myself.
Thoughts, it turns out, that were to continue as I then met up with a friend of a friend with whom i’d been trying to arrange a meeting for some time, a particularly inspiring yet disillusioned gentleman, we spent all afternoon discussing how divorced the Human condition has become from nature, and how a holistic approach rooted in self understanding and worth is required even to begin to improve this. At this point I couldn’t help but be reminded of a line in the poem “Our Greatest Fear” by Marianne Williamson
“Your playing small does not serve the world.”
I then saw this on Twitter and couldn’t help but love the headline..
Save the Planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven’t learned how to care for one another… We’re going to save the F*ckin’ Planet?
..which, though humorous and flippant in style, only stood to further reinforce these ideas solidifying in my mind.
All of this today, harshly juxtaposed with a very quiet evening alone, is culminating in an increasingly strong realisation that my initial responsibility to the wider world is to become “okay”. Not amazing. Not great. Not, as some have already said, “formidable”, “inspiring” or any of these flattering and memorable praises. Seemingly counterintuitive, perhaps, in the face of my arguments towards building greater self worth in order to ‘serve the world’ but these statements, pleasing though they are, are meaningless as they were directed not to the ‘genuine me’ but to my ‘presented self’ while there is currently an altogether too vast distinction between those things. So to become ‘okay’ simply as me should be my first step. To not require a ‘presented self’, but simply to ‘present myself‘ because, to borrow another couplet from Marianne Williamson
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Be gentle first with yourself – if you wish to be gentle with others.
– Lama Yeshe
Feeling like the last 24 hours were an exercise in mercilessness: throwing myself in at the deep end of a series of pools of unknown magnitude. The good news is I realised that I could still swim. However, I could probably have found that same information out by simply climbing into the pool down the steps.
And though I think it was an interesting and worthwhile (if not, indeed, vital) exercise, from tomorrow I’ll be looking for middle ground. Which is tough as I have never yet felt comfortable within the grey scale.
So I have been mulling over the concept of neither wanting and pursuing everything my heart desires until I get it and more, nor restricting, shutting down, closing off and stepping away entirely but rather accepting with grace what is given and is available..
My conclusion?
I should tread more softly and allow myself more time, as anything I construct this quickly will fall just as fast. I have years to build a foundation strong enough to sustain all that I can be and I owe this time to myself. I am my own worst enemy. Constantly pushing. Never good enough. Expectations which, in the rare case they are not altogether unachievable, are certainly unsustainable.
And what hypocrisy as I urge and advise you of your beauty and accept you as a whole. Those things you regard as flaws sitting as neatly in my idea of you as those things you pride yourself upon. No value attribution. Just you.
…and now, to find ‘just me’.
It can be difficult to accept others and to accept ourselves.
“I should be better. I should be something different. I should have more.”
All of this is conception; it’s all mental fabrication. It’s just the mind churning up “shoulds,” “ought tos,” and “supposed tos.” All this is conceptual rubbish, and yet we believe it. Part of the solution is to recognize that these thoughts are conceptual rubbish and not reality; this gives us the mental space not to believe them.
When we stop believing them, it becomes much easier to accept what we are at any given moment, knowing we will change in the next moment. We’ll be able to accept what others are in one moment, knowing that they will be different in the next moment..
– Thubten Chodron
I read a wonderful blog post this week which tapped into a collection of thoughts and feelings I have been semi-consciously turning over in my mind for some time now. In many ways I am glad I found this post before I tried to verbalise the feeling myself, as I shouldn’t have managed it with close to the honesty and grace that Sasha Dichter has.
Simple, beautiful, a spot on ‘must read’ … please do follow the link above..
It is very easy for me to lose a coherent sense of “presented self” at the best of times. I am known to adopt the intonation, gesticulation and vocabulary of people I have been spending time with which, though intrinsically changing nothing about who I am and what I believe, can create a fractured picture for the outside world.
Particularly at this point in my life where I am generally confused, tumultuously restless, dissatisfied with my choices and fundaments of myself as a human being with a role to play in this world, I have noticeably been feeling myself ‘playing at’ different roles and doing what Sasha describes thus: “we play, we practice, we experiment…and in so doing we discover the ground we would like to stake out for ourselves”
In actual fact I found this post after a day long seminar taken by a speaker whom I both respect and admire deeply as well as, possibly arrogantly, see something of a kinship with. Hence it is perhaps fairly easy to see how this came at the right time for me, and is therefore worthy of sharing in my opinion.
I got caught at a particularly difficult moment in my life but perhaps there was a reason for that. Maybe it took a disarming instance of vulnerability for me to see with any clarity how I needed to reshape my life in order to continue to grow.
I have decided not to seek to learn but simply to be more open to what the world is trying to teach me. It isn’t always the case that I know where the shadows in my understanding lie, it is certainly not always true that the lessons will come in the order i expect, and no matter what Einstein theorised it isn’t a fact that time will prevent everything happening all at once.
But for now we see through a glass, darkly ... 