A birds tale.......singing your own song

 

"You must find your own song, your very own way,

that's why, my dearest of sons, you must now fly away."

The little blue wren, swallows his fears,

kept at bay, his burgeoning tears.

 

"But where do I go, and must I go alone?

Must I find new paths, never before flown?

"Yes, my son, you have to leave this nest,

to learn, to grow, to become your very best."

 

The little blue wren, push forward his chest,

his little heart pounding, beneath his vest.

Then with a flick of his tail and courage in his eye,

he lifts his wings and takes off into the sky.

 

Years go by, no little blue wren in sight,

the father worries; did he do right?

Then early one morning, first morning of spring,

his son returns, with a new song to sing.

 

"In my pursuit to find my own song,

many are the paths that I have flown.

I have watched from above, but also down low,

 creatures called humans doing what they do."

 

"I have to admit, that I don't understand,

the duplicitous nature of mankind:

They build, they destroy, they create, they annihilate,

they love, they hate, they encourage, they berate,

they share, they hoard, they laugh, they're bored,

they hope, they despair, they break, they repair,

they kill, they save, they're cowards, they're brave,

they're compassionate, they're indifferent,

 they're intelligent, they're belligerent."

 

"And yet,

somehow they still also manage

to create music such that equals the finest of all birdsongs,

write poetry and sonnets that opens windows to their very souls,

extend gestures of love that mend broken bridges,

but strangest of all,

when faced with disaster that threatens their very existence,

they often find ways to a congruent co-existence."

 

The father looks at his son,

throws his wings around him,

holds him real close and then gently says:

"Teach me your song."

(Citizen Z)

 

 "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." (Rachel Carson) 

 

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are........

 

Looking at this painting, what do you think is on this woman's mind?

Is she sad, is she pensive, is she scheming, is she remembering something, is she listening to someone perhaps?....... the are many possible interpretations.  If I gave you more information about this woman, a background story, do you think that that would influence what you "see"?

What if I told you that:

a) she has just been told that she has breast cancer?  b) she has just been told that she is pregnant?  c) she has just been told that she's got the job  d) she is a singer and she is looking at the pianist waiting for him to finish his solo  e) she is a cashier, waiting for the customer to pay his bill  f) she is a mother watching her child at play.......

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight." (John Berger)

Our thoughts about what we see, may I suggest, affects what we think we see.

Some suggest that we understand the world around us through our own perceptions, which may lead us to ask: are our own perceptions influenced by the world around us?

If our perception of "the world" is that it's scary, uncertain, dangerous, and treacherous, ...chances are that that is what we will see. If our perception of the world is that it's interesting, exciting, full of possibilities, and mysteries, then chances are that that is what we will see.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are", said Anais Nin.

Although perhaps not always consciously, most of us try to make "sense" of the world we live in.

(Thing is, methinks, that what makes sense to one person, may not necessarily make sense to someone else. Not only does it vary from person to person, but also from culture to culture; what may be "common sense" for one culture may be "nonsensical" to another.)

Making sense of things; perhaps can be said when our perceptions line up with what we "see".

A driver weaving in and out in peak hour traffic may be perceived as engaging in "bad and dangerous driving" until we find out that the driver is trying to get to the hospital due to a life-and-death emergency. A person slumped on a park bench next to a Pub may be perceived as a drunk, although there may be many other reasons as to why he/she is slumped on the bench.

Our past experiences, our values, our cultural backgrounds, and our core beliefs influence how we perceive things, which in turn influence what we "see".

What we see is filtered through: how we think about ourselves, others, and the world, .....and how we think about ourselves, others and the world is influenced by our childhoods, cultures, value systems and experiences.

Let's take a beetroot as an example. I love beetroots, raw, grated, steamed, it doesn't matter, I love the colour, the taste, the texture. When I see a beetroot, I see a vegetable that I love to eat.

A friend of mine however, sees something totally different, he sees a vegetable that made him puke for hours and the mere sight of a beetroot makes him feel nauseous. Why? Because when he was a kid he ate a beetroot that was "off" (bad) and gave him food poisoning.

(Even a one-off experience can influence us to such an extent that we are not willing to challenge that experience to ascertain whether our experience really was a one-off or not.)

The good news is that we can change how we see things, .....by changing our perspectives.

Instead of going with "that's just the way I see it", what if we asked ourselves: how can I see this differently?

Perhaps some people are self-serving, but not all? Perhaps some people have negative intentions, but not all? What if I wait with passing judgement on someone until I know more? What if I challenged the sources of my perceptions? (Just because XX does it this way, does that necessarily mean that's the only way?) Are there benefits to be had by changing perspectives, and if so, what do I envisage them to be?

Watching the ocean roll in, one man says to the other: "Wow, look at all those beautiful waves!"

"Yeah, and I see all the jelly fish, sharks and other deadly things swimming in them", says the other man.

"Man, look at this awesome painting!" says an art lover to his friend. "Art? You call that art? I see nothing but a mess of paint on a canvas", answers the friend. "Wow, this is a wonderful home", says the woman to her friend. "Wonderful? I see a home that is highly impractical", answers the friend.

Even if there are sharks, jellyfish and other deadly things swimming in the ocean, is it not possible for the waves to still be beautiful? Even if a canvas has a mess of paint on it, is it not still possible for it to be awesome? Even if a home is impractical is it not still possible for it to be wonderful?

 

"Miracles happen everyday, change your perception of what a miracle is and you will see them all around you." (Jon Bon Jovi)

"There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence." (Deepak Chopra) 

Looking for The One?......maybe there are many The One's

 

Are you looking for the "One"?

 (With that I mean that one person that possesses all the qualities that your heart desires.)

In some cultures, marriages are arranged and whether that person is the "One" or not does not enter into the equation, the coupling is less a matter of the heart and more a matter of suitability and tradition. Which is not to say, in my view, that an arranged marriage/coupling need be any less successful, loving, or "happy" than a marriage/coupling founded on romantic love.

According to the philosopher Alain de Botton: "There is a cult of Romanticism. It started in the 18th century, and it basically told people that everybody has a soul mate, everybody has somebody who will cure them of all loneliness."

So what is a "soul mate"? From what I can gather, a soul mate is someone who makes us feel "complete", someone who "gets" us, ......someone who loves us as much as we love them.

Hmmm...not saying there is no such thing but.......this seems like a tall order for someone to fulfil.

If we are looking for example, for someone to "cure" our loneliness, are we really looking for someone to have a loving relationship with, or are we perhaps looking for someone that "makes" us feel better about ourselves? As well as the romantic notion of a soul mate, often there seem to be an underlying subtext attached to the soul mate concept: "If you love me, like I love you, then you understand me without me always having to tell you what's on my mind." Is that true however, is it reasonable to hold the expectation that loving someone automatically means "knowing" all that goes on inside that person's heart, mind, and soul, without verbal confirmations?

Do we hold the expectations that once we find The One, The One will know what our needs are without us having to verbalise exactly what those are?

Do we expect of ourselves to know what our soul mate's needs are without asking?

Before I go on, perhaps I better define my view of love:

It seems to me that we love someone when we care more about the other as he/she is, rather than who we think they should become, when we reveal ourselves honestly and vulnerably just as we offer the same for the other. We love someone when we act with patience, resilience, compassion, forgiveness, attention, and with a whole hearted commitment to their well being.

If our search for The One is primarily driven by wants, then we may have a "shopping list": "I want a kind, tall, slim, rich, fit, good-looking, sporty, smart, well-dressed, professional, etc. etc. person, because those things matter to me and so those things would have to matter for my soul mate as well."

Compiling a list when grocery shopping, or shopping for a new electronic device may be helpful, but I wonder if it's really helpful to have a "wants" list when looking for someone to share a loving relationship with, I mean, what if we meet someone who "ticks" some of the boxes but not all?

(Some suggest that we have a subconscious internal "check list" and that often when we meet someone with a similar personality to our own, we feel a connection and an ease being with them. Ticks a few of our boxes, so to speak.)

The need to belong and to love, according to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, are two of our most fundamental needs.

Matthew Lieberman writes: "60 years of attachment research attests; connection is the platform for the rest of existence, thriving and flourishing. Love and belonging are not conveniences we can live without."

There is plenty of scientific research to support this: we need to love and be loved, and to belong.

What if the notion of a soul mate is just that; a notion; what if there are any number of potential soul mates? What if a soul mate is something someone becomes through the nurturing of a relationship with love, compassion, patience, and understanding?

For any relationship to flourish, it is my belief that verbalising our needs rather than relying on "mind reading" is more helpful.

Examples of mind reading: "If you love me, then I shouldn't have to tell you what I need....If you love me, then you know what I need" .......If you love me I shouldn't have to explain"....according to Alain de Botton these expectations have their roots in our childhoods when our parents often successfully guessed what we needed without us specifying those needs........ "that sets up a dangerous precedent whereby we equate true love with someone who doesn't need to have things spelt out to them."

The drawback on relying on our loved ones guessing what our needs may be, or us guessing what their needs may be, is that it often gives rise to a lot of misunderstanding and contention.

If a "true" love is supposed to just know, then what is a "true" love? A feeling, an attitude, a choice?

Is it possible that true love begins as a feeling, develops into an attitude, and then becomes a choice?

If you are looking for The One and have a checklist, may I suggest that you throw away that list? Instead, if you meet someone you connect with, adopt an open heart and mind and communicate honestly with that person.

"Love is an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person. Love isn't just a strong feeling, it's a decision, a judgement, and a promise." (LoveQuotes)

The Heart - and why putting barbwire around it is not a good idea....

 

Metaphorically speaking, the heart is commonly used to symbolise the centre of emotion, love, affection, and romantic love. The Egyptians believed that the heart was the source of the soul, memory, emotions and personality. Aristotle said that the heart was the source of intelligence, motion, and sensation. During the Renaissance, however, that view changed and the heart became a mere organ that pumps blood.

Before the heart became a mere pump, a great number of influential and much revered and loved literature had been written, and this may help explain why the notion of the heart as a metaphor for emotions and the soul has persisted. Perhaps another contributing aspect may be that we "feel" things in the heart as in: when we get excited it beats faster.

Knowing that physically speaking the heart is a pump, does not seem to prevent us from using it metaphorically. Some examples: "the heart of the matter is..., he was heartbroken, you need to stay in touch with your heart, she was tugging at his heart strings, she was singing the song without any heart in it, put some heart into it, his heart was crushed, they acted without heart, that was a heartless action, etc.etc.".

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart". (Confucius)

I would like to hazard a suggestion that most of us have experienced what we would call a "heartbreak" of some sort. A break-up, loss, rejection, betrayal, indifference, disappointment, and so on, but no matter why, .....it hurts. In order to protect ourselves from being hurt again, many of us "padlock" our hearts, put barbwire around it, build walls, conjure up any number of different methods to keep our hearts safe from being hurt again. There can be a problem with doing so however, because preventing our hearts from being accessed from the "outside", can "harden" our hearts towards ourselves as well as others. "Well, that's it, I'm never going to open my heart to anyone again, ....in the end it just leads to pain" is an understandable response after a break-up, disappointment, and/or a rejection, problem is...... when we decide to "close" our hearts, it affects most aspects of our lives.

(As a temporary healing method, this may be helpful, but as a long term solution to get over heartbreak, in my view,....not so much.) Wrapping barbwire (metaphorically speaking) around our hearts may prevent others from trying to get close to us (and prevent us from being hurt), but the spikes cuts both ways. In our attempt to protect ourselves from pain, we inflict pain on ourselves by not allowing our hearts to expand, to reach out, and to love freely.

Life is risky business; it includes experiences of disappointment, suffering, pain, rejection, broken hearts and broken promises, etc., but it also includes experiences of; joy, fulfilment, friendship, happiness, affection, love, plus a whole lot more.

Having an "open" heart (no walls, barbwire etc.), in my view does not mean "loving" everyone and everything all the time, rather, it is an attitude of setting aside fears and/or hasty judgements, and inspite of perceived risks invest some of the treasures of the heart: compassion, understanding, tolerance, empathy, forgiveness, acceptance, and love; in others, as well as ourselves.

 

“I have worn my heart on my sleeve because it is too painful to carry it inside my chest.
When I carry it on my sleeve, it has the freedom to exist, to beat in rhythm with the Universe.
I feel like I'm more alive and yes, there are those who out of curiosity will say or do things that can cause its delicate existence to feel pain and sorrow.
I would rather deal with that, than to put it back in its little cage where it knows nothing else but the rhythm of my body and my Ego.
My heart was never meant to be part of my Ego.
My heart was meant to experience the Soul.”   (C.C. Campbell)

"There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life"........

 

I was once told by a wise man: "There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life".

When I first heard those words, a number of retorts instantly surfaced and there seemed to be no end to the "but's": "but I am not responsible for what other people say, do, or how they treat me, or what happens, etc. etc.".

Then driving home late one night from a gig (music), I suddenly got it and I

 felt as if a massive burden fell off my shoulders.

Many of us have probably had times in our lives when life seemed so complicated, and so difficult, and so confusing, and so painful, that we wished someone would just appear and rescue us from all our troubles. In the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt, we find the earliest evidence of the human quest for "salvation", to be "rescued", to be "saved". Of course, in those days, staying alive and well was far more challenging than it is for most of us today. Today we have tools that we can use to predict and analyse a great many things with, and this helps us to make and take preventative precautions, anticipate what may happen in the future theoretically and even practically, we can do modelling, we can create virtual realities, but, the biggest of all issues that every human being have to face: mortality; we all have to face on our own, and at this point in time; our own mortality is not something we can be "rescued" from.

Some of us perhaps feel inclined to want to "fix"  or "rescue" things, ourselves, other people, and situations, and some of us perhaps feel inclined to assign blame and often feel as if we are "victims".

(I am using the term "victim" here for lack of a better word. Put another way: some of us see a problem and ask ourselves what we have to do to fix it, some of us see a problem and ask others what they are going to do to fix it, although some of us perhaps swing between the two.)

Victor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and also a Holocaust survivor, writes in his book "Man's search for meaning": "Those who came to the camp and kept asking "why is this happening to me" hardly ever survived more than a few weeks,..... I realised that those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

Many of us have probably asked that question: "Why is this happening to me?" and quietly wished that someone would swoop in and rescue us. For some of us, when we were children, often our first heroes and rescuers were our parents/caregivers. When we had a bad dream, when we scrubbed our knees, when a friend let us down, when our first love dumped us, our "heroes" would come to our rescue and comfort us. If, on the other hand, we had parents/caregivers who did not come to our rescue, rather, we had to learn to fight our own battles from a very young age, and for many of us, this often forced us to find our heroes/rescuers within ourselves.

"There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life".

So what kind of responsibility am I talking about?

I guess that my interpretation is this: the actions and decisions that I make, I hold myself accountable for, as well as the outcomes that are results of those actions and decisions.

How does this relate to "freedom"?

If I am not responsible for my life, then I have very little say in what happens, things happens to me over which I have very little control; a restrained existence.

Taking ownership and responsibility not only for our actions and decisions, but also for our emotions, I believe we have the freedom to choose how we will respond.

"No, you're wrong there, people can make you angry, upset, sad and so on" you may say.

"Ofcourse I am going feel angry when someone says something insulting."

Victor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Even if someone says something insulting to us, we still have the freedom to choose how we will respond. Yesterday, as I was making an inquiry into the changes the government has made in regards to how to renew a car registration, the assistant spoke to me in shall we say, a very arrogant manner.

As I repeated my question over and over, I could feel my patience waning. ... I perhaps could say that she made me angry, but that would be incorrect, she did not make me angry, I felt angry because my expectations of how I believed she should have spoken to me was not met.

I chose to remain calm. (Then I went out into the car park and vented my anger....hehehe, no, not really)

According to the really smart people, nobody can make us feel bad, angry, sad, etc. ....how we feel is our own choice, our own responsibility.

Which in my view, is good news.

There may be times in our lives when we may need a rescuer, as in; we are flooded and sitting on the roof, a fire is raging around us, our car has broken down, we are being attacked, and so on... but as a coping strategy for life, may I suggest that embracing responsibility and ownership for our own lives, offers so much more.........