Love, love, love

I've been thinking again about why I started writing this blog, what I was hoping to achieve. I wanted to record attempts to love people, everyone, anyone, and what happened on those moments when I managed it. I wanted to grow bigger, lose the ego, become tough at loving even when disappointed. 

Here I am a quarter of the year already gone. It isn't imperative this fitted neatly into 12 months, but it helps me to have a frame and 'a year of living in love with the world' sounded more manageable than a lifetime. At least to start with.

Loving people, strangers, colleagues, neighbours, friends and family is both incredibly difficult and easy. I am finding it much easier to love strangers, because strangers lack the detail of closeup, the nitty gritty of familiarity which can erode kindness quicker than almost anything. It's relatively easy to walk around thinking 'I love you' as people walk past in the street, but much more difficult to think lovingly towards someone you see and know and talk to and depend on and are bound to day in day out. I am astonished at the rewards of being more loving to people at work. Sometimes these people irritate or mystify me or make my life harder or make me feel bad, but that is the human condition not them as individuals. I am trying and trying and sometimes it works to stop and think before reacting, to love them or more precisely to try to "see" them, to understand what they might mean or want or be afraid of in that moment they seem to be difficult, and work has become a great deal more pleasant as a result.

I don't think I'm any closer to reaching a new plateau. More often it's as if I'm in a maze -- and isn't life a maze really, when it all comes down, just a series of paths taken or not, the walls sometimes closing in and sometimes opening out into clearings, the sense of there being a destination but having no idea what or where it is, of running, walking, crawling along paths which feel sometimes like someone else's paths, of decisions, of backtracking, of looking upwards and seeing the sky and hoping you'll find the point of it all before the sky becomes dark.

That sounds as if life is lived in a panic or a daze and that's not quite right either. I dont feel panicked or frightened or defeated, but I do wonder if I'm doing it right.

I was reading Maria Popova's blog (which is great, by the way) on love:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/28/love-2-0-barbara-fredrickson/

- this post is about a book by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become (UK; public library).

and on that page, this leapt out at me:

I hope this comes out big enough to read...but if it doesn't, here it is transcribed: 

First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant — it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.

And it's true love in all its forms is akin to an ever-shifting, never fixed weather pattern, the winds of time, storms, rain, the warmth of sun. Also, that love bestows transcendence, a sense of largesse. It is hard, it is without significant milestones to help light the way or signpost through the maze, but it is what I'm aiming for.

 

 

Tiny beautiful things

I have been reading the beautiful, loving, deep, thoughtful, charming, moving and sometimes funny book by Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things. 

It's one of those all-too-rare highlights. For me, the only other authors I feel similarly about, who resonate as deeply, are Khaled Hosseini and Simon Van Booy. I must read more to find more. 

Like people or places which "get" you, and which you feel you "get" right back, this book is not everyone's cup of tea, but she writes so beautifully and, I'm surprised how unusual this is, about pain and love and loss and longing and all those wonderful ghastly human things we all endure or pine for or try to catch or avoid in a way which honours us.

I long to be as wise and strong and true as this woman and to use that wisdom and strength and truth for some good purpose.

Is it so very hard to be this honest, as honest as she is, about life and what it is to be human? 

Is it so very hard to be useful to others in the way she is? 

And is it better to just get on with life privately and productively than to pick at the edges of people and tell them what you see underneath? 

All I know - and reading her book makes it somehow concrete rather than a mere dream or fancy - is I want to do what she does. 

Becoming the un-disfigured self

I used to have this clear picture of what I thought I was. A disfigured tree, blown sideways by the winds over time but growing still, bent but breathing. 

I suppose I thought being tortured was romantic (only because poets and musicians can seem tortured, so it was all vanity, embarrassingly. All the same, I looked upon the tree as a fair analogy of my view on life and accepted it was me, my truth.)

But in the past 18 months much has changed and I no longer feel comfortable trapped inside a shape imposed by outside forces. I want to find my own shape. 

Today I was talking with a wise and funny Irishwoman who said: "maybe it's time you saw things how you were born to see them." Which I thought was a beautiful expression. Imagine just for a moment what that would look like, seeing things the way you alone were born to see them, your own original, valuable, necessary-to-the-rest-of-us "take" on life.

 

For many years, too many, my "take" on life was the view from someone bent sideways and low. I have learned in the past 18 months that kindness and compassion to others (and to ourselves) is far more beautiful.

If I was a tree, I would now rather look like this:-

 

Winter

The days and weeks tick by. Sometimes I feel I am on watch in a cold, grey place surrounded by deep mists and everlasting twilight, as if I have to remain ever-alert, ready to act, hour after hour. I am growing lazy, all this standing and walking, a rifle or cupid's arrow slung over my shoulder, my feet cold, my mind at once swimming with ideas, hopes, possibilities and empty as a painter's canvas, white, virgin, masquerading as a white on white heavily misted interpretation of the woman I want to be or think I am. The sort of painting if hung in a gallery would not be to everyone's taste, but one needs just one heart, one pair of eyes to see, to love, not thousands.

So I am on watch in a place where nothing happens, an apparently plain canvas with nothing to say, no artfulness.

This is not good.

Should I try and leave the frame, go in search of adventures, life? And how? I am praying for colour to return and, at the same time, I am content, excited, hopeful, alive. I am thankful, grateful, amazed. 

Meditation

I am trying to learn to mediate. I want to do it regularly. Sometimes when I use the app I have downloaded for it (love the sound of the woman's voice) I feel as if I'm in a soup with bits in it. As if I'm in a blender on slow speed, bits of me, my worries, fears, neuroses, concerns, all swimming round and round in a cloudy soup and I feel mildly panicked. Then I remember or am shown or am drawn to a stillness in the centre, a place of utter peace and stillness. It feels like the beginning and the end, the source of love, light, all that is real and, unlike the soup, it is solid and light and I am it and in it and I know it to be true. Is this meditation? Am I supposed to do more with this? Go further? I remember "your job is to stand, simply stand" as the storms go past. So I try to not try, to strive, but simply (complicatedly) to just be. 

This is happiness. Yes, I want for a companion, a dearest to be around, laughing, a best friend. But despite their absence, I am the happiest I have ever been in my warm, white little house with a fire laid for later, a candle burning, a 7-mile walk in my loins, dinner ready. There is a pulse underlying the bricks, the blood, the stuff of "real" life. I am blissed out here at home, on my own, sated, full to the brim with thanks and things I love, people I love. This is happiness, this ordinary pleasant whiteness. 

Something deep in me has been seeking this pale peace forever. And here it is. I reach out into time, past reality, through the ages and rock and my soul kisses yours. I love you long time. 

I keep failing but apparently that's normal

My attempt to love others and be more open minded and positive and less judgmental would so far earn me, at best, a poor C grade.

Probably not even that. 

And that'd be on a good day.

In the last few weeks I have made some new friends and won over a few colleagues I'd never spoken to and who I had assumed a long time ago I didn't like and would never like. One is an older woman, she is mumsy and purses her lips as if judging everyone's round her. I couldn't stand her and would avoid her face, her looming sort of judgement. If she walked into a room I would turn away. 

The other day I was forced to sit next to her in a training session. Turns out she is quite funny and quick to learn things. She was good to work with. She might be judgemental, I'm not sure about that, but she wasn't at all dull in the same way nobody is dull once you get close enough to see them. 

It's both harder and easier to re-wire my thinking than I'd expected. I am enjoying trying to do it, but I'm far from making the changes I'd assumed would be simple.

But (and there's a saying that it's only what comes after the 'but' which counts) I recently met a man who told me how hard he had found studying for his PhD alongside working full time and he said: 'over and over again I failed, it felt I'd never get to the end, never achieve what I set out to, that I'd been kidding myself.' 

He persevered and three years later did earn his degree, though of the initial cohort of 14 candidates only seven lasted the distance and graduated alongside him. He told me that when he kept hitting walls and thought it was too hard, he learned that intelligence wasn't enough. He needed to think differently. So he learned resilience.

It's not very sexy, but resilience seems to be the golden ticket to lots of things in life.

I may have earned a lukewarm pass in my project so far (and that is flattering myself) but I'm going to try to keep going. 

Dictionary dot com says this about it:

re·sil·ience

  [ri-zil-yuhns, -zil-ee-uhns] 

noun

1.

the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc.,after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.

2.

ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, orthe like; buoyancy.

Origin: 
1620–30;  < Latin resili ( ēns ), present participle of resilīre  to springback, rebound.

To me, 'Return to the original form' after being messed  around by life, by prejudices, by mistakes, is deeply comforting. 

I borrowed the picture from http://pattischmidtcoaching.com/articles/bending-with-the-wind/

Cliche cliche cliche

Cliches are cliches for good reason - pride comes before a fall is the cliche which came and snapped at my feet his week. Here's me thinking I'm on top of life, following bliss, learning to be kind, rising above petty nonsense, blah..... And then crash. The details of what happens aren't what matter, all the matters is I hit a wall. I must have let pride sneak in. 

Here’s some things I’ve learned...

1.       If I start to see someone as a potential new mate then the old flame I never quite got over will almost inevitably reappear on the scene as if by magic.

2.       If I ever think even for a moment that I am somehow better than anyone or above a certain situation, I will be taken down, usually by a small but embarrassing ‘fail’ in front of an audience.

3.       I don’t have to tell someone I’m becoming more interested in them or that I’m not.

All of these would seem normal lessons if I was 13 or 14. Not quite so great given I am a great deal older than that and either haven’t learned these things til now or, more likely did know them once, then forgot. Duh.

I started this blog as a bid to record attempts and failures to stretch my boundaries, to become bigger and better in life, in everything. I want to transcend the stupidest time-wastingly desperately tedious nonsense such as 1, 2 and 3 above.

I hoped to document that it was possible to rise above nonsense, to become bigger hearted, to live 100% conscious that we are all one, that life is bliss, full of joy and promise. And to somehow manage it while not on drugs (if you don’t count the wine, because we all know the “we are all love” stuff is not just possible on drugs, it’s kind of mandatory).  

I wanted to reach out and leap into this place and I will try again, but let’s just say for January 2014 I have become a lot more wrapped up in silly stuff than I’d hoped. Before the first month is out, my head has been turned, I’ve had a bout of jealousy so severe I had to leave the room and stomp around the block; I’ve become wrapped up in minutiae I had assumed, arrogantly, I had risen above (cue flagstone to trip over); I’ve fallen for a cliché life, like a wedding album with artful shots of shoes in black and white. The photos seem to be meaningful, an attempt to tell a story – here is my big day; here are my beautiful shoes – but the images themselves have become clichés and so, ultimately, devoid of meaning. That is what I want to avoid, becoming  a cliché, devoid of meaning.   

Roll on a new week.