Archives for posts with tag: who are you?

The Meme is not the Experience

April 25, 2015 //

Life in the Information Age is pretty amazing. There are so many sources of information, so many formats, so may ways to share, to process, to filter, to understand…and so much to know. Realistically, ‘being a student of life’ is a journey that concludes only at the point at which life itself ends. There is so much knowledge available that repetition isn’t really necessary, and following hyperlinks wherever they may lead is the drug of choice for many an intellectual dilettante. The wellspring of knowledge never seems to run dry. There are still choices to be made, verbs to apply…your results, and mine, may vary. Keeping up with it all is pretty challenging…We’re not only drowning in information, and in facts, we are provided misinformation, lies, and advertising slogans in similar quantity, forcing us to sort out bullshit from information pretty much continuously if we expect to hold on to some understanding of the world that is at least somewhat consistent with reality as a shared experience… But… We’re each having our own experience. Hell, even ‘placebo effect’ is a real thing that has real effects on actual people, in spite of ‘it doesn’t work that way’.

So…yeah… ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ and ‘facts’… how’s that working out for you?

Some of the rules are outside our power to change them.

What about when someone disagrees with your position, your emotions, or your experience? What then? Is ‘being right’ more important than being content? Is ‘winning’ more valuable than enjoying your experience?

What matters most?

What about when your experience of events, and your sense of self, find you feeling invisible, misunderstood, or a stranger to your loved ones, because you are not recognized as the being you experience yourself to be? Is correcting the erroneous assumptions and misunderstandings worthwhile in the moment? We are each having our own experience – which means that even our assumptions, expectations, and understanding of others, in the moment, is also truly our own; like so many things, our understanding of others is mostly made up, and not based entirely on our direct experience. Is contentment found in a quiet smile, and self-acceptance – or in ‘righting the wrong’?

Just be.

Is it enough to be, and to understand being, from the vantage point of this self, that I am – or is there some need to assert some moment of self more explicitly to feel the powerful connection that comes with recognition, acceptance, and understanding by others? Is the connection worth enough to compromise authenticity – knowing that such a choice results in a poor quality connection, indeed?

Self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-compassion… there is value in knowing who I am.

Are there ‘right answers’…or simply my answers, or your answers? These are only questions; I have no answers for you, only answers for me. I do think the questions have value… I keep considering them.

What else matters this much?

One last question… It’s a tough one, but the test is an open book sort; the world-wide web is vast, I’m sure you can Google it. What do you actually know about people who are most dear to you…and how much are you simply assuming?

Change is. Choose wisely.

Today is a good day to test assumptions, to ask clarifying questions, and to recognize one another in the moment. Today is a good day to embrace love, because it has more value than ‘being right’. Today is a good day to check facts, cite sources, and know myself. Today is a good day to trust that no one else knows me like I do. 🙂

Tags are you going my way?, can you hear me now?, change is, experience, good self-care, I am, namaste, perspective, putting my own oxygen mask on first, reflecting on reflections, self-awareness, sufficiency, what matters most?, who are you?, you don't tell me!

Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being

72 Minutes

February 25, 2015 //

I had an amazing evening with my traveling partner, last night. It didn’t end as well as it started, and I went to bed feeling off-balance and a little sad. I wrapped myself in my blankets and wept for a few minutes, even tolerantly allowing myself a few ‘it’s not fair!’ and ‘it isn’t me!’ moments. I didn’t notice, but at some point I realized I had moved on; my tears had dried, my breathing was deep, relaxed, and even, and my heart felt calm. 72 minutes. Tears became meditation pretty quickly, and very naturally, and I don’t know quite when, but it was 72 minutes from when they began to fall, to when I began to fall asleep, and realized that I was actually entirely okay in that moment – and that moments being what they are, the earlier one that caused the heartache was long over.

Moments are not a big deal; they are moments.

Any one moment, utterly unique, and filled with potential.

Moments do not define me. I define me.

We really, truly, are each having our own experience, moment to moment, day-to-day, and it any one such moment we may each – or all – be at odds with one another, because those individual subjective experiences are our world, and we view the rest through those filters, on the backs of our assumptions, and doing our best to find our way through our very own chaos and damage. “Being right” doesn’t really enter into it, for me at least, because “being right” is just as subjective as our experiences, themselves. The challenge for me, last night, was in figuring out how to stay aware and engaged with my hurting partner, and make room – compassionate, tender, understanding, supportive emotional space – for him to have his own experience right along side me having my own.

I have room for improvement. This is a very general statement I believe to be universally true of my experience.

So often things seem more complicated than ‘this versus that’. Perspective matters. Relevance matters. Compassion matters.

I found my way last night with the awareness that the moment didn’t define me. The challenge we were having communicating and loving wasn’t a characteristic of ‘who I am’ – it was a moment. A challenge. Sure, it’s pretty easy to take that challenge and turn it on myself as a weapon, but where is the value in that? Growing as a person is more easily fostered in gentle conversation, shared insights, connecting and discussing needs, limits, boundaries with compassion for each other, and present with each other even when/if we are hurting. (It sounds easier than it seems in the moment, at my current skill/awareness level.) Remembering that I define me, and that my experience of myself is 100% reliably true to the self that I am when I allow it to be was powerful. However hurt a lovers feelings may be, those are their feelings, about a moment (their moment); their feelings do not define me, (and considering how little tie to objective reality emotions may truly have, it seems a very poor practice to internalize someone else’s feelings, or taking them on as characteristics that define me, for myself).

We each make our way using the perspective we have, and the tools we develop.

I woke feeling pretty awesome this morning, and very centered. It’s a lovely way to start a day. Today is a good day to be reminded we are each having our own experience, and that they co-exist with equal validity. It’s a good day to reread The Four Agreements. It’s a good day for love.

Tags be who you are, experience, I am, love me do, meditation, mindfulness matters, perspective, ptsd, TBI, tears reduce cortisol levels, we are each having our own experience, who are you?, words of love

Categories Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words

What Time is Love?

October 6, 2014 //

I think the answer to the titular question is ‘now’. Excellent. We can move on…

Night.

I woke ahead of the alarm. That’s no surprise. I felt awake. I got up. That’s how it generally works. Before I’d even finished dressing and brushing my hair, after assorted other morning activities relevant to starting the day, I felt tired and sleepy and totally able to go back to bed. Unfortunately, it’s also Monday, and that means the weekend is over and today is a work day. I couldn’t be more disappointed if I were a kid and summer just ended unexpectedly when I thought I had another week. lol I’m mostly sitting here yawning and wondering why I am so groggy. I slept through the night. I slept deeply and woke feeling rested. This hardly seems at all reasonable.

So here I am feeling tired and especially uninspired, sipping my espresso, and considering the lovely weekend. End to end this one was pretty excellent, and I smile over the details, and over my coffee. Pain Management was complicated this weekend, and I’m in more than usual pain these past handful of weeks; autumn is here, and the changing weather generally has this result. Maybe I am just groggy as a byproduct of having relied on Rx pain relief more than usual? That’d be all it would take, and I’m satisfied to accept as being so, and move on.

I took time to meditate this morning, feeling content and serene, and instead of having to steady my mind with meditation through a series of distracting internal attacks on myself by my own brain, tempting me into sorrows with invented nonsense and insecurity, I found myself more gently distracted by ideas for paintings. lol I’m okay with that one. After meditation was concluded, I happily took notes. Artistically, I’ve been very productive lately, which is complicated joy; I paint enough that wall space, storage, and practical details like selling things quickly become concerns. In the past, I’ve often been too disordered to do much about it, besides crowd more on my walls, sell what I could, and tenderly put away what there is no room for. Good choices about taking care of me find me in a better place. Over the weekend I worked on a more commercially user-friendly web page, my Etsy store, and making my image archive more useful for me. (Selling my paintings is rather hard for me; I want to keep most of them, myself. LOL)

Just about the most important artistic moment this weekend occurred on Saturday, later in the day. I had an inspiration, a moment of eye-opening wonder and delight, for a self-portrait of incredible importance to me that I could not have painted even 5 years ago; transcendence. I want to paint a powerful self-portrait that frees me from the anguish sometimes hidden in the details of living with my injury, by blowing that myth to pieces with the beautiful truths of the strengths I also gain from the sort of injury it is, and the growth I am experiencing on this journey. I want to paint the singularity that is now, on my timeline. Yeah. From here on, anything I say about the idea itself pretty quickly becomes garbled; it isn’t about words.

There are quite a lot of experiences, feelings, and moments that just aren’t about the words we attempt to use to describe them. I get caught on that a lot; I want to share, I have some words, surely somewhere in all those words are the right words to share… something. Too late I sometimes find that the experience is beyond sharing – in words. Doing so, and being forceful about trying to make a course correction when it begins to go awry, is a handy shortcut to an argument in the middle of a pleasant experience. Hardly fair to anyone involved. I’m learning to remind myself that some of what we experience is truly made of up “you had to be there” moments that can’t be shared in words at all, but can be shared in the subtle companionship of wordless emotion. Just chill with it. Just be that experience, softly. Just hold that moment, enjoy it, let it simmer there in my consciousness long enough to become the look I wear on my face, and the way I carry myself through space, available to be enjoyed and shared in my very presence. It’s nice – it’s more difficult than it sounds, sometimes. Occasionally, I or a loved one will make a specific call for a moment of stillness…living with me, living with this injury, does require that effort now and again. 🙂

It’s a still and quiet morning. The household is so quiet that the loudest thing I hear in the background is my tinnitus, which is mildly annoying. I’m more awake now. Awake enough to be very aware of back pain, but before I start feeling cross about that, I notice I’m already immersed in gratitude that it isn’t worse, that I don’t also have a headache, that my ankle doesn’t feel like it’s on fire, and that my heart feels light and I am content. No bitching required. That’s another nice change to take note of; I am less inclined to bitch about stuff, generally, that I used to be. I’m pleased with that. I think about ‘change’ and I think about how often I have felt wounded by a call to change ‘who I am’ in prior relationships, lifetimes, or circumstances. It hurts to feel that I’m not good enough or that I am somehow broken, defective, or lacking in real value as is. There’s a whole library of books to help people get past that and understand their worthiness as beings… often at the expense of understanding how awesome change can also be. Demands for change from others can feel so critical and accusatory… but truly, there are things about me I’d see changed ‘if I could’, and of course I can. That’s a choice. If I choose change because by changing I become more the woman I most want to be there is no reason to discourage change. Hell, I enjoy change when it brings me the joy involved in being more who I am. That’s good stuff. I even get to decide who that is – no one else can. So what’s to be mad about? I change what I want to change, what I choose to change, in order to become more who I am interested in being – based on who I already am. Magic. Being told to change, ordered or directed to change, pretty nearly always sucks. Being asked to change can sometimes carry with it some baggage about the forces of change, and it isn’t always easy to determine whether the requested change is one I actually want to make, in that moment, for the requested purpose. I’ll still make those choices; it’s best to do so eyes open, and willing to admit the change has value, or the strength to say it isn’t one I wish to make. The real demonstration of skill, for me, will be to easily hear a demand for change, recognize the feelings associated with the implied criticism, not take that personally and be able to evaluate the change itself on its own merits and determine without pressure whether it suits my own needs, meets my own goals, and results in taking care of me and meeting my needs over time – to be able to put down the baggage, the hurt, the resentment, and honestly evaluate the suggested change, and make a reasoned choice for myself, outside any context relevant to criticism, or hurt feelings. That would be powerful.

An unexpected hot flash, and sudden wave of nausea end that moment of contemplation. Practical matters of being a human primate intervene, and I notice the time. I’m awake now. I’m feeling ill, and in pain, but I am awake; good enough to hold down a job. lol

Today is a good day to be human, and be okay with that. Today is a good day to recognize the humanity of each individual I meet, and consider how difficult life can be for any one of us, on any day. Today is a good day for consideration, for kindness, and for a smile shared with a stranger. Today is a good day to lead by example and treat each person truly well, including myself. Today is a good day to be imperfect, and a good day to be uncertain. Today is a good day to be okay with who I am, and delighted to have opportunities to improve on that my own way. Today is a good day to change, and to change the world.

Morning. (Not this morning, but a morning, nonetheless.)

Tags a good night's sleep, arthritis pain, choosing change, meditation, mindfulness, perspective, ptsd, taking care of me, TBI, what do you want?, who am I?, who are you?, who I am really is all about me

Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, Words

Patterns

May 3, 2014 //

Patterns occur pretty naturally, it’s the way repeatable, reproducible things work, perhaps.

The pattern of ripples in water.

I don’t know the math and science of patterns with the sort of detail that would be appropriate for a mathematician or scientist. I see patterns.

Patterns on a sandy beach.

I see where patterns are broken.

Sometimes it’s obvious.

I’m a pattern analyst by trade, if I narrow down ‘data analysis’ to something more specific, although the sort of thing that I did in the 1980s manually with my brain and eyes is generally done by machines and programming today.

Patterns, and our innate human relationship with patterns and pattern recognition sometimes goes awry; we see patterns that aren’t actually patterns, by connecting unrelated events or experiences. Apophenia is a fancy word for seeing patterns in unrelated things. It’s a very human tendency.

Just in case you’re sure you only see patterns that are ‘real’… Are you seeing a face in this arrangement of circles and lines? Cuz… this image is not a face, just some circles and lines. 🙂

Sometimes patterns are obvious, with obvious causes. Sometimes patterns are quite subtle. Created patterns and naturally occurring patterns both fascinate me.

Sunlight through blinds – natural? Created?

It isn’t always easy to be utterly certain that a pattern is a pattern with patterns that are not visual, auditory, tactile, tabular, charted, or graphed – at least for me. Emotional and behavioral patterns are much more difficult to be certain of, because the involvement of the observer in the observation is likely to be much higher, and the quality of the data, itself, much poorer. The time I have spent studying patterns in my own emotional life (for example relative to the ebb and flow of hormones) has been worthwhile for my growth as a human being, but it is a slow process of observation, and error correction. Each observation checked and checked again for verifiable accuracy, examined from multiple alternate perspectives, or against other theories, and any easy or obvious seeming answer questioned to limit and hopefully avoid both bias and losing perspective or compassion for myself. It’s a complicated endeavor. Before I began practicing mindfulness, it was a hopelessly fast route to frustrated rumination that really didn’t go anywhere. Now, I’m rather pleased that it seems to fast-track improved long-term emotionally relevant decision-making about my life and behavior that has improved my everyday experience a lot.

There’s that ‘decision-making’ piece, though… Choice is a big part of living well. A lot of people actually choose to live less well than they could; choosing frustration over contentment, choosing wanting over enjoying, choosing righteous indignation over understanding, choosing to be stalled in their life and experience over choosing change. It’s very hard to watch.

Today is a good day to choose well. Today is a good day to be the change I wish to see in my world, and in my life. Today is a good day to choose love, and to choose pleasure. Today is a good day to invest enthusiastically in having a good experience. Today is a good day to change the world.

Tags choose well, do you hear what I am saying?, investing wisely, love and loving, making changes, mindfulness, OPD, ptsd, TBI, what matters most?, who are you?

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Words

Fictions

March 16, 2014 //

Spring is definitely here. Flowers are unfolding.

Sunlight and flowers.

Sunny days seem somehow more luminous.

Blue skies

Afternoons are reliably warmer. I’ve been enjoying it, and regretting that two of my favorite things about Spring can’t be photographed and shared: the scents, and birdsong. I delight in the fragrances of Spring. I’m fortunate that I don’t have those allergies; I can enjoy the scents of Spring without reservation, and generally without any unpleasant consequences. Each recent day has been enhanced, punctuated, and highlighted by new fragrances as different sorts of flowers begin to bloom. It’s wonderful.

Life isn’t all blue skies and flowers, of course, but I feel better equipped to deal with the occasional stress or weirdness. Practicing mindfulness makes a huge difference to both handling the stress, and enjoying the scent of flowers and sounds of birdsong. It continues to be ‘practicing’, too; there is no ‘mastery’ here. I am always beginning, always learning.

Yesterday was well-spent and interesting. I went into it resolved to be in the moment through my challenges, to refrain from taking things personally based on assumptions or baggage, and letting Spring – and life – unfold from the vantage point of student, and of observer. Yesterday, I met with a former partner. The break-up was a messy one, and although it was years ago, I certainly have my own baggage around those events, and experience suggested that I could count on my ex to have a recollection of those events as unique and personal as my own. I wasn’t looking for a confrontation; my ex had reached out to me – quite unexpectedly – to let me know some watercolors and photographs of mine, old ones, had been found – did I want them? The contact was simple. Honest. Cautious. Brief. We arranged to meet. I arrived, my ex met me. We exchanged greetings, a few polite words, a hug. I accepted the offered bag of photos and small paintings and went on my way. No drama. No unpleasantness. Not quite strangers, not adversaries – just people. I contemplated that on the train home. I considered, too, all the ways it could have gone. My fears about it. The stories in my head beforehand, built from other experiences, were varied and bore no resemblance to the event as it happened. We create our experience as we go along. I’m glad I stayed open to possibilities I could not – or simply did not – imagine. I’ve been carrying a lot of baggage, hurt feelings, pain, anger… yesterday I set a lot of it down.

We’ve all got baggage.

The photographs that were returned to me are precious. Photos of me at 22, 23. Some of my own early photography. Some holiday photos in the apartment I lived in as a young soldier in Germany so many years ago. I looked at them closely, considering the moment each represented. I was so young. So lovely. I didn’t feel beautiful at that age. I felt fat. I felt huge. My husband-at-the-time regularly pointed out that I was ‘obese’ and really needed to ‘take off a bunch of weight’. I was 5’6″, a size 4 or 6, and weighed about 115 lbs. The big round curvy ass that he derisively commented on so frequently wasn’t going to disappear from dieting; it’s how I’m shaped, and that was enough to ‘prove’ to me I was fat to the point of grossness at that vulnerable and insecure point in my life. I looked at the pictures with some sadness, wanting very much to reach back in time and tell that younger me how incredibly beautiful she was, and teach her to understand that she could live her own story, and did not need her husband’s fictions to be the woman she most wanted to be. I wondered if anyone had tried to tell me… some of the pictures are of a holiday shared with friends. I contemplated how empty that holiday was, how disconnected, each person living some fiction intended to project something better than the moment, something more wonderful, more powerful, more appropriate, or safer… ‘appearances’. Sitting here this morning in my now, a hot coffee at hand, content and calm, I am finding it hard to imagine anything sadder than depriving ourselves of who we are by ‘keeping up appearances’. Living a fiction was not satisfying for me. It was lonely. Frightening. Isolating.

One of the photographs is a lovely shot of that young me, immersed in a bubble-bath, looking serene, eyes-closed, mouth relaxed. Appearances are insidious. I remember the day. The young woman in that photograph is black and blue beneath the bubbles, just beyond view. Serene? No, hurting, but calm – having survived again. Those were good moments for the me that I was then, those moments when I could pause and be grateful that I lived. My few friends had no idea; I was very skilled at appearances.

Some of the paintings I got back are small works, whimsically decorated envelopes, actually, that had contained letters to my lover, away at college. I considered the experience of cherishing a distant love, the experience of writing the letters, painting the envelopes; I was as much in love at that time as I was capable of being. I did not know much about love. I did not understand that being unable to love me, I would be mostly pretty unskilled at loving anyone else. From the future I look back and wonder – was that love? Wasn’t it? Is it fair to say now that it wasn’t, then, when it was the limit of what I was capable of, as far as ‘love’ goes?

We don’t just create the fictions that ‘keep up appearances’, we edit our history to meet our needs in the now, too. We make things a bit more to our liking in the telling, or represent ourselves as being a bit more this than that, because we value those qualities, or feel compelled to tidy up loose ends with a few good words. Fictions. Often not even willful deliberate fictions, just erosion of memory over time, or perhaps unnoticed adjustments to cope with trauma. Am I even able to be truly here, now, and hold on to whatever that is into my future recollections of this moment, once it has passed? Each having our own experience, and so much of it created out of our assumptions, our interpretation, our world view, our expectations, our biases, the limitations of our knowledge, or our senses… Can I ever really know a truth that is unquestionably true?

This morning I glimpsed an understanding of something important for me; mindfulness, and an observing presence in the moment, is as close as I have ever been to ‘the true truth’. The scents of Spring. The sounds of birdsong. The unfolding of flowers. The moments when I am, and nothing more, are the ‘real me’. Quiet meditation. Being. Becoming. Without words.

I look again at that photograph, seeing the strength, the calm, the still moment. She is beautiful, no fiction required.

Tags appearances, being and becoming, emotional ghost pains, fiction, I am, I survived domestic violence and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, keeping secrets, life is a banquet, meditation, mindfulness, portrait of the artist, ptsd, TBI, voices from the past, what is love?, who are you?

Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Fiction, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, Words

The Meme is not the Experience

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72 Minutes

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What Time is Love?

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Patterns

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Fictions

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