Sunday. No.1: 'Yes' or 'No'
Why do you want to be the one who says, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?
So that you can be the one who decides this is how I want my life to look. To be. To IS.
It’s a hell of a fine day when you get up off the John and don’t worry any more about what you look like to other people and decide what you look like to yourself. You know what I mean?
I once thought I tipped over the apple cart of my life and then thought, ‘No, I just can’t live like this anymore.’ And that was it. No thunderclaps. No birds singing. Just a simple and firm conviction that was unrelentingly calm. I was distinctly aware that I had voiced this decision to myself, and that was it.
I didn’t need to announce myself to the world in the moment; I just knew that I deserved better than I was giving myself the opportunity to be. And that’s how I know it can be the same for you.
Life is grand without grandstanding. Life is quite the magical ride, and it’s also as boring as fuck some days. And that’s how I feel about it. It doesn’t mean that that’s how you need to feel about it, but I get to decide that for myself without having to bear any outer consequence.
This is just what it takes to be who you are. A simple declaration to the self that I will do better by you, by me, by us, by we. And when that happens, it doesn’t much matter anymore what anyone else thinks. It just means I have found a place where I can bring solace into my soul without compromising who I am in nature anymore. I am me. And that’s it.
It’s not the most delightful experience to say that, ‘I can be this way, not that any more.’ In fact, it can lead to some pretty hard times and hard feelings for a while, but that’s just a little spilled milk on the counter compared to what it’s going to be if you don’t stand up for yourself and start letting some of the air out of the tires of your grandiosity and congestion.
Grandiosity is a new way of thinking about being on your high perch without choosing for a new experience even though the one you’re living isn’t bringing you a deep sense of personal satisfaction. And congestion is the way you plump yourself up with ideals that don’t matter but hold a structure in place because they overload it with crud. Not so ideal.
What I’m talking about is being square with yourself at the same time as you are being square with others. Not leaning over a little to the side, so that one doesn’t have to see that their expression is being off-centre. Or that one gets to overfill, so you lean back and away.
I mean that when you look at who you are squarely in the face each morning, you start to see that there is more to this life than you have been giving yourself the opportunity to know. And that’s how it’s going to be for a while, everyone staying in their own lane a bit more. And that doesn’t mean there can’t be any interaction; it just means you’re giving yourself space to feel what it’s like to be in your own terrain for a while without toppling all the trees in the forest to get a good look around.
You could just as easily walk out into the street when there’s no cars in sight as you could go for a rampage through a shopping mall like it’s like Desert Storm. But what I’m saying is the thing that is happening when people do this is they have been overcrowded internally by an ideal that won’t allow them to see who they are without taking hostages wherever they go.
And this could mean that I don’t want to be near you right now. Or it could mean that I don’t want to be near myself right now, but the only way I can see myself is through your eyes, and your eyes have hurt me.
That’s a pretty hard way to live.
And when it really gets down to it, these are the choices people are making without knowing they are making them. And it is bringing us a world of hurt and conviction to go out and get the other guy out of our road instead of saying that ‘other guy’ is ‘me’ looking back at ‘me’ saying, ‘This will never do.’
We don’t know how to interpret our inner world of feelings, and so we express our despair into the outer reaches of the world, and the world comes crashing down around us. We have to learn to self-regulate. And we have to learn how to be free in our own body. And we have to learn how to be free in our own minds without a rigid set of ideals holding us down to the ground so hard that we can’t even breathe anymore.
I know it’s a pretty fine day when I stop in my tracks and go, ‘What is going on here?’
And then I look around and do a slow pivot and let the data fill in my senses of what’s occurring in the moment. Not what happened yesterday with that guy, or who did what to whom. But just, and only, sit and look, and listen, and feel to myself what is happening right here, right now.
When I do this, I localize my feelings more accurately into my experience, and then I can know when I’m being pulled or swayed by a past event that has no relevance or bearing in my experience of the moment, but I am just allowing it to backfill data unnecessarily.
Our lives and minds don’t like a void. And so for a little while we have to give ourselves some energetic space and some wherewithal to start seeing through the eyes of reason that exist at the level of the soul instead of the eye of the ‘screw that guy’ perspective.
These are not experiences of the popular vote, but they sure are going to bring you a deeper experience of life and living than you’ve been allowing yourself to have. Hell, just the other day I put down my armour pack and went and ate a sandwich instead. And that was it. No grand show. No postulating. No accessorizing the experience. Just pause and put it down instead. And that was it.
It made me feel a little twitchy in my boots. What’s that guy going to think? Or what is that girl going to do? But you know what? Nothing of consequence happened; it just unwrinkled itself. And that was a curious thing because I spent a long time worrying about the wrinkles that people would feel about me.
And then one day I just woke up and decided that you don’t worry about the wrinkles in the sheets of a bed you’ve slept in a thousand times. You just go out and buy some damn new sheets.
It doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it out to be; we just need practice and a little grace for ourselves and others. We can’t do this alone, and we have to quit running the other guy off the road like he’s a lunatic. We just have to stay in our own lane for a while and see how the world really looks when we allow it the grace to fill in for itself instead of overriding it with every possible thing with fear.
That’s all we’re doing is painting a world of fear when there’s ice cream to be had.
We’re dive-bombing the look on someone’s face when we have no idea why it’s there. We all live inside our own internal construct and then extrapolate that out into the world to see.
Now, surely we can do better than what we are seeing out there in our nations filled with fear. Surely we could offer hope, or light, or love. Surely we could ask for a little solace. Give a little care. And then we could maybe rethink the way we are stamping down the grasses and the flowerbeds of our life for a nice concrete patina, but until we take care of the inner mechanism, not a lot we do is going to make a difference in the world.
And that’s what I mean when I say, ‘We have to be who we are no matter what the cost.’
It will cost you.
It will cost you some sleepless nights that you don’t have to have any more. It will cost you some inner turmoil. It will cost you the right to stand here and pontificate about why that guy’s a jerk and you would do it differently. It will cost you the flamboyant rhetoric you’ve been putting out into the world. And it will surely cost you an ounce of experience of looking the other way, so someone else’s disapproval could mould or shape your world today.
You see what I mean? We are appliquéing the world into a pretty picture some days when what it really needs is a firm foundation to lean upon. It needs your support, and it needs your patience, and your tolerance, and your own unique way of being. And that’s why we have to be who we are instead of who we think we should be, or hell, even might want to be.
We need to settle into the fullness of ourselves and breathe new life into our experiences instead of stacking up days of sameness. And I don’t just mean in routine. I mean in the way that we look at every other person.
Be kind, People. And then just get on with your day.
And that’s all really. Just a softer inner fullness so we can offer ourselves and the world a little bit of grace.
Janice.