What's It All About?

How can anyone even contemplate LIFE?…it’s too big a mystery. It's overwhelming. 

I understand why people assign religious purpose and meaning to life.  They feel compelled to do so. There is no obvious answer, which means there is a void, and I’ve heard that nature abhors voids and rushes to fill them. Apparently, especially human nature; thus we fill it with something, anything, fact or fiction.

I myself have aspired to the idea that life’s purpose is to grow spiritually, which is really stretching reason and logic, because spirit itself cannot be proven. I know, it cannot be disproven either. But it isn’t logical, to accept something just because it cannot be proven it does not exist. There is a lot we don’t believe without proof. Yet many, most in fact, seem easily inclined to the idea of spirit and a GREAT SPIRIT. 

We have senses with which we experience the world. We acknowledge cause & effect in the physical. If our skin is burnt, we know it came in contact with something hot. If a bone is broken it came against something harder than itself.  But when we cannot physically determine a cause, we make one up instead of saying, "gee, we just don't know?" We seem to long for something greater than ourselves. (Given the problems of human nature that's understandable.)  That longing seems to reside in emotions that are also not physical, though emotions also cannot be denied because we experience them.

Still, feelings are not facts. They may engender physiological sensations thru which we know we are having emotions,  but that doesn’t prove they are any more real than the gods of the many religions. The person who sees a rope in the grass and runs in fear because she has misperceived it to be a snake is laughed at when its all over with and the truth is seen, and she hopefully laughs at herself.  Her reaction to her misperception may be real, but what generated that reaction is not. I think the practice of stepping back from our emotions and evaluating what caused them is important.

So many of our emotions are based on misperceptions and/or faulty conclusions of fact.  Example: One may indeed have been denigrated by a colleague, say, but that doesn’t make the insult true. Or, even if it is true, it doesn’t mean we have to feel bad about ourselves for x number of hours or days.  Nor does it mean we have to undermine or in some way get back at that colleague the next chance we get. If it occurs repeatedly of course some different reaction must take place to make the offender stop or to remove ourselves from abuse.

But I went off on a tangent, and now I have to apply that tangent to my initial thoughts. Life seems meaningless to me and without purpose. But I don’t have to fill that void with anything at all; not with religion or spirituality or any kind of fiction or fantasy.  I can just let the void exist.  I was resisting that acceptance because it was leading me to feeling depressed, but I stepped back from that emotional response. Not having purpose or meaning doesn’t have to depress me.  I can enjoy my existence even though it may have no higher purpose beyond itself.

What else can accompany my awareness of the possibility that perhaps nothing I know has meaning beyond itself?  Is it possible to just be with that without assigning emotion to it?  Perhaps there are unknown reason for life, for my planet, my species, my solar system, my universe.  Must I know it? Must I search for meaning just because I haven’t yet been convinced there is some?

No. I can just be. And I am finding that just being is freedom. But I have no need to assign freedom as a purpose for being or to proselytize this to others. I’m just sharing.  

Best of Days

      Some days just seem like dreams and are easily forgotten.  They can be the best of days; middle of the road days without extremes; no need to trudge, just amble; calm water days; no need to row, no where to get to, just flow.

The Apple Inside the Worm

I listened yesterday and was given a new understanding, which I am going to have fun applying. By fun, I mean engaging in even deeper levels of relating to others and myself 

My colleagues were having some difficulties with an associate's angry and demanding attitudes. When I shared with my boss yet another employee’s irritation with this person's demeaning tone,  he shared a great wisdom with me that he had just realized.

Uncomfortable with his own anger that this person had stirred up in him, he went to meet the person face to face face. His intention was not to confront , but to discover the source of the passion that was riling everyone else up.  He saw that the anger arose from a desire to the best job possible.  Once he acknow-ledged that he saw this strong desire to get the best possible outcome, the person calmed down and became very respectful to him.    

In some ways this was merely the standard practice of active listening. But I think my boss took it to a new level.  He wasn’t just listening for a result, so he could assure the person that he/she was being heard. He had and acted on a sincere interest in what motivated the passion . He did more than hear and listen and acknowledge. He looked deeper into a heart & mind, and saw something good and acknowledged that. 

Our associate still seems angry and demanding to the rest of us, but the wisdom is this: All passion has within it some form of love. Anger is a passion we typically try to avoid, but instead of resisting it we can become deeply interested in it and thus in the person expressing it, even when it's ourselves.

So this morning I felt myself getting angry with my daughter about her seeming anger over a minor misunderstanding in a conversation.  This was my first recognized opportunity to consider what another’s and my own passion was. 

I took a mental step back and remembered first that she had risen very early to drive across country, so she was probably a bit sleep deprived, and thus it was easy for her to misunderstand me. Secondly the conversation was about directions to take her child to a destination. So I then saw the base of my daughter’s seeming anger (and it could have just been my perception not her actual passion ) was to get me to understand the directions clearly so that her child would arrive timely and that I would   not be frustrated by misdirection. Once I saw her love I had to look at my own passion.

My anger rose out of feeling disrespected rather than loved. That will always charge my emotional engines, because I love and respect myself and know that I don’t deserve, nor will I tolerate, any form of disrespect. But my anger is my defense against anything that I  perceive is not love. It doens't bring me love, but bars the door. But by exploring her anger and seeming disrespect I came to understand that it wasn;t really what I initially and reactivley thought it was, but was coming from a place of love for me and for her child. My angry reaction dissolved.  Instead of seeing the anger, I saw the love. This one wasn’t really that difficult.  I no doubt will get a bigger challenge to test this newfound concept.

Opinions Are Important

    
Yesterday, I was a bit derisive of opinions and my attachment to my own. But opinions are important. They are the way we find out what our community thinks. Whether we find them on blogs, in our local or national newspapers, or on TV,  they inform us of our own and other societies’s standards.

     When small I was a shy and quiet child.  I could be in the same room with adults and listen in on their seemingly unguarded conversations. I felt a bit invisible, as if they weren't aware of my presence. I learned a lot that way.  I still hold my thoughts in meetings and public discussions in order to get the full drift and the consensus or lack thereof.  This is not so I can agree with the majority or find the safest position. I bide my time, so that I don’t prematurely express the conclusions and judgments that my mind automatically spews out for consideration. I try to find the middle ground and the most reasonable position given all the perspectives. 

     I wonder if I would have made a good diplomat, but that career choice never crossed my mind until just now. Maybe that's  because in one-on-one, I tend more to dominate and interrupt, holding my opinions and thought processes in the highest regard. Quite annoying to my family and friends.   

     Hopefully, by blogging alone at my desk, I can make listening more my practice when with others.

Today She Starts

     I really don't want to have anything to say. Anything I do have to say is 99% opinion.  If I weren't attached to my precious opinions, I wouldn't care to share them, but I am attached. 
     Doing this is especially difficult knowing that there are hundreds of thousands online who, like me, are doing the same thing to express themselves. I am just part of a very large herd, but I do often try to take a contrarian, yet hopefully intelligent, view.  Some times I am just ranting. 
     Also, I belong to a writing group, whose members often point out that I use long run on sentences that say to much to be comprehensible. So you've been warned.
     One friend who admires my writing and thinking suggested I do this. I blame her.
     I posted something on facebook that offered a handmade item to the first 5 people who responded. Five days later, I have only one response...so I will be greatly surprised if this gets more of a following than my one friend who suggested it.
     I have no idea what I shall blog about. Maybe whatever is on my mind that I want off.