Lately I’ve been contemplating my dissatisfactions, judgements, critiques, and expectations of others. I’ve watched myself get swept up in the storms of my thoughts, convinced that my ideas are superior and my judgements are justified. Watching my arrogance and realizing how destructive it’s been to the relationships in my life, whether it’s to people close to me or peripherally. My judgements live in a wilderness of their own, untameable as anything that lives in the wild.
Yet I realize how much those places divide me from connection to my heart and to the hearts of those that walk through my life. I see myself as a ‘wild thing,’ but in truth I live behind four walls and under a roof, and I’m not subject to the moodiness of mother nature, I sleep on a bed and not on the earth – so as wild as I like to think of myself, I’m not truly wild.
Nor should my thoughts be wild. My thoughts also need to remember that play is more important than survival. I’m going to thrive with more freedom when I remember to tread lightly with my mind. The divisions we’ve created between us to make us feel better are a bit of a joke.
I’m not better than someone else for owning a business, nor is someone who attended an ivy league school better than me for the privilege of their education. I’m not better than someone for the car I drive, or the friends I have, or the vacations I take, or the food I eat, or the love I experience in my life. I’m not better than someone because of the thoughts I have in my head.
If I’m annoyed by the number of cars driving down main street when I’m trying to make a left, and I become frustrated and impatient, it’s not about the cars getting in my way. It’s about my mind getting in the way and proliferating an idea that I need to be somewhere immediately and that those vehicles are an inconvenience in my life. My agitation is mine, no one else’s. I can get as upset as I allow myself to be but that’s just creating a harmful inner world that seeps to my outer world.
I’m not better than a person of colour nor am I better than someone who is freaking out in line at the grocery store because of how long it’s taking.
I’ve come to see those places in my mind differently. I’ve started to consider that the things that agitate me are just me. Whatever they are, they’re also agitating the parts of myself that don’t feel seen or loved.
On a recent journey of my mind as I unpacked this idea, I thought about how funny it is that something simple could become so highly frustrating. As I stayed in the humour, I recognized that there might be something to this idea. I could laugh at myself and make it that I wasn’t wrong for having these feelings, but the feelings themselves were the things that I needed to alter my response to.
We’ve constructed a world within ourselves that becomes easily offended. If we can stay curious about this, we might actually start to find the humour in it.
Isn’t it funny that we’ve created all this division? Isn’t it funny that we’ve constructed a whole political system that divides everything into beliefs about bad versus good?
If we tackle the belief system at its core, at the audacity of our beliefs, isn’t it funny that we believe something so simple as a thought should be taken so seriously? Isn’t it funny how I got triggered by an email received at work from someone who didn’t seem to value the amount of work it took for me to create something for them? Isn’t it funny that I was ready to wage war in my mind over their beliefs? Isn’t it funny how I went from feeling calm to agitated in the time it took me to read a few words?
Isn’t it funny that my daughter being short-tempered and disrespectful could send me into a tizzy? Also, isn’t it funny how if I take a few breaths and acknowledge the ridiculousness of my response that my inner world settles and I calm down immediately?
Isn’t it funny how when I say, “Isn’t it funny?”, I no longer feel agitated. Isn’t it funny how quickly I soften when I’m able to relax my opinions and how clearly I can see when I’m able to laugh at myself?
Perhaps this simple way of changing perspective could have more profound changes in each of our lives.Just a thought.
Love, Noelle