Do you ever feel like what comes out of your mouth weighing 5 grams is taken by other people as a ton? Or what comes out silk is received as wood? Or what comes out in freedom is received as manipulation?
I suppose it is a common enough experience. What we say must be filtered through someone else's stuff. Nobody is ever truly objective in that sense. It's why we will never ever completely know how others perceive us. It is something patently outside of our own control. You can try - which is why friendship takes work, a continual reconfiguring of what you understand about someone else, of realising how askew your perceptions were about them, of adding a small piece to a never-ending jigsaw puzzle that is other people.
Of course, the flipside of that is that we are responsible for changing the way we come across to others if we begin to understand that what we project is not what was intended. I was shaken into this awareness when I was 18 years old and realised, with a sort of horror, some things about my dealing with people that were overreactive, spiky and defensive. Sometimes we cannot see in ourselves what is plainly before the eyes of others. It is as valuable as gold to have kind people clue you in to yourself. It's hard and it's raw and it is difficult to say and to receive, but these are precious things, these feedbacks. They help us along the path to knowing ourselves.
It is a difficult thing to realise that our protections become our fortresses and that we use them to butt others with. I guess it is a melancholy sort of a thought, really, on this dreary Saturday morning - that in a sense, we are all alone because nobody ever truly "sees" us as we really are.
Except God. I often feel lonely but paradoxically I never really feel alone, even when I am by myself. Your rod and your staff they comfort me.
That is the starting point, for me. If God is there and all flows out from him, then perhaps in some future age we shall all know each other as we know ourselves and know God. Like Mack in The Shack, meeting up with the father he was alienated from in life, in a field, a diamond and emerald and amethyst field.
(Oh, and go Hawkers)
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Superb ponderings, Sue. Such richness here.
ReplyDeleteI would add that, the more we're open to God, to Love, to All That Is, the less we need those defences. We come to understand that we are a part of All That Is and not apart from it. We are individual expressions of Love, all of Creation is in fact, and Life consists in simply remembering that Gloriously Cosmic Fact and forgetting all the crappy lies we've absorbed and accepted as Reality.
Everybody Rocks as we slowly come to see this:)
Love ya Sis, and I hope your Saturday is losing its Dreary:)
Harry
You really need to start your own blog, Harry. Just think, you could write how everybody rocks as we slowly come to see this :)
ReplyDeleteMy Saturday did lose its dreary. It always does. But there is so much to glean within the dreary, and it abates the quicker I embrace it, so I guess dreary belongs also. It was good even though my football team lost and missed out on the finals :)
Hmmm... maybe The EverybodyRocks Blog... or FallingOffABlog...:D
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of Embracing The Dreary and so transforming it. Wonderful.
Football's only a game you know. But then it isn't;)
Namaste
Harry
Haha. Good blog names :)
ReplyDeleteMaybe in the end God will embrace the entire world and transform it :)
Yes, I agree, football both is and is not just a game :)
I believe God already has, Sue. We're just struggling too much in the grip of Love 'cos we can't really believe how good it is... or maybe we've just forgotten who we really are and where we came from, whose image we bear. God don't do Dreary:)
ReplyDeleteA famous Brit football manager once said, "Football's not a matter of life and death. It's far more serious than that.";)
Namaste
Harry
You are so right, on all counts, Harry :)
ReplyDelete