(image from non-clickable tumblr, via pinterest)
They seem to come and go as they please, and it can be hard to tell the difference between the ones that could be alerting you to something that genuinely needs attention in your life, and the ones that really need to just be looked at, with bemused indifference, then let go of before they jostle for precious head space and threaten to blacken everything around you.
Just to make things that bit more confusing, sometimes there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to when talking about things helps, and when it just makes it worse. If there's one thing I'm learning, it's that there's hardly ever a blanket rule for this kind of thing. It's so tempting and attractive to think that there is, that if you approach something in a certain way it will always work..but, it's just not how things go.
It's also really tempting to want to simplify things: to think that you understand something or someone in full, and to reduce them to a manageable, knowable size and shape that conveniently fits inside the pigeonholes in your head. But again, this is at odds with the reality of this person as a complex, inconsistent, feeling, living being, much like yourself.
We're all too familiar with the really horrible, tangible effects that this kind of "reducing" of other people can have on a large, social scale (racism, sexism and all the other isms seem to stem from it to a degree) but what amazes me (at least in my own life) is how frighteningly easy it is to let it creep in to your personal, everyday interactions, be it with the people you deal with across a counter, or the people that matter to you most. It's so incredibly easy to react to, attack and belittle the very limited mental image that you have of someone, it's infinitely harder (but incredibly important) to try and relate to another person in a way that acknowledges and sees their 'realness' that is so akin to your own.
As convoluted and inarticulate this may all be, I guess I'm trying to express this because I can see the damage it does to my relationships when I react to an image built out of assumptions, my own fears, and wrong perceptions rather than the real person in front of me. To be on the receiving end of this feels pretty terrible as well. So, hey, let's all try to relate to actual people, not the 2D cardboard cutouts of them in our heads, and it might save us all a lot of unnecessary suffering.
I will leave you with a quote now, because unsurprisingly, no one says it better than David Foster Wallace.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
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