Ways of Being

I'm finding out interesting things about myself at the moment.
OK. I think they're interesting; bear with me and I will show you that it's not all about me.

Self awareness, in the sense of recognising oneself and ones behaviours, can be a difficult thing. It requires an acceptance that we behave in ways that are not always as we would like, and it requires a degree of honesty that can result in revelations that are at best difficult to accept, at worst devastating to contemplate.

I've been consciously raising my self-awareness, and I've found things I don't like. I'm not saying I hate myself - not at all, no melodrama here - it's about accepting myself and also accepting that, through recognition of these traits I am at least admitting that there are things I would like to change. Moreover, I am accepting that there may be ways to change them.

I look back at my behaviour over years and years, decades, back to school days, and I find that I am still using the same behaviours I did way back, and for the same aims and goals.

So here's the interesting bit I said I'd show you.

When we talk about people, when we describe them, we say what they're like. Not just physically, but their behaviours. We'll say of people that they are friendly, or prickly, or hard work but worth the effort.
If we are pushed, we may really analyse them and come up with more subtle things - they are collaborative, or coercive, or jocund. They are introverted, contemplative, enigmatic (or are they?)
These lists of terms we can apply to people's behaviours are of course our perceptions, but if we can agree (I hope we can) that the descriptions of these behaviours would be broadly accepted by the subject of the labels, then we find that the labels themselves are likely to describe the subject over a great many years of their lives.
My point is that people don't change so much; they behave now, more or less, as they did way back in their formative years. So my observation of the longevity of my own behaviour sets above applies to most people. I am not unusual!

I believe that behaviours I learned before I was ten are unlikely to be a perfect fit for a man in his forties. Sure, some of them will still be relevant, possibly the majority on some level, but the subtleties of those behaviours will be mismatched to what I experience now. They will be things that, when folks describe me, if they are honest, I would be troubled to hear.

I am analysing my behaviours, and trying to work out which ones are ancient responses to regularly occurring situations. If I'm still responding to these situations as I did when I was prepubescent then I'm trying to work out what I really feel about the situations now, and comparing that with the responses and behaviours I exhibit in those situations.
Put more simply, I'm checking that my habitual behaviours actually match what I really feel now.
I'm identifying the bits of my responses and behaviours I find wanting, finding their triggers and drivers, and working to replace those responses and behaviours with ways of being that I am more comfortable with - more comfortable because they reflect how I feel now, not how I felt nearly 40 years ago.
If I can do this, if I can change how I behave by examining and recognising fundamental parts of what drives and triggers and influences my behaviours, then anybody can do it.
Interesting then that people don't seem to consider themselves capable of such change. they say 'I'm just like this' or 'it's just me'.
Worse, they say things like 'I'm crap at X' or - as I heard today - 'I'm rubbish'
Somebody who I know to be shockingly clever, hard-working, almost recklessly generous and loving says he's rubbish and he actually believes it! That's a tragedy.

This recognition of ones behaviours as a thing to be questioned and possibly modified needs to be triggered by some event in life, some moment when a person says 'actually, am I rubbish?' and starts to question their assumptions about themselves, question those ancient and practised behaviours, and question their immutability.

Folks need to start their journey on their own terms, not by suggestions of others, so the trigger will be different for everybody - but while it will be different, it must be possible to plant a seed that says 'we can be aware of the potential for change of our self'.
I know what it was for me. It was somebody who heard me say something about myself and just said it back to me with a single raised questioning eyebrow.

I am thankful to them. It's started a difficult journey for me, but it's a journey I need to take now that I have seen the path, and I am glad to be taking those first steps.
I just wish I could remember who the hell it was!
You see, my memory is crap.
... Oh. Hang on...

On discovering a surprising thing

I have discovered a thing.

I am actually rather astonished by it. I did not expect it, I did not look for it, but I have found it and I am just beginning to feel like the cat that has the cream.

Last autumn I had a revelation. There are many things I haven't done because folks have told me I'm not terribly good at them. They were right too, that's not the point, and I thank them for their frank appraisals, because without them, this would not have happened.

Some time around 1984 my voice broke; I stopped singing, and for good reason. I went from being in school & Boys Brigade choirs where I did quite a lot of singing, to being a bit rubbish. I couldn't hit a note, and I couldn't control my new 'voice' that sounded like a herring gull in the wrong register.
I tried to do drawings and paintings. They were rubbish. People said so. They were right. So I stopped doing them. And so it was with other pursuits.
But the revelation came last year when I was musing how I have missed these things. I don't do them because I'm not good at them, but I miss them. And, in an unusually reckless moment, I came to a conclusion. "Fuck that" I thought. "Just do them".
I remember thinking that I had stopped doing these things because other people didn't like the result of them. OK, so my artwork was dire. But you know what? I can hit a note. And as I recently proved to myself in an underground car-park - I actually can sing. I'll never get rich from it. I may even get asked nicely to stop sometimes. But bloody hell it felt good!
The car-park was my turning point. I had to transpose up a bit, but I belted out Libera me Domine (the Fauré, natch) and my voice filled the space. I filled the space. It was a liquid warm thing, sloshing around the pillars and air ducts, splashing everything as I threw it from me.
And when I stopped, and the resonance slowly faded, I had a gleeful smile, and I did a little dance of joy.

ha! you're thinking. He's found singing again.

WRONG.

Well, OK, not wrong. I have, but that's not what's inspired this post.

I have found something quieter and softer and something I can do without waking the neighbours.

I have found writing.

I'm doing it. But I'm doing it for me, doing it and sometimes posting it up on the interwebs for all to point at if they choose but I honestly couldn't give a damn. The feeling of ideas flowing through my fingers, crafting the balance and nuance, pairing words (like that) and just letting it flow from me... it is joyous. It's like the sun coming out.

I was talking to a chum on Twitter about Thoreau and his turn of phrase, and I wanted to mention Plath and poets that I love and I realised that what I wanted to do was actually write something.
Now that I have realised that this writing is for me, not for anybody else, I have been released from the tyranny of anticipated judgement to immerse myself in the simple act of it, the product isn't important because it's defined by the act; now I realise that something comes to me, it flows, and I am discovering it as I do it, the joy of it. I could sit here and do it for hours, I think... and despite the two-hour interruption I just had, I can pick it up where I left off and nobody will ever know!

Maybe it's a thing that comes with age, this ability to do things for the joy of them. Things that I would have been concerned about doing because I was always worried about the purpose of the act - what are you writing? Why are you writing it? What are you going to do with it? What, ultimately, is the point?
Never before had I realised that the point is that I like writing, and most importantly that enjoying it is enough (something I remember reading a year ago - see Vonnegut's note on Joe Heller's understanding of enough on Maria Popova's truly wonderful brainpickings site)
You might be wondering if this is a self-confidence thing. It's not that I don't do things because I don't have the confidence. I don't want to do them for others, I want to simply do it. I know I'm not great at them, that doesn't matter. It's not about self confidence, it's about self expression.
It's not about doing, it's about being.

So.
I am going to write.
Probably quite a lot.
I might put some of it up here.

It's for me, and you're all very welcome to look.

Communication

Communication is complicated.
We use language to explain to each other what we want or feel or need.
Language is a powerful tool for communication, we all have a pretty good grasp of it. It's a universally used framework for expressing thoughts.
But language, as somebody said to me a while back, "has its lacunae" (I had to look it up, thus exposing my own. Meta...)
So, at best, all we can do is use an incomplete framework to express what we are thinking. It's the best tool we have, and it's incomplete.

This is partly the reason I teach my kids 'complicated' or 'difficult' words. If you have a wider lexicon you are more able to express yourself more precisely. They're not really complicated or difficult. They are subtle, precise.
The extent of ones art of communication by language is partially dependent upon the extent of ones lexicon; with a wide knowledge of words one is capable of greater precision, of identifying and communicating a more subtle meaning, of implying nuance, of applying a metaphysical pressure with fewer words that is greater with less effort - consider the difference between poking a balloon hard with a finger and gently with a pin.

But there's a hell of a lot more to communication than words. Language is like a shaft of light in a dark room. It illuminates only that which is within its beam, and there are things which it can never convey.
We are so used to language it can be hard to imagine much else in that dark room - but the room is a metaphor for all possible experience, and language can only describe the ingredients of the idea.
Imagine that instead of language we had Lego. Now, build a sphere. You can approximate, you can make something that is accepted as spherical within the limitations of the bricks, but it's not a sphere.
The approximate sphere is close enough that the person you give it to will recognise what you are getting at, and it will trigger things in their mind that show them the precise sphere elsewhere in that dark room in their head, some sphere they have experienced in the past.

An admission: I have introduced by the back door another shaft of light into your dark room - the idea of Lego as a form of communication. With Lego, one can make an approximation of pretty much any physical thing. So it's a good method of communication of aspects of the physical world, but it's lacunae lie in the description anything other than objects.
There's a reason I have done this - Lego is better at communicating some things than language. The two shafts of light in the dark room we now have are not parallel; they may or may not touch, they certainly pass close to each other, and they are of different hue and diameter and intensity. But whatever their relative strengths and weaknesses, they are both shafts and leave the rest of the room in darkness.

Now we can start to see how many forms of communication there are - anything that evokes a response and triggers recognition of other experiences not in the direct beam of whatever medium you are experiencing. Anything at all.
Language. Lego. Sculpture. Architecture. Painting. Pottery. Design. Music. Movement. Touch. Human contact. Sex. Food. ... Anything.
All of these things and any other man-made stimulus communicates with us on some level or other. Whether or not we are conscious of it, they affect us, effect a response somewhere, trigger recognitions. Our dark spaces are illuminated constantly and in so many colours and from so many directions. It is the moment-by-moment framework of understanding of the world around us that is in effect. And, of course, there are some things those illuminations can never touch - the essence of experience is only referenced by the abstractions of the communications that come to us; we can never actually feel the experience that is related to us through whatever communications are received.

Once we understand this stream of communication and the myriad sources, we can start to understand better how to communicate better with others.
Communication is key; it is the projection of ourselves into the world, and the world perceives us through our communications.
Talking to people is one thing. Language is ubiquitous, widely understood. It's great for most purposes. But if you really want to communicate, language can leave people in the dark.

...

Two further things for consideration come to mind, and I may devote blog posts to them later...
Firstly; what about the emotional responses we experience from non-human generated forms? Is the feeling of knee-weakening impact I experience from certain forms in the South Downs the result of something we can call communication?
Secondly; the feelings we get from some people when their words do not 'ring true' - what else do we pick up on? What is the mismatch between our expectations and the received verbal communications? Does the sender of those communications understand them, or even recognise them?
I shall think on and share what I come up with.
Thanks for reading!

Human Instances

I was in my car this morning, dropping off various members of the household at bus stops, meeting points, near schools - all very ordinary.
This is a common activity for me. I work a 0.5 contract (usually 1.1 of a week though - that's another story) which means that two mornings a week I am not heading in to my office. I'm dropping people off, then heading home, to work from home and deal with such weighty matters as laundry and watering orchids. Sometimes I even do shopping...

As I returned home, I noticed the people on the bridge, walking across, a man in a hat, a girl in school uniform, a woman rooting in her handbag.
I've been thinking a lot about the human experience lately, and I saw these people as individual human instances, living people experiencing their individual universes.
I drove on past the bus stops, round the roundabouts, people waiting and driving and being driven, each experiencing that moment uniquely, probably mostly unthinking, of just standing, or of being pushed by the turning motion of a car, or being lost in the flow of needing a thing that must be somewhere in the handbag.
What were their experiences of that moment? I doubt any of them remember it so much.
What happens to that experience, what happens to the lost signals that we process and discard?

The people, all of them, living in that moment, had a flow of experiences that were all commonplace and unnoticeable. It's all things they'd done before, and there was nothing remarkable, just the ordinary world, just living.
I wondered what we miss, all the time, what things that would have once been fascinating and new and are now commonplace - from simply being able to stand, to the delicious anticipation which we do not experience when waiting for a bus to appear around a corner, to the frisson of doubt about the phone that might still be in the kitchen or might be in this bag somewhere beneath the biros and nail files.

So many things, all the time, so much passes us by, and we all carry on with our lives focussing on the mundane and completely understood.
Meanwhile, the torrent of experience pours past us, filtered out, abandoned and lost.
Of course that's a necessity; we can't process it all, and the processing of it is an experience in itself. We can't keep up, we can't even begin to, and there's a tragedy in that, of all the missed life.
Perhaps we miss something more important though - that we change, slowly and inevitably, that we become new people, and yet we continue to ignore the things the old us was used to.
We focus on the things our old selves trained us to think are important, and those voices that answer the standard questions (what do you do? are you OK?) are old voices giving old answers that may have been right once, may have been thought through once but are too rarely scrutinised, and are not the answers of the people we become.

Were the people on the bridge happy? Nobody was weeping. Perhaps that's what we settle for, in the end. The easy path, the familiar, not weeping.

For my part, my experience of that moment was of a connection to the people, and there was something joyous and loving and I was glad to see them, bustling and not weeping.
So much so, I decided to write about it.