Life realisations- letting go, finding peace, the forgivable fallibility of parents and feeling like you deserve

in #life6 years ago (edited)

There is a funny thing about dreams. You wake, you have them, you remember for a minute and then it's gone.

But inside that dream are all the teachings your unconscious wants you to know to help you. There's a momentary gap when you sleep, because that is when the fear sleeps too.

And that's why, if you don't write the dream down quickly- before your tricky head starts filtering, judging and denying- the gift will be gone.

There's a lot going on at the moment. And with it comes insights. At the moment little dreaming. And the insights themselves are fleeting but strong. But life is moving along so fast, that if I don't write them I will lose them. And like the dream that's gone, I would have missed the lesson. So that's what I am going to use this digital space for today. It may be in random order, it may have little or much context. I hope by writing it out it will make it more real for me and that I can take it forward and absorb it in my life. And maybe it will help some reader out there...

Like most truths, as much as they are authentic they've been said a thousand times before. But listening is not understanding.

  1. if something doesn't work let it go.

The point of having something in your life is functionality. Because life is here and now.

This week a job offer I thought was no longer current popped up again as current.

A job I'd wanted a month ago was not offered, though I thought it would be.

A positively anticipated date from the internet was very obviously a non starter, within five seconds of meeting. For me, at least.

The date was very awkward. I'm an outgoing and chatty person but when I'll guy obviously likes me and I don't like them, I clam up. I won't look at them in the eye, I make conversation but coldly and I find it hard to focus on what they're saying. I'm not very good at hiding how deeply uncomfortable I feel. If he's not that into me either, it's much easier. But if he's into me and I just... can't... I can't wait to run away.

The guy I met was actually super nice. We had a really easy couple of phone calls before (hence the positive expectations) and I still got the impression from the date that he is a good person. But I couldn't find the slightest spark to be attracted to him physically (he wasn't the most good looking guy but he was by no means disgusting). For just did not do it for me and when I tried to play with the idea I just retreated inside myself more.

On top of being a nice guy, he was also perceptive and quite wise and open and said, on me clamming up on him. Hey, it's okay if you don't fancy me, I fancy you but it's ok. Which made me feel so much more awkward because I was so mortified at the thought of confirming back to him that he was right. I just didn't fancy him.

Now I don't know why I feel this way. I'm pretty sure that years ago I had no problem being quite direct about it. When I was 16 for example I had a good male friend who was into me and at some point it came to a head. I had no problem saying - sorry, just want to be friends, saying or implying that I didn't fancy him.

The thought that it's okay to let something go if it doesn't work came to me when I got home later. Doing the washing up, it was mulling time.
I could hear my mind, how it was beginning to turn the events in my head around so that the date would turn into another story about how ..blah blah blah. I can't tell you the story because I didn't let it happen because of the golden thought that popped into my mind. I can tell you what the story that my subconscious was going to make me feel- helpless, faulty, negative expectations from life. So depressed. But then this thought came into my head. If you tried something and it didn't work, let it go.

This is what he taught me, actually when he said laughing - hey, if you don't fancy me, that's okay. And then I started apologizing and he said- don't apologise so much, it's not good. You're right, I said. And he was.

From the deepest sense- why hold onto something that doesn't work? For what reason?

To own a possession, to be part of a relationship, of a movement, that works is to honor life. Because if something works, it's adding to life.

Sometimes in modern life there are metaphors we use but we are so disconnected from the reality of our day to day that it's hard to get the full impact.

Flogging a dead horse comes to mind. I've heard the expression so many times it barely resonates.

But now I try to imagine. A horse. It exists. It's massive. Shiny hide, huge size, long muscley legs, built for running- everything in it's appearance suggests it is resplendent with life. Except for one thing. The horse is dead. It's lying collapsed in the floor. Sitting on it is this little man. He's a firey man, full of energy. He's an angry man. And, he's a fool. We'll call him the fool. The fool is sitting on the dead horse and he's furiously whipping it. Flogging it. But the horse is dead.

So there's this huge disconnect between what the fool perceives and what we perceive.

The fool is an angry man. He whips the horse once. It doesn't respond as it is dead. This makes him more angry. He lets out that energy by whipping the horse again. And so it goes on until he exhausts himself. The closer he comes to exhausting himself, the more he feels like he's made progress. Progress he defined for himself as generating anger and then releasing it until he was exhausted. But he didn't see it that way. He felt like he was really punishing the horse. But he wasn't of course. The horse was dead. So in fact, he was fighting a dead thing, embuing it with life in his mind. Simply by reacting to his own anger. His own anger kept the horse alive in his mind. His anger came out of him, projected life onto the horse, in order to create more anger.

What we as the Observer see is this.. the fool thought he was dominating the horse by flogging it. Because each time he whipped it, he felt his energy dissipate onto the horse. But in reality, he was getting himself into a rage.

There is little to be said for cultivating anger except if it moves us forward when we would not otherwise. The trouble with using anger as a tool to move forward is that we become dependent on it. Like the fool flogging the dead horse, we lose sight that we are the doer. We become dependent on the object of our anger to stimulate the anger in order to move ahead. Anger disempowers the self as the captain of one's ship.

Or should I say, the captain of one's ship, sailing in peace.

I was so anxious about the job.

Would I get it. Would I not get it. Disappointed when what I thought would materialize did not.

And then see what happened. Stuff happened regardless of me turning stuff over in my mind.

The same with the date and how my mind began its automatic churning if negativity once I got home and began to idly mull over the washing up. My mind wanted to go over and over again about the failure of the date, about how being disappointed once means I'm going to be disappointed again and again and again, how it's all hopeless... Flogging a dead horse. The horse that died was the expectation that something would come out of the date, that I'd like him and he'd like me and...the expectation had to be let go of. Not thought over merciliessly. That's flogging myself.

So often I'm agonizing over things. Like the fool flogging the dead horse. Believing that the energy I put into the agony and over thinking will make a difference. It won't.

How much of the scar tissue around my heart from disappointing loves could have been prevented from not trying to make work something that wasn't working?

How much energy wasted?

If it doesn't work, let it go.

  1. Better to aim at moving in peace now rather than struggling our whole life and to rest in peace only then.

This afternoon I went to the funeral of my Great Aunt. We're not blood relations, but my mother often visited her as her immediate family doesn't live here. She was in her late 90s. Had a very eventful and interesting life. Was a real character. Born in Poland. Escaped in early 1930s to what was Palestine. Orphanned aged about 11. Split up from her sister. Married, moved to Italy, in film jet set society. Opinionated, critical, fiercely loving, cynical, literary, curious, stylish, sharp, grateful. She was fed up of living a good few years. She died as she dreaded, suffering a stroke two months before, which made her softly locked in her body whilst her mind remained sharp.

It was a shock to see her body. The body is wrapped in cloth, it was taken into the hall as the officiating Rabbi made the blessings. Her body was so long and thin. She used to have a healthy appetite and was very vigorous but in her last days she refused to eat. Which is how the family knew it was the end. As they put her corpse out on the table, an insexr scuttled down onto the floor. In the heat of June, despite the morgue, the insects must have already been settling in, despite that it was just two days since she passed.

Surprisingly, the insect I saw gave me comfort. It's so much more horrifying to see the shape of a corpse wrapped in a funeral shroud when you still associate the living person with it.

When the Rabbi made the blessings, the feeling in the hall changed. Grief struck the composed.

And for me, if she was no longer there; this Great Aunt who was such a force of nature; then where was she?

The words of the Rabbi drifts to my brain. The blessings are all to the deceased. That the soul of the deceased is now in peace.

And I think to myself; is this all that we can do once the soul departs...

I did not know my Great Aunt as a younger woman. I'd hazard a guess from her traumatic earlier life, from some of the details from her family life that she was not a woman at peace in life when she was younger. But as she got older and with a heavy sense of irony she fought life less and became more at peace with it.

When my stepfather was dying last year, a few days before he died, I went to see him. He was lying on the bed. Aged 90, emphysemia, in terrible pain. He could barely speak. I held his hand. All he could say was "not fun."

If the best anyone can wish for you at your funeral is "rest in peace" then it's probably better to find peace now that we're alive.

A year ago I had a strong sense from this that life is right now. That there's little point romantizing the end of life to make it better. Life is here and now.

But there's something about retrospect, isn't there?

I mean, at the funeral today my Great Aunt's son eulogized her. She loved him dearly but she was a difficult person too, opinionated and critical. He recalled that two weeks before she died they took a photograph of her with her family and descendents. He offered to print the photo. She poo pooed the idea, perhaps because it stunk of sentimentality. But she died staring at the photograph.

When he recalled this at the time, it seemed to me the thing that, when all is said and done, what you take away when you leave this life, the idea that for a good life, it's your family. I saw this too with my stepfather and frankly he was not a great family man and probably caused a great deal of psychological harm to most of his four children. But he too had a hard life.

My Great Aunt also had a family non family here; a family who adopted her as their matriarch. The lady of that family also eulogized her, far more emotionally.

I'm not suggesting her son loved her less. It just seems, like I've seen with my own mother, that sometimes parents screw up the job with their own kids but do a far better job stepping up to the role with someone else's kids.

And yet what is it that defined my Great Aunt? As the natural mother to her own son? As the adopted Matriarch to a non blood related family? Both and neither. She was a whole person. Talking in a generality rather than about her son, I'd say that though a grown up child may feel deeply wronged by the mistakes the parent made, and in fact may not recover, whatever the mistake, this does not define the value of the whole life of the parent. However significant family, people make mistakes.

Better to have been a lousy parent but have given life than a perfect imaginary parent that never had children.

I'll keep this one short.

I suddenly realised this week.

The only reason is stayed so long in a job (7 years) seething, just seething with anger that I didn't get a pay rose whilst much of the success of that place rested on me...it was because I didn't feel like I deserved it.

I blame my ex boss. Again and again.

I flog the dead horse.

Tomorrow and Thursday I have a job negotiation.

In fact, they want me for this role.

I asked for a lot of money.

I need to work on feeling I deserve it.

From this inside.

And love. I deserve love.

I am worthy, valuable.

I have a right to exist as I am.

I don't need to justify myself.

First I deserve it. Second I state fact.

If you offer me what I want or it doesn't change anything.

Even if you have a poor opinion of me, that won't change my opinion of me.

I have a balanced, correct and high opinion of me.

This is what there is, regardless.

If I come down in price, that's me accepting reality which is that different people judge the same situation differently, perceiving different parameters, different things in or not in existence, different priorities. This is life. I don't fight life. I do stay true to myself.

I support myself.

I deserve all the good things in life

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Nice words, @waking. Although I was slightly taken aback by the quick turn from "good person [who] wasn't the most good looking guy" to "dead horse."

Otherwise good! Stay true to yourself. No exceptions.

Thank you ! Hahaha well I'm writing it all straight out and planning on editing on oooh a year when I have the word count. But maybe reread (or I'll rewrite) I DEFINITELY wasn't calling the guy a dead horse.;-) and thank you for reading:-) :-) and commenting.

@redsandro - edited (lightly). Thanks!

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