In my experience, what people want is acceptance. That is, to be accepted and loved exactly the way they are and exactly the way they are not. Pretences, walls and strong suits (personality assets) are ways we have learned to masquerade who we 'really' are, in case we are rejected.
The world seems to contain too many walls, misunderstandings, rights and wrongs, all judgements. What if there was no 'one' right more than another, just different views? Person A standing in a box, facing the pink wall claims to person B that the wall is indeed pink. Person B faces the blue wall behind person A and swears by the shirt on his back that the wall is definitely blue, not pink. Who is right? They are equally correct. Both are in the same box, only facing opposite walls. Now imagine they begin to argue about the color, even call each other names and end up hating one another, all because they fail to turn around and see the box from the other party's point of view. Pretty riduclous, wouldn't you say? To the outside observer, this appears insane. Person A and B are in a deadlock, unable to zoom out and see the bigger picture. They are trapped in the disdain and disgust of their own myopic perspectives.
In my previous blog entry (1 October 2007) I spoke about anger, and how the anger was already inside of us and when triggered, there is a subtle moment, a gap in which we can choose whether to lash out at others or to let it go. I experienced this first hand this week. Last Saturday our house was in disarray. After an entire day of cleaning, I got fed up.
"Your shoes are all over the place! Why can't you help me clean up for once!" I barked at my husband. After 45 minutes of rampage and unleashing verbal abuse at him, he said,
"You are acting like a crazy woman! Where is all this anger coming from? You should read your own blog about anger."
Bam! It hit me right in the gut. I wasn't practicing what I preached. I had been staring at the 'pink' wall, blind-sighted by my own views, making him wrong for seeing a different colored wall, unable to surmise the scope of the box. I was immediately humbled by this apt reminder and retreated to the corner to lick my self-inflicted wounds of hypocracy.
Juilia Cameron (author of "The Artist's Way") says, we tend to practice what we teach. When my husband pointed out to me how incongruent my behavior had been to my writings, I was jolted back to conscious choice, stepped back and saw the 'box'. I continue to slip back now and again, more often than I care to admit. My objective is to catch myself more and more quickly each time.
