Tag: reflection

  • Conviction

    I always assumed that the key driver that prevented people from making the changes in their lives that they knew needed to be made was a lack of courage. That lack of courage I always assumed to be the result of fear to embrace the new while giving up the comfort zone or the dysfunction that we’ve grown to cope with. But after an interesting discussion with an undefined acquaintance yesterday I realised that there may be another dynamic to all this that I failed to notice. That dynamic is the issue of pride. Pride is what keeps most of us stuck in ways that we know are sub-optimal in our lives, but we stubbornly persist in our ways because backing down is so strongly associated with failure.

    I think in that lies the key to understanding the influence that pride has on our convictions. Convictions, I’ve always believed, is a reflection of priorities. That which we place more emphasis on will receive a greater investment of energy, while everything else will fall in line behind that. So if the way we’re perceived by others is a higher priority than the way we find contentment in our personal space, then it stands to reason that we will nurture those behaviours that sustain that perception rather than make the adjustments that will give us peace. Say hello to chronic ailments and mental disorders. But I’ll leave that rant for another time.

    The cycle doesn’t start/stop there because the question then arises as to what it is that influences the priorities that we choose for ourselves? The fact that these priorities are a result of an evolutionary process as we grow and is most often not a distinctive thought process that we experience consciously implies that we’re mostly unaware of these priorities that drive us. I guess in this case priorities are pretty much the choices we make in life. When those choices are well-informed, they serve us well. When they’re not, they drive us towards nurturing perceptions rather than substance.

    The underlying drivers that prompt us to make these choices are our beliefs in our ability to be successful in the choices we make. More simply stated, if we are confident we’ll be successful, we’ll be more inclined to pursue the change or the improvement. But if we doubt our ability to reach that goal, we’ll compensate by finding distractions or excuses as to why it’s not possible or important for us to pursue it. That’s where that pride factor comes in. The more proud we are, the less likely we’ll be to expose ourselves to situations where failure is a real possibility. The only time we pursue such ‘risky’ endeavours is if we believe that the repercussions of not doing so would be more severe than the repercussions of failure, which brings us back to the issue of priorities.

    If it’s more important for me to maintain the façade I created about the perception of success that I think others hold of me, I will sacrifice relationships or rights that others have over me, because fulfilling those rights or maintaining those relationships is not as important to me as being perceived as a success. Success in this case is not limited to material targets or wealth, but can also relate to simple things like being seen as independent, aloof, or righteous, to name a few examples.

    Taking all this back to the opening thoughts, the correlation between the perception of failure if we back down, versus the pride of not wanting to be seen as a failure explains why it is that even in the face of overwhelming odds, we sometimes hold on to behaviours that we know are detrimental to our wellbeing. When the motivation to move forward is greater than the motivation to maintain the façade, that is when conviction will triumph over cowardice. However, I guess if we really wanted to, we could argue that conviction in maintaining the façade is what drives that behaviour as well, so it may be safe to say that conviction can be misguided if pride steps into the equation. And pride, as we know, is a result of focusing on what others think of us rather than being true to what we think of ourselves.

    Perhaps conviction is more accurately associated with the latter, as in how we perceive ourselves? Pride prevents honesty in that introspection process because if we perceive ourselves through the eyes of others, we immediately curtail perspectives that may uncover flaws that we know will detract from that perception. This thought process is exhausting. I think that’s a pretty accurate reflection of why most people avoid it, and as a result, why we have so few that act with meaningful conviction and so many that behave like attention whores or victims to society. I suspect there isn’t much difference between the two.

  • A Long Drive With Me

    DSC_0396[1]

    I once heard that you’re never lonely if you like the person you’re alone with. Sounded simple enough, only to discover that most people I know don’t like who they are. Obviously that self-loathing or dislike is rarely displayed overtly, but that’s only if you don’t know what to look for. However, that’s beside the point. On a trip I undertook from Johannesburg to Cape Town yesterday by car, I found myself contemplating what it means to be just me, by myself, without distractions, or definitions, or perceptions to meet. It was interesting.

    I realised that the quiet moments are never quiet. What the mouth restrains the mind shouts out loud. My mind drifted to past relationships that I abandoned and relationships that abandoned me. But interestingly though, there was no bitterness attached to the memories. It was simply recollections of events that passed. Events that add to the compilation of moments that personify my life, but hardly ever defining moments. I gave up the ghost of the past a long time ago. It wasn’t difficult to do. I just stopped investing in it.

    So this journey by car, almost 14 hours straight, with no one but my thoughts and some nostalgic tunes to keep me company, allowed me moments of pause that is otherwise not possible in the daily clutter of life. It wasn’t a matter of leaving life behind, or trying to escape the race. It was more a moment intended to take a breath. A deep breath. Time to reflect, or not to reflect. Time to allow my mind to travel its own path without deliberation or purpose. It was then that a sobering realisation dawned on me. What was it that defined who I am today?

    Surprisingly, I found the radio or the music I had selected for the trip to be an intrusion quite often. In fact, so much so that even the sound of the icy wind howling outside proved to be a distraction when I turned down the audio. But the intrusion was not a harsh one. It wasn’t so because it resurrected unwanted memories or anything like that. Quite the contrary, it imposed on my quiet time with me. Those tunes and noises prompted a response. It demanded attention. I didn’t want that. I wanted time for solace. Time to reflect on whether the path I am travelling is a good one, or the path that I have travelled was in vain. It was time to take stock, but not deliberately so. Perhaps, all this simply prompted me towards considering whether or not there is purpose to being me.

    But even such considerations were not entirely the focus of my thoughts. There was no specific focus. That was the beauty of it. I had the soft nagging of deadlines in the back of my mind, but not loud enough to prevent me from stopping to find beauty in the gravel by the roadside. Beauty that is ignored because we’re always too busy with important things, like living up to expectations, or maintaining specific appearances. The bee at the side of the road didn’t care that no one was looking. In fact, after shoving my phone up close to capture the moment, it didn’t seem to care that I was looking either.

    But clichés aside, there is a more important truth to all this. A few wild flowers or straggling bees in an abandoned space is not what lent that space beauty. Nor did it detract from it. It simply was that way, independent of my appreciation of it. The fact that I found a moment to pause for long enough to admire and appreciate it in its natural state is what afforded me that moment of beauty. But such appreciation did not alter that scene in any way. Whether I appreciated it or not, it was still true to its nature. Perhaps in that is the life lesson I needed to take.

    Doing what I need to do, independent of affirmation or consequence, should not taint my intent behind doing it. The value or beauty that I choose to offer the world should not be based on how I want it to be received, or how it is appreciated or reciprocated. Instead, it should simply be an expression of me. An expression of the sum total of my life’s lessons that inform a more sincere offering without remuneration. But it still did not answer the question that begged a definition of who I am.

    I’ve always maintained a romantic notion that stated that I choose not to be defined. I think that ceased to be just a notion yesterday. In fact, probably a long time ago, but yesterday it became a conscious un-subscription from that notion. Definition by definition implies a final state. It implies a completed form, or a finite outcome. I am not yet final. I am not yet fully formed. I will never be fully formed and therefore will never subscribe to a specific definition. Except when I take my last breath. At that moment, and only at that moment, will the sum total of my life’s experiences declare my final definition, and only against that will I be judged.

    By those that consider the whole of me, I may be judged fairly. But by those that remain invested in only a single moment of time from a distant memory, they will only be able to judge an abstract moment of what I lived. Their fixation on me, and inadvertently on their own singular moments, will rob them of the beauty of the whole because they opted to remain defined from fear of the belief that they may not be able to exceed what they have already achieved. Some remain rooted in a moment that defined their insignificance, and the fear of discovering that they may be even less significant than that which prevented them from being more.

    The time I spent with me yesterday is time that is rarely experienced by most. Not because I am better, or more capable, but simply because the saturation of fear and self-loathing defines more souls than life itself ever did.

    I am me. And I am not yet complete. I am not a work in progress, nor am I a commodity for sale. And I am yet to be defined.

  • A Ventlet

    I need to copyright that term. It describes my channels of expression so well.

    Ventlet. (n) Channel of expression or platform to express without fear of ridicule or repercussion. Most often employed to express confusion and/or angst that is unintelligible to most ordinary souls.

    My moment of deliberate superficiality has now been accomplished for the day. I browsed through an old post earlier and it struck me that I spend more time wanting to make a statement rather than share observations these days. I don’t like that. It blends in with the soap-boxers too easily, and I don’t care much for that kind. That tends to blend in too much with the hoards of deconstructionists that I find myself surrounded with. People that always have a reason why something is flawed or not good enough while rarely being bold enough to offer an opinion of their own. An informed opinion, that is.

    Perhaps they also have a need for ventlets but do not have access to one. Nah, that doesn’t compute. I could have said ‘that doesn’t add up’ but I felt like being superficial again. Over embellishment of expression is a great way to make something mundane seem important. I know how to do that well, even though it is something that annoys me easily. I often find myself prompting people to speak plainly.

    Having tough discussions without the political correctness to stroke people’s egos, from personal experience, tends to yield more meaningful outcomes than showing a superficial respect for everyone. The superficial ones are those that are so focused on appearing likeable or proper that they willingly compromise substance for image. The irony is that such superficiality, to anyone paying attention, is in fact disrespect, disregard, and a waste of valuable time. Its focus places the needs of the superficial one above any vested interest in a meaningful outcome that any of the participants of such an engagement may have. Perhaps this post should be titled ‘Superficial’ instead?

    Thinking aloud in a space that is no longer anonymous has its daunting moments. It has tested my sincerity on many occasions and is probably also why I seem so prone towards making statements rather than expressing my internal conversations with the aim of making sense of them. Like I’ve said before, we’re all curators looking for an audience. What an odd thought to be reminded of, yet so apt. Every overt act or expression is a means towards soliciting a desired response from the audience we wish to impress.

    I suspect that there is no logical end to this vent, yet I continue brushing these keys with the tips of my fingers hoping that my mind will once again form the expressions of the thoughts that need to be verbalised the way it once happened so naturally. Moments of reflection like these stem the tide in my slip into senility and self-obsession. Taking stock of my forms of expression tends to result in me calling me to account for subscribing to mannerisms and inclinations that I would normally despise in others. A moment of reflection is greater than 80 years of worship. I can see how that would be more valuable than ritualistically plodding on to an imposed rule set as opposed to conscious subscription to a way of life.

    Wow, how did this suddenly become about religion? Perhaps in that is a hint to the underlying tensions that I have subdued for too long.

  • Still Searching

    The search for serenity continues. It’s a search that will always be futile, like the pursuit of perfection, but its pursuit promises peace. The kind of peace that is forever elusive yet holds enough promise to keep us committed to its pursuit. Passing my fingertips over the keyboard without crafting any thoughts holds a similar promise. It’s as if I’m hoping that through some stroke of genius the clutter in my head and the weight on my shoulders will suddenly unpack itself beautifully in prose that will give it meaning and purpose. The stroke is there, but the genius is not.

    There was a time when a slow deep breath with my eyes closed would cause the substance of my thoughts to surface while subduing the noise. Now, such a breath only reminds me of the shallowness of my breathing. It’s the shallowness that echoes the distractions of my life. Discarding the essentials while focusing on the embellishments. I see it around me all the time. I’ve spent fortune after fortune of hard-earned bonuses in the renovation of this piece of land each time hoping to create a comfortable space that will remove the clutter and allow for repose, yet so many iterations later I have yet to place even a basic bench in the backyard so that I may be able to enjoy the peaceful surrounds of a garden that is admired but rarely enjoyed.

    My breath is like that bench. In misplaced moments I find myself inhaling deeply, feeling the release it offers, but losing focus on exhaling because the next breath is prompted again. Completing a thought, or a chore, or even a breath, have all become synonymous with restlessness. The chest tightens, the shoulders spasm, the neck stiffens, and the head pounds. But these are not my emotions being expressed through an unwilling body. It is echoes of the strife that exists around me. Strife that is disguised well. An unhealthy focus on needing to prevail leaves an underlying torrent of debris that threatens our composure the moment the crack in our armour reveals the wounds beneath.

    Too often I notice too many with an outstretched hand to seemingly want to lift me out of the abyss of reality. I smile a silent smile at their obliviousness. They’re oblivious to the fact that I stepped into the abyss to cup my hands beneath their feet so that they may be lifted high enough to see what life is like beyond the surrender of their hope to the expectations that they have grown to embrace as reality. It’s the same distracted-ness that convinces us that the more effective our defenses the more wholesome our perspective, until we reach a point where we’re ready to offer those defenses to others before we even understand their reality.

    It’s the tokens that count. The tokens that resonate with us in our search for familiarity of purpose. We see a struggle that, on the surface, resonates with a defining moment of our own and before even looking closer, let alone trying to understand, we present a promise of salvation not realising that such an uncalculated gesture in fact reveals our desperation for serenity more than it offers peace. I believe that life will only ever offer a psychosomatic relief from the trials of this world. As we prioritise our efforts on those things that provide relief or comfort, the impact of their poor cousins is deferred for only as long as we’re able to keep them away from the feast we hope to indulge in.

    Life presents us with a spread of delicacies and trinkets, carefully concealing the sweat shops that operate behind the veil of obliviousness. Those that are restless through conviction peer behind that veil in their attempts to see the delicacies and trinkets for what they are, slowly finding themselves repulsed by it. Most prefer to indulge instead, believing that what lies behind the veil is unimportant, because it is only in the appreciation of the indulgence that gratitude is reflected. Gratitude is hollow when it appreciates the outcome without an understanding of the toil that made it possible.

    Perhaps in that there is some truth. Perhaps it is the hollowness of the appreciation expressed by others towards our achievements in life that never fully heal the wounds that created the present moment. It’s a fleeting consolation that recedes when the darkness descends. The night is only as peaceful as the day’s indulgence, and the day’s indulgence is only as focused as the reflections of the night. Perhaps we should stop seeking fulfillment in the expression of gratitude from others. When we use that hollowness as a yardstick against which to measure our success, we subscribe to the insanity that dictates that the oblivious will define our peace. I just realised why the search continues.

  • Orphaned

    I’ve found that the most unassuming leaders and role models are the ones with the greatest impact. They are not the ones that are celebrated from the pulpits. In fact, from the pulpits is where you will find them despised or judged. But that is not a testament to their being, instead it is an indictment against the bearers of those stations.

    Seeing a father celebrated tonight left me ambivalent, as the subject of fatherhood often does. I looked across at one whose father was taken away at a young age. I saw the fight to maintain composure dull the eyes that was just a minute ago filled with the enthusiasm of youth. But even in that there is a blessing that I struggle to relate to, and I wonder if those that have lost truly appreciate the gravity of the grounding point that they have in life, even if only for those few short years beyond which they may understandably feel cheated out of a lifetime of love and affection, not least of all the wisdom that often accompanies such a presence.

    Oddly enough it really is the presence more than the conscious efforts of fatherhood that appear to leave the most powerful impressions. Perhaps in that presence I can relate,  but not much beyond. I often recall the words of a man I once met when he described the influence his father offered in his life. He recounted how he awoke every morning to see his father sit comfortably in his favourite armchair reading the newspaper, allowing all about him to continue uninterrupted, but equally uninterested. It was that scene that prompted him to be more than his father ever was, to him or to those around him. That is a reality I can relate to.

    But tonight was a reminder for more than just that. I found myself questioning my views about celebrating life versus celebrating occasions and witnessed first hand how people that I have anyways recognised and admired for living a full life seemed to be galvanised by the occasion of marking a milestone in a life fully lived. Perhaps they, like me, don’t recognise the amount of life they live. Perhaps they too, looking from the inside through the lenses that filter their reality, may not recognise the amount of life they have lived relative to the struggles and loss that scarred their landscape.

    The reality I’m faced with is that life is not separate from the bad times, or the occasions. Celebrating the occasions in the absence of celebrating life at least gives us speckles of appreciation even though I still spurn the distraction it causes in its wake. Contemplating all this, including some unexpected interactions this evening gnaws away at yet another old companion that I’ve held dear for so long. Jadedness is spawned by bitterness. It’s a response needed to dull the ache that a lost youth and an absent father etches into our distorted view of what promise the world holds. It’s this same distortion that often sees us fighting battles that exist only in our minds.

    Maybe the fatigue of being me is suddenly not a fatigue, but instead it is a surrender to a reality that was self imposed. Self imposed or not, it is still my reality. Tonight, sitting here, isolated in my thoughts, surrounded by the warmth of an extended family of whom only a select few I have ever connected with but still feeling the familiarity of a blood line I am tied to in spite of my exclusion for reasons unknown to any of us, I find my soul oddly consoled, yet still restless. But it’s a fading restlessness, even if just for tonight.

    Perhaps my jaded soul will learn what it means to feel human after all. Perhaps not.

  • Introverts don’t exist

    I’ve often been accused of being an introvert. Some apologists would say that it’s not a bad thing, but then they’ll continue to describe specific adaptations in behaviour that ‘normal’ people should adopt in order to understand or engage with introverts more meaningfully. They’re idiots, and so is every other person that allows some idiot with a degree to classify their state of being by attaching a label to it.

    I am not an introvert. I choose to be introspective. I choose to observe before flying my mouth off, and I choose to be measured in my responses only after I am comfortable that I have grasped the true nature of what I am dealing with. That is not being introverted, that is being reasonable. Yet once again, because spontaneity and instant gratification is worshipped by the masses, those that choose to live with substance rather than overt expression, are considered as lesser beings.

    To a much lesser extent extroverts are similarly labelled. The irony of that label is that it places many of ‘them’ on a pedestal, which denies them the ability to assume a quiet and introspective disposition when needed because there is always someone waiting to accuse them of being in a bad or sad mood. Those that don’t care for the labels will shun such shallowness and continue their introspection, while most will succumb and find the next best distraction through which to express their extrovert-ism.

    Labels will be the death of many kind souls because just the term introvert has such negative connotations. According to our friend Google, the dictionary definition of introvert is:

    image

    As if that isn’t enough against which to rest my case, I would go further to suggest that many consider introverted behaviour to be a personality disorder. Those that buy into this Neanderthal way of thinking embrace that label, and then go through life trying to find coping mechanisms defined by the ‘normal’ idiots with degrees so that they can fit into someone else’s retarded definition of what their behaviour should be like.

    It takes a healthy dose of a superiority complex to assume that just because you do not relate to the disposition of another, your inane academic qualification endows you with the right to define them as flawed in capacity and therefore a charitable case for those that compensate for this apparent shortcoming in introverts. This post is deliberately condescending because the hogwash about supposed introverts seems to prevail regardless of the logical reasoning offered in return.

    Just because someone doesn’t like your company, or because they prefer their own company to that of the gossipers, the nit-pickers, the shallow ones, or the distracted ones, doesn’t make them flawed. In fact, if you were honest with yourself, and you subscribed to the label of being an extrovert or a ‘normal’ person that is neither introverted nor extroverted, seeing someone shying away from company should prompt you to consider what is distasteful to them rather than assuming that they have a mental disorder that was created by sadistic capitalists with a degree is psychiatry.

    The world has learnt more, and benefited more, from those that are introspective by choice, than they have by the party animals that throw caution to the wind in order to appease the fickleness of the masses with which they surround themselves. Distractions rarely inspire growth. The art of introspection is to navigate through those distractions in order to grow. So the next time you see someone sitting quietly and observing, before you assume they’re an introvert, consider that they may very well be observing your whimsical behaviour and trying to understand what drives you to be as fickle as you are.

  • Who am I?

    Ask me any question you’ve ever wondered about me. I’ll publish all answers (unless specifically requested not to). In my efforts to understand others, I sometimes fail to see myself clearly. It’s only through meaningful engagement with others, especially those that have no vested interest or natural bias in my life, that I am able to get a view of how I appear to others versus how I perceive myself.

    I’ve been contemplating a career change by becoming a life/career coach as an option. But in the back of my mind I’ve also been entertaining the idea of moving into the holistic health industry. Alternate healing methods have always fascinated me, and my research and personal experience in tracing back physical ailments to emotional triggers further cements my views that most modern medicine practitioners focus on symptoms rather than root causes. Worse still is that often enough they use a broad sword approach to remedies where the finesse of the scalpel is called for. 

    So go ahead. Entertain my pathetic attempt at crowd sourcing and tell me what you think of me, or ask me what you may have always wondered about me, my sanity, my dysfunction, or anything else. I’m morbidly curious to know what you think of me. What image does my blog conjure in your mind about its owner?

    P.S. This is honestly not a fishing expedition for compliments. 

  • Goodness lies in the person who doesn’t see goodness within himself.

    Imām Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal