Okay bear with me as I gather my thoughts here....
So each and every one of us has a group of words in our mind that we believe describe who we are. For example, I would say mine includes words like; optimistic, loving, playful, introspective, forgiving, impatient, independent, etc, etc.These defining words are shaped by our experiences, others opinions of us, and self discovery. A few of them may sometimes shift and change or adjust priority levels, but they are relatively consistent. We also have words that we believe we are NOT which are just as much a part of our identity. These are the opposite of the words that we are. Like for me; pessimistic, spiteful, flighty, cruel, patient, codependent, etc, etc.
We also generally form a group of these words in our head for others when we meet them. Like when I walk into a class the first day and evaluate the teacher; strict, immaculate, helpful, intelligent, kind, impatient, unqualified, etc. Sometimes these first evaluations or "first impressions" are correct, sometimes not; and accordingly, sometimes we adjust our thinking of them according to their actions and yet... sometimes not.
Therefore, our opinions and evaluations of people, whether they be correct or incorrect, will always be invalid. People are constantly changing and growing and there is no way we can accurately predict others behavior. Not only is it impossible, it is also unfair.
Okay so here's the real point I'm getting at; we treat people according to how we see them. We may think that we want people to be better and we may "have high expectations" for others, but really all we are doing is setting them up for failure.
People generally, to a certain degree, behave how they are treated. EXAMPLE... Think about it, if your most cherished family and friends believe you to be unintelligent, stupid even, how are you ever supposed to get out of that mold? No matter what you do, you will be critiqued as stupid, and on the off chance that you do something undeniably intelligent, they will all be shocked that you achieved something so great and write it off as a fluke or a "one time thing". They may even try to "help you become smarter" or encourage you to do your best or make it "easier for you to succeed". But it never works and each time they try and you fail you only feel more stupid.
So you move out of your house, make new friends, and suddenly you find people are willing to engage in intellectual conversations with you, they listen to and value your opinions and beliefs, they expect great things... How do you think you will behave then? Because of that positive reinforcement, you will likely want to learn more and express more in order to continue to supply that reinforcement. You will be more confident in yourself and in your ability to make a good argument and prove your point, you won't be afraid to be wrong because you know you won't be overly criticised (even if you are, you can handle it now because now you are intelligent), you will build on your knowledge and become a truly intelligent person.
So you are a changed person now, you have broken out of your shell and started to become that person you've always wanted to be... then you go home for the holidays. What do you find? Packs of people who know you as that same old unintelligent person. You try to prove them wrong and they laugh and scorn, or maybe just ignore you or look at you strangely. Their "stupid glasses" are on for you, they see you and they see stupid, they don't realize that you have changed and they treat you exactly how they did before. Maybe you are strong enough to not give in to their views, even if you're not, it will never be pleasant for you to go back there again because you will hate the person you are when you are with them. And maybe you're not strong enough, maybe you go right back to how you acted before, you play into their foolishness, you cannot prove them wrong no matter what you do so you give up.
Tragic.
Real.
Its what we all do. We are all on both sides of that scenario at different moments of our lives. If we truly love the people who surround us we need to do them a favor and give them the space and freedom to constantly change and improve, I mean REALLY. Change your opinion of them NOW and allow it to be an opinion free of bias, in fact maybe even tint your thinking with a positive bias. Some may call that "benefit of the doubt" but what an oxymoron! We should not be doubting them in the first place!
Truly loving someone is not having a bias or judgment of them that you don't allow them to overcome, it is giving them the freedom to be their own person and always encouraging change and improvement.
Britter OUT.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Thoughts inspired by my textbook "The Actor and The Target" By Declan Donnellan
Seeing is an interesting thing to try to explain. Try noticing next time you are talking or telling a story what you are really seeing. Though you may be looking into your glass while trying to answer a serious question, you are not seeing what's in that glass, you're seeing all the possibilities of your answer in that glass. That glass represents all your thoughts and memories and it is as if that glass will give you the answer to the question you are about to answer. When you look into someone's face while you speak, you are not just seeing a friend or acquaintance, you are seeing the light in their eyes, their expression as it changes in response to your words, you're seeing the scenery behind them and how it may effect your words, and not only that, you are seeing yourself seeing, and thinking, you are even seeing the words you are speaking. All of these things do you simultaneously see.
The more we feel, the more useless will be the words we find to express ourselves. "Talking about" tends to make us generalize and generalization conceals the uniqueness of things. There will always be a gap between what we feel and our ability to express what we feel. The more we wish for the gap to be smaller, the more we try to tell 'the truth', the wider this gap grows. There is no way to explain to others the entirety of your feelings, for entangled in those feelings are many years worth of hopes being fulfilled or crushed, desires, fears, disappointments, and wishes, all of which have been constantly changing. Meanwhile, those you are trying to express your feelings to have the same messy background for you to attempt to forge through to communicate. Hopeless.
What is "truth"? Life is really just each one of us acting out different roles on different stages. The quality of our acting depends on the truthfulness of our performances. But truthful to what? To others? To the real me inside? To what I feel, want, hope, or ought to be? Truth is only momentary, for it changes under circumstance and relies on nothing and yet everything at the same time.
We do not exist alone; we only exist in context. There is no inner resource that will make us independent of the outside world. Outside sources are our only means of energy. We must always be taking things from the outside inside ourselves; food, water, images, feelings, words, ideas, etc. The breeze that tickles your cheek and causes you to lift your hand to scratch, the lips you desire, the conversation you dread.... Each of these 'targets' energizes us. These targets are not objectives, wants, plans, a focus, a motive... All of these arise from the target, they are ways of explaining the 'why'. The target is the master, the 'point of focus' sounds more like a servant. Seeing these targets transform is what gives us the freedom to transform as well, we cannot live without being constantly transformed. We are never the same from moment to moment, nor is anyone else. One moment we may see a handsome lover, then a lost young man, then a desperate thief, then a cruel betrayer, and yet the man beneath it all is still that man. (Or is he? That is a whole other discussion on the structure of human beings and if we are at all the same man the day we die as the one the day we were born; on a molecular level or as the whole picture.)
Choices are merely a decision of change. Rosalind may be thinking she wants to teach Orlando what love is, but that she is really doing is seeing an Orlando who sentimentalises love so she must try to change that. Othello really does not want to murder his wife, but his act of trying to kill her is based on the view that his wife is destroying him and he must try to change this.
Growing up... that creeping feeling of being both responsible and powerless, unworthy and unaware, too small, too conspicuous, too cautious, too...me.
It is imagination that enables us to perceive. Our capacity to imagine is both imperfect and glorious, and only paying attention can improve it. Imagination is the only thing that can connect us to reality. Without our ability to make images we would have no way of understanding the outside world. Even as it is, so many images are thrown at us per second that there is no possible way all of it could enter our brains completely untainted by our mind's opinion of the truth. Imagination is not to 'invent' but to 'discover' what cannot be seen but may be seen in the past or in the future or from some other perspective. Ideas, for example do not exist by definition, they cannot be present, but they are not invented, they are discovered by means of combining and disconnecting and recombining many different thoughts we've spent our lives forming. We can easily see the tip of the iceberg, but we need wisdom to infer the other three-fourths.
Attention, unlike concentration, must be given. Concentration is about me; the more I try to concentrate on something, the more I see me concentrating and less do I see the thing I am actually concentrating on, I end up seeing it the way I see it and seeing nothing new at all. It pretends to be about other things, but its not. Attention though, is not so easily switched on and off, it is given and it must be found, we cannot control it, which makes it scary, yet useful. When you capture someone's attention, they are quite literally, unpreventively under your control.
We are all terrified that we will... what? It is fear that causes us to do bad work, so the fear of working badly is a self fulfilling prophecy. Only paying attention can bring peace from fear and panic, if we are so terrified of what we may see that we never pay attention to anything, we abandon ourselves to chaos. The fact is, if we manage to pay attention for a moment to those faces of fear that we cannot bear to look at, they would not get clearer, but further blur before our eyes, proving our fears not only harmless, but nonexistent.
An uncomfortable choice: freedom or independence?
Think about that one before you continue reading. You can have either, but not both, because one must destroy the other.
Independence is born of fear; the desire is common. We don't want to depend on things that might let us down, but the thing is, we NEED the outside world, those targets remember?
Freedom is a mystery; it is a given natural, like being present (another given that sometimes people try so hard to be in). It is freedom that makes us human, however we cannot control it because we do not make it, so we are in fear of it. Independence is the synthetic of freedom.
We hate the thing we need. The most useful things are given; but we fear the supply will dry up somehow. Consequently we reject these gifts and manufacture substitutes; 'lust' or 'fun' for love, 'laughter' or 'contentment' for joy... these are inferior replicas, but our creations wouldn't deny us would they? We cannot control reality, but we can control our fantasies. Good? No. Our fantasies don't exist; so we're not really controlling anything at all. Good thing this illusion of control is so deeply reassuring...
If there were no obstacle to overcome there would be no quest. No quest means death. Every living moment contains an element of quest. This unbridgeable distance between all of us may be your enemy, but it is your friend. Romeo is different, separate, and therefore, out of Juliet's control, no matter how hard she tries to bridge that gap, she will fail. Creation keeps us apart; we are not fused and can never become fused. However, as soon as there is distance, there is a potential path. Even the most basic path has two points; a beginning and an end, me and where I can go. Fusion paralyzes, distance moves.
There is always something to be lost and something to be won in every situation. These are called 'the stakes'.Again, every living moment has an element of quest; every moment of our lives we deal with a situation which will either get better or worse; even if the only 'worse' is only the infinitesimal signs of aging. Not only does every situation contain these stakes, each one of us has two halves as well. A husband we want to see, and one we don't want to see; words we want to hear, and words we don't want to hear; its double vision. One man is a man who understands us, and a man who doesn't; is a strong man and a weak man. There is always something to be lost and something to be won; they are always precisely the same size. Both the positive and the negative are present at the same time, both the hope and the fear. All of life comes in opposed twos. In a kiss... being rejected or savored. In a jump... landing or falling. A declaration of love is terrifying because the joy of being loved back is exactly mirror the terror of being rejected.
Pain comes when people defy our world view. We tend to see the good in people we like and the bad in people we dislike, its comfortable that way. To see the people we love do bad things and the people we hate do good things is so unbearable because we must either change our view of them or admit that the world is never predictable enough to establish such things as like and dislike even though that is our human instinct.
Britter OUT.
The more we feel, the more useless will be the words we find to express ourselves. "Talking about" tends to make us generalize and generalization conceals the uniqueness of things. There will always be a gap between what we feel and our ability to express what we feel. The more we wish for the gap to be smaller, the more we try to tell 'the truth', the wider this gap grows. There is no way to explain to others the entirety of your feelings, for entangled in those feelings are many years worth of hopes being fulfilled or crushed, desires, fears, disappointments, and wishes, all of which have been constantly changing. Meanwhile, those you are trying to express your feelings to have the same messy background for you to attempt to forge through to communicate. Hopeless.
What is "truth"? Life is really just each one of us acting out different roles on different stages. The quality of our acting depends on the truthfulness of our performances. But truthful to what? To others? To the real me inside? To what I feel, want, hope, or ought to be? Truth is only momentary, for it changes under circumstance and relies on nothing and yet everything at the same time.
We do not exist alone; we only exist in context. There is no inner resource that will make us independent of the outside world. Outside sources are our only means of energy. We must always be taking things from the outside inside ourselves; food, water, images, feelings, words, ideas, etc. The breeze that tickles your cheek and causes you to lift your hand to scratch, the lips you desire, the conversation you dread.... Each of these 'targets' energizes us. These targets are not objectives, wants, plans, a focus, a motive... All of these arise from the target, they are ways of explaining the 'why'. The target is the master, the 'point of focus' sounds more like a servant. Seeing these targets transform is what gives us the freedom to transform as well, we cannot live without being constantly transformed. We are never the same from moment to moment, nor is anyone else. One moment we may see a handsome lover, then a lost young man, then a desperate thief, then a cruel betrayer, and yet the man beneath it all is still that man. (Or is he? That is a whole other discussion on the structure of human beings and if we are at all the same man the day we die as the one the day we were born; on a molecular level or as the whole picture.)
Choices are merely a decision of change. Rosalind may be thinking she wants to teach Orlando what love is, but that she is really doing is seeing an Orlando who sentimentalises love so she must try to change that. Othello really does not want to murder his wife, but his act of trying to kill her is based on the view that his wife is destroying him and he must try to change this.
Growing up... that creeping feeling of being both responsible and powerless, unworthy and unaware, too small, too conspicuous, too cautious, too...me.
It is imagination that enables us to perceive. Our capacity to imagine is both imperfect and glorious, and only paying attention can improve it. Imagination is the only thing that can connect us to reality. Without our ability to make images we would have no way of understanding the outside world. Even as it is, so many images are thrown at us per second that there is no possible way all of it could enter our brains completely untainted by our mind's opinion of the truth. Imagination is not to 'invent' but to 'discover' what cannot be seen but may be seen in the past or in the future or from some other perspective. Ideas, for example do not exist by definition, they cannot be present, but they are not invented, they are discovered by means of combining and disconnecting and recombining many different thoughts we've spent our lives forming. We can easily see the tip of the iceberg, but we need wisdom to infer the other three-fourths.
Attention, unlike concentration, must be given. Concentration is about me; the more I try to concentrate on something, the more I see me concentrating and less do I see the thing I am actually concentrating on, I end up seeing it the way I see it and seeing nothing new at all. It pretends to be about other things, but its not. Attention though, is not so easily switched on and off, it is given and it must be found, we cannot control it, which makes it scary, yet useful. When you capture someone's attention, they are quite literally, unpreventively under your control.
We are all terrified that we will... what? It is fear that causes us to do bad work, so the fear of working badly is a self fulfilling prophecy. Only paying attention can bring peace from fear and panic, if we are so terrified of what we may see that we never pay attention to anything, we abandon ourselves to chaos. The fact is, if we manage to pay attention for a moment to those faces of fear that we cannot bear to look at, they would not get clearer, but further blur before our eyes, proving our fears not only harmless, but nonexistent.
An uncomfortable choice: freedom or independence?
Think about that one before you continue reading. You can have either, but not both, because one must destroy the other.
Independence is born of fear; the desire is common. We don't want to depend on things that might let us down, but the thing is, we NEED the outside world, those targets remember?
Freedom is a mystery; it is a given natural, like being present (another given that sometimes people try so hard to be in). It is freedom that makes us human, however we cannot control it because we do not make it, so we are in fear of it. Independence is the synthetic of freedom.
We hate the thing we need. The most useful things are given; but we fear the supply will dry up somehow. Consequently we reject these gifts and manufacture substitutes; 'lust' or 'fun' for love, 'laughter' or 'contentment' for joy... these are inferior replicas, but our creations wouldn't deny us would they? We cannot control reality, but we can control our fantasies. Good? No. Our fantasies don't exist; so we're not really controlling anything at all. Good thing this illusion of control is so deeply reassuring...
If there were no obstacle to overcome there would be no quest. No quest means death. Every living moment contains an element of quest. This unbridgeable distance between all of us may be your enemy, but it is your friend. Romeo is different, separate, and therefore, out of Juliet's control, no matter how hard she tries to bridge that gap, she will fail. Creation keeps us apart; we are not fused and can never become fused. However, as soon as there is distance, there is a potential path. Even the most basic path has two points; a beginning and an end, me and where I can go. Fusion paralyzes, distance moves.
There is always something to be lost and something to be won in every situation. These are called 'the stakes'.Again, every living moment has an element of quest; every moment of our lives we deal with a situation which will either get better or worse; even if the only 'worse' is only the infinitesimal signs of aging. Not only does every situation contain these stakes, each one of us has two halves as well. A husband we want to see, and one we don't want to see; words we want to hear, and words we don't want to hear; its double vision. One man is a man who understands us, and a man who doesn't; is a strong man and a weak man. There is always something to be lost and something to be won; they are always precisely the same size. Both the positive and the negative are present at the same time, both the hope and the fear. All of life comes in opposed twos. In a kiss... being rejected or savored. In a jump... landing or falling. A declaration of love is terrifying because the joy of being loved back is exactly mirror the terror of being rejected.
Pain comes when people defy our world view. We tend to see the good in people we like and the bad in people we dislike, its comfortable that way. To see the people we love do bad things and the people we hate do good things is so unbearable because we must either change our view of them or admit that the world is never predictable enough to establish such things as like and dislike even though that is our human instinct.
Britter OUT.
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