Becoming something…

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“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Life sure does feel like a maze, does it not? Wandering looking for the right direction, knowing at any moment we might walk right into a wall. The worst part is that we are often doomed to back-track. At best, we find ourselves busting through the wall but only to find ourselves lost again, with little frame of reference. It is part pre-determined and part under your control.

There is no alternative to being yourself. I think mostly it has to do with your attitude along the way.

You have experienced parts of the maze behind you, but not all of it. Has it shaped you? A product of our experiences or not, we have got to start listening to the scale to which we define ourselves. The confusing reality is, often the walls are miles apart and filled with millions of people. Life isn’t long enough to assume you can deduce the way out through guess and check. The cheese might not be as close or as far as you think. Without tangible walls to give a sense of direction or a map to the maze ahead (or the one being built), why are we full of this concern. You can define ‘this’ how you like, but even if the concern is not to have one, what is it in context to?

We often look to our most local of mazes through which we see ourselves traveling, forgetting the immensity of the one we are actually in.

Leave your home, find your car (or the nearest bus stop), and think about how well you seem to navigate the most local of mazes. You are probably doing just fine along life’s maze. Stop looking for the walls, looking for the end, and fearing the retracing of steps. Otherwise, the cheese won’t have a smell anymore and your sense of direction will be localized to the smaller of life’s mazes. Because the local maze you might be stuck in, is the one inside your head.

“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Don’t create context, walls to define yourself against. Self, defined, is limited to the scale of what you define it against. There is no alternative to being yourself, amidst walls you can’t see and contexts you can’t begin to define.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

My man left a bunch of quotes on my desk this afternoon. I figured I would share them with you all.

For one human being to love another that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof; the work for which all other work is but preparation.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.
-Sam Keen

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it dows not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inpiriation.
-Pearl S. Buck

Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving creates love.
-Lao Tzo

The only gift is a portion of thyself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them and you have found a lover for life.
-Leo Buscaglia

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or it’s flame burns low.
-Henry ward Beecher

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
-Mignon McLaughlin

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.
-Fulton J. Sheen

The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.
-Jacques Benigne Bossuel

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined… to strengthen each other… to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
-George Eliot

The loving are the daring.
-Bayard Taylor

May all of you love and be loved.

For those that find this day to be a contemptuous lonely one, it’s just a feast day of a dead saint anyway.

This entry is coming from an interesting experience I had yesterday. Shedding light on my cultural background and growth I realized that your environment can really influence impulses. I found myself wondering why I picked oranges over minorities.

I’d just enjoyed some nice gulps of water, post workout. I was waiting for my fair weather friend to change. I say fair weather because she ditched driving me home because the roads were getting poor and I was left to wait for a fair weather bus that was a cycle late. I digress. While waiting, I looked at a photo representing the writing/academic center for the campus I work on. I noticed something peculiar. What do you notice?

I saw oranges. I was so tickled by my discovery that I asked the same question of miss fair weather. Turns out everyone is white in the photo, this being what she noticed. Stumped, I asked her to look harder. By time the oranges were of mutual discovery, she was antsy to leave and I was fumbling for my own explanation of our differing perspectives.

Was it that I came from a college with beyond Caucasian diversity around 15% (not to mention other missing groups)? Was it that I don’t remember seeing much color in my suburban environment? Why did I choose oranges over minorities?

It hit me though, in one of those I got it before but now I really understand it kind of ways, that our life experiences are unique. Not only unique, but they are the molders of how you see the world. It was important to realize that all the education in the world hadn’t taught me to see, instead I was blind. We will see things differently, all of us. Your boss or supervisor that just doesn’t seem to make sense, probably isn’t doing it on purpose. This experiential intelligence is hard to measure because it has as much to do with how much you experience as it does with the quality and variety of an experience. In the work setting, the ability to recognize this is the biggest step in being able to manage up (7 ways to manage up or Managing Up: An Overlooked Factor in Career Success). In your personal life it can help relationships grow and drama dwindle.

Can we challenge ourselves to see things differently? If you saw white people, begin looking for the oranges, and vice versa. I think too often we find ourselves in conversations where we are more concerned about the other person not seeing the oranges that you did. Instead, why not notice that they saw something different and wonder why you didn’t see it at all.

Life is one big learning opportunity. If you aren’t listening you might just always end up with a bunch of white people or oranges for that matter.