Humans Are Funny

Humans are funny.  We really are a peculiar people.  To quote a famous philosopher, “Humans have a knack for choosing precisely those things that are worst for them”. -Albus Dumbledore.  Sometimes we don’t even choose the worst thing consciously, it just sort of happens.  Note to self: don’t make an emotional decision that goes against what you decided to do when you were in a logical setting.  A problem steps in front of us and we try to figure out a way to sidestep it, climb over it, dig under it, or plow right through it.  These sometimes will work if the problem isn’t too large.  However, when the problem is looming over you and is too big for any of those to work, you tend to do the opposite of what is best out of fear, lack of understanding, impatience, or frustration.  You don’t even recognize that you are doing is the opposite of helpful. 

Here is an illustration:  When we fear something, our tendency is to avoid it.  What we don’t emotionally understand in that moment is that facing that fear, confronting it and thinking logically will empower you to make the right decision, or overcome your fear, or whatever the case may be.   

With anxiety, whenever you are having anxious thoughts, you desperately try to rid yourself of them and/or try to explain them away.  This cascades and before you know it, your all of a bother and you don't even remember what triggered it.  The best way to get rid of it is try to refocus on something else, and ignore it.  Counter intuitive.  Easier said than done as anyone with anxiety will inform you.  Another example is found in my own art, singing.  Well sort of my own art.  In order to get good tone, extend your upper register and range, you need to think about lower breath support.  Your natural instinct would be to reach upwards, which makes it harder and hurts your voice.   

Kind of odd how many things tend to be that way.  In order to have more spiritual peace and freedom, the more commandments of God we keep.  Seems opposite, but that’s the battle between our dual natures.  Our natural instincts appeal to our natural being.  The ways of nature are usually very simple.  They can be complex, difficult, large, or small, but really it is very simple.  The counter intuitive solution, the best way to do things, appeals to our spiritual natures, our souls.  Our brains and hearts have to work together to double check and make sure that a particular option is right, because if we let one or the other make an exclusive decision, we have a good chance of making a mistake.

It all ends up working out and we get some guidance.  We look back and think, “Man, how in the world did I make the right decision”?  It seems that we are helped along more than we think we are sometimes.  We see the path is perfect, once we are past major check points that is.  Which is funny because that tends to make us more nervous and anxious to do the right thing the next time an issue stands in our face.  "What if this path leads me here", or "what if the right path is just around the corner",  or "what if I make the wrong choice"?  Whenever the next big decision comes up we think about the past and swim in these questions without a paddle. Past success makes us twice as fearful of future failure.  And past failure tends to make us more confident and motivated for future success.  This is why we must trudge through hard times occasionally, it really is what gives us the faith, confidence, and capability to succeed, and make the right decision in the future.

That’s what we’re here to learn.  Which of our natural instincts do we respond to most often?  How do we respond to the right side of our natures more accurately?  We practice.  We ask for help.  We study.  It is quite the process.  The more we try to avoid our fears the less we will learn and the more unscheduled trials we may face.  As a wise turtle once said, "We often meet our destiny on the path we take to avoid it". 

I'm Not a Writer...

I’m not a writer.  I don’t write.  The words that come on to the page are simply my thoughts, sporadically jotted into what you all call words and sentences.  I don’t know why the all of a sudden curiosity in moving my thoughts from the abstract to the concrete.  To some they may think that I’m depressed or struggling.  I’m actually doing just fine.  Who doesn’t have a hiccup in the road sometimes?  I have found that even when the path looks never ending and relief feels that it will never come, it does.  Logically we know this, emotionally, we continue to relearn this every time something difficult confronts us.  So what do we do?

Well whether or not it is something hard and difficult that comes before you, or the greatest thing you have yet experienced, you struggle with a cavernous desire to express it, to get it out of your head and heart and into space.  Why is that?  Not sure exactly, but it has something to do with human chemistry; to reach for something to transcend the human experience.  When you feel so much that it seems to burst out of you and concrete ideas don’t suffice.  The only way to rid yourself of the rising pressure seems to be through the arts.

Honestly, no one can recall in written history when “the arts” started being used to describe the indescribable.  I don’t think it ever “started”.  It seems to me that they are used without beginning or end.  Every culture and peoples have songs, dances, arts, dramas, etc. to describe all walks of life and human experience.  You try to describe a human experience by explaining it through a supernatural one (most often).  You need the relief that comes from an extra-human interpretation of the things you go through and the ideas you have for a better life.

Have you ever looked at a piece of art and immediately felt your entire being transported to the setting, your heart changes it’s pulse to match the emotion of the painters strokes, and we feel as if we are not us for the slightest second?  You either forget what you are worried about in your life, or how you feel is brought up to your eyes. 

Have you ever watched a play and forgotten that the people on the stage are not real?  They are people created by a playwright.  The actors have lives off the stage where they may be completely different from the people they become when the curtain rises.  Their character transforms their character for two hours and their goal is to teach you something.  You feel that familiar change of heart pump.  You don’t even consciously know that it is happening but you crave that feeling the next time we are sitting in the audience, waiting for the curtain to rise. 

Have you ever been to the symphony and heard the colors being painted by the conductor?  You catch glimpses of every human emotion as it floats from the flutes to the cellos, back to the horns, then through the percussion section.  How can so much be interpreted by such unique sounds and colors?  How are they configured to create an emotion?  So a configuration of frequencies and timbres can portray human feelings and thoughts.  Cool.  Who knew? 

What about reading a piece of classic literature or poetry?  The symbols are put together to create ideas.  Humans call them words.  How can words be so eloquently sewed together to create a flow that rolls off the tongue and into the heart?  We seek to find ourselves in the characters on the pages.  You piece together a fragment here and there and you see things that you wish you possessed.  The pure forms of good and evil are seen with all their personalities in plain sight so we can see them in their disguises here in reality. 

When dancers shape themselves into inhumane figures and patterns, what passes through your mind?  It doesn’t seem possible that the human figure can be completely re-arranged with such grace and beauty.  You can’t look away and you don’t understand how the dancers movement is exactly how you feel.

 

Film is an art that is growing rapidly in popularity.  Unfortunately, film has a bad connotation because like a plague is has sought, unintentionally, to substitute in for the other arts.  But films combine multiple arts into setting.  It has a cross-art form that draws us in the instant the opening credits start. 

No one wants the ordinary, lackluster events of everyday life to be portrayed and that is why we always get a glimpse into the extraordinary and THAT is what we call art.  

Every one has that favorite song when they are sad or particularly blissful.  They have art hung on their walls of things that help them feel certain ways.  Their favorite movies are the ones they pop in when they are having a day of good fortune.  They go to see productions that make them cry, for joy or sorrow; and while they pretend to hate it, they secretly love to be brought to tears from the arts, for joy, sorrow, or pure art.  It doesn’t matter what the art form, but it takes you someplace else, so you are able to see more clearly where you are.  It is hard to see the here and now, when it is too close to focus on.  You need to step to higher ground in order to see the world in which you live.  The arts connect with your very soul.  When you leave an artistic experience, the feelings linger, sometimes for days.  You find yourself hoping that you could carry that feeling with you.  You long for the feeling to remain with you so you can escape the monotony of life.  You wish that life was an art.  That’s when it hits you that when you are part of the artistic process in any way, your life can be an art.  Living to the highest point you can, closest to the heavens, is the finest art there is.

When No Roads Diverge in the Yellow Wood

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they are confronted with the unknown.  There seems to be no paths diverging in the yellow wood.  So the first thing we tend to do is sit in the clearing of trees and rest.  As time slips past, impatience and frustration seeps into our nature.  We start by remembering the easy times of times past.  This thought steps down a floor to wishing that the path was still that way.  Time continues mock and still, no path appears in the trees.  Our anxiety grows higher and higher until we are no longer upset solely about the lack of direction, but we are upset that we are upset.  We desperately try to rid ourselves of the feeling and hope to hope that a path just…appears.  Desperation leads us to over think, over analyze, predict the future, and over stress.  This boils our anxiety to the point of what we th  We can’t stand waiting here.  The darkness of the forest and the depths of our feelings seem tangible.   
ink is hysteria.

Eventually it becomes too much and we cry out to…something, and while different cultures and peoples cry out to different things, it seems a funny thing that we all cry out to a being or power that is above our own.  It’s then that we find that it is in our nature to reach out and to believe in divinity.  That is the way we were created.  As we plead and beg, all of our despair seems to escape us out of two spheres of light.  As our cheeks are salted, we explain our situation to Deity.  Then, as if by surprise, we realize that a certain calmness has covered us.  When did the calmness enter?  We can’t even remember.  Our thoughts are still ambiguous, but that doesn’t seem to trouble us like before.  All we know is that the despair is lessened.  We have peace; the absence of conflict in our hearts as we feel those devious feelings of desperation slowly drawn out of us.  Only now are we able to have a clear enough mind to get up off the ground and move. 

Once on our feet, we begin to walk around the clearing, searching for an answer.  We move branches, step into thickets, sweep away the undergrowth, and continue.  Finally we see the path a few steps past a fallen tree.  Our initial excitement is stifled by a nagging doubt, “This can’t be right.  It should be clear as day.  Why is this fallen tree blocking the path”?  And while these questions circle, we feel an instinctive nudge down the path.  This nudge feels unique to every single person.  The endless accounts of people hearing a voice, feeling a pressing hand, seeing a mental picture, getting a clear thought, gaining an unyielding desire or motivation, or having other paths blocked from our view entirely, all fade as we feel within ourselves our own, unique “nudge”.  Words, the greatest inadequacy in describing human emotion, don’t have the specificity to explain how we know that this is the right path and despite the nagging doubts in our head, we go forward. 

The fallen tree is the first of many obstacles.  This doesn’t settle our doubts, but we still trudge forward.  We start to wonder if we made the right choice.  “Was there another path that we didn’t see”?  This kind of thinking slows us down and we trip and stumble on smaller obstacles in the path because we are too preoccupied to see.  The path continues upwards.  We see the summit of the mountain miles above us.  That is our goal.  We try to keep our eyes glued to that goal, true north.  Although we have our eyes up, we continue to trip over rocks, roots, shrubs, and logs which is frustrating because don’t understand why this is happening.  Our eyes are on our goal right?  We look ahead on the trail and see pieces of it going up the mountain.  We look back and see that our trail has guided us safely around impassible chasms that would have lead to our end.  We grow in our sense of assurance that we are on the right path.  The thought then occurs to us that we need to avoid the small rocks before we can make it to the top.  Our feet are offended with the constant barrage of hindrances.  So we take our eyes off the summit and glance two steps ahead of us.  We are able to negotiate our foot placement much better.  We put our subconscious, child-like trust in the path.  We’ve had assurances that help us to know that we’ll end at the top, but we can’t look too far ahead or we’ll continue to trip on the little decisions placed before us. 

After miles of our journey, we get to a resting place towards the top of the mountain.  We have come so far, and while we aren’t nearly at the summit yet, we can see much more of the path behind us from higher ground.  We look and see to our surprise, the little clearing from our past.  The memory of that clearing floods our vision and while it was very hard, we look back at that moment with a loving fondness.  For we see now, that who we are now was made in that patch of woods.  Where we are now, was decided amongst those trees.  We come to this and our view of that instance changes to that of a parent witnessing a child trying a new skill and for the first time, for so we were, in that little space of trees so long ago.