Learning

Found this at Subversive Harmony. I like the way this girl has decided to look at the world.

*You’re not really as awkward as you think. Or if you are, other people are just as awkward, so it doesn’t really matter.

* It’s a pretty safe bet that you do/think/like things that other people don’t do/think/like. This makes you interesting, possibly a little eccentric, but not a two-headed alien.

* It’s not constructive to clam up in a corner. You’re not rude if you talk. You’re not even rude if you talk to someone first.

* Stubbornness is a gift. You were stubborn enough to walk to three grocery stores looking for your canned sweet potatoes, and you found them. Be too stubborn to think going to events is useless.

* Do things you enjoy because you enjoy them, and enjoy the things you do on their own terms. Anything else is icing.

* Remember how much better you did with finding a job and an apartment when you set aside the desperation, listened to your instincts, took your time, explored a number of options, and didn’t take the first offer you came across? You think maybe that might apply to other situations?

* You know how you said you didn’t need to try things to know if you’d like them, and then you let yourself be talked into trying them and had fun despite yourself, even if it still wasn’t quite your bag? Remember that. You know how you didn’t like all those different foods when you were a kid but for some reason tried them again recently and changed your mind? Remember that, too.

* On the other hand, if it’s not fun, and honestly not fun, there are other events/groups/activities out there. Life’s too short to waste time.

* Rumination is both your friend and your enemy. Probably more your enemy at this point.

* Que sera, sera.

Why didn’t someone tell me these things a decade ago?

I particularly like “anything else is icing”. Why do we insist on having such high standards for ourselves? What do we get out of it except a constant feeling of inadequacy? My husband occasionally reams me out for possessing higher standards against which I judge myself than those standards by which I judge other people.

The other important one is “life’s too short to waste time”. That means staying in that soul-crushing job, not-destructive-but-certainly-not-constructive relationship, that cruddy apartment may be gaining you a few cents here or there, but being miserable (or even neutral) hardly balances the gain. Be happy. It’s better for you in the long run, and probably the short run too. Really.

Alas

Rain! Cool temperatures!

My husband asked me what I’d like to do on my birthday weekend, and I was rather depressed to discover that I couldn’t think of a single thing other than eating copious amounts of raw fish. If only Holly Cole had been in town this weekend instead of last weekend…

Spiritual Parallax

Okay, no one ever said spirituality was easy.

(How’s that for a one-line opener?)

No, seriously. If you think spirituality is easy, then you’re either a one-day-a-week organised religion-type who doesn’t think about it on the other six days, or you’re not trying.

Spirituality is all about trying to be better than you currently are. This automatically becomes difficult because of the following issues:

1) You’re constantly improving, so you always think the new stuff you’re learning is hard. Ever take piano lessons as a kid? The early skills you pick up become incorporated into your skill set and applied to subsequent learning. Problem is, we don’t see it. We keep starting new pieces of music, and they’re always hard. We never think that if we go back and play something we worked on a year ago, we’re much better than we were at the time. The same thing applies to spirituality. You work through an issue, it becomes part of you, you hit another issue, and all the time you’re saying, “Gosh, why doesn’t it get any easier?”

2) We tend to work through the same issues in a different context, and we don’t realise it until the lesson’s learned.

3) You can understand an issue with your head, but until you understand it with your heart and soul, it will still be an issue. (This is my Waterloo.)

4) Your needs change as you evolve and develop throughout life. This means that you can sometimes be working on an issue long after it’s past, not realising that you should be focusing on another issue. You’ve got to stay alert and sensitive to your own needs.

5) You can always be better. Always.

When you realise that spirituality is a daily thing, an expression of your relationship of whatever you consider the Divine, then two things happen: you understand that each action you make is spiritual, and you see that our innate laziness has made adherence to a one-day-a-week religion an easy way out. One of the reasons I follow a neo-Pagan path is because I have to do it all myself. No one else tells me what I ought to think, or interprets words for me, or that I’m forgiven. I have to struggle through it myself. Ultimately, this means that I learn the lessons on a much deeper level. It also means that the solution to the problem is intimate and personalised, so to speak.

It doesn’t, unfortunately, make it easy.

Lately, people have been talking to me about how blocked they feel spiritually, and I sometimes wonder if it’s because we think too much. We create our own obstacles; we choke up our own expressions of creativity and joy. We prefer to be miserable, because for some vague socialised reason, we believe we ought to be unhappy. We create exercises to “work” on our expression, our connection to the world around us. We “practice” our spirituality.

Whatever happened to being?

Maybe we ought to borrow Nike’s slogan of “Just Do It”. Or Yoda’s good old “Do or do not – there is no try.”

Live it. Breathe it. And congratulate yourself for every day you live, because you touched people somehow. You put words down on paper. You punched keys. You smiled. You daydreamed as you looked out the window. You made dinner.

Yes, you’re trying to improve yourself. However, saying, “I didn’t do what I dreamed I could do” does more damage than good. Positive reinforcement, in this case, is worth more than negative reinforcement. Being better doesn’t mean being unhappy. The old adage of “No pain, no gain” has no application here. Yes, we suffer, we deal, we’re stronger. That doesn’t have to happen every day, though.

Be thankful for the little things. Be open to the idea that yes, it can be easy. And stop making it harder than it has to be.

Just do it.

Random Religious And Literary Links

Found on a banner on a web page:

The Goddess is here, and She is organising.

Well, I laughed.

It’s on the interesting Christian Wicca page. Nope, I haven’t yet read it in entirety, but it’s nice to see that some people don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Here’s an excerpt from an article entitled Christian Wicca: The Oxymoron Syndrome:

To be very honest, I am not the original person to set about Christianizing the practices and sacred Days of Power of The Wicca, Pagan religions, or any earth-based religions. As much as I would like to take credit for this – the Roman Catholic Church did this first. The Catholics are truly in many aspects the original Christian Wiccans or ChristoPagans.

Heh.

More oddness: S.A.L.V. (Slytherins Against Lord Voldemort). Aside from the spelling mistakes, it’s an intriguing idea.

Gnash

Tori Amos will be in Toronto this August 13th on her LottaPianos tour. I, however, will be in Pennsylvania.

Sigh.

Neil Gaiman on seeing Tori at some point during this North American tour: And no, I don’t yet know which ones I’ll be going to. Given that this is going to be the last time she’ll be on the road until at least 2005, I want to make as many as I can. (“Look, I’ll just ride in the bus and write a book. You’ll hardly even notice me. Promise.”)

As if Neil Gaiman could ever not be noticed.