Greetings, to anyone who might see this blog. I am reinstating my old travel blog as inspired by a colleague. For anyone who knows me, I often pride myself on being a wanderer; a searcher of new ideas, lessons and information. Strength finder tests in the professional world label it as Intellection, in my spiritual life it is often called the spiritual journey and emotionally it is simply called lost. While some of these "labels" have happier connotations than others, it all gets to the core of how I identify myself as being someone that looks for new information, enjoys new destinations and challenges and is always willing to try new things just to see what I learn.
I inundate myself with new hobbies, a browser bookmark full of blogs, stacks of self-help books and podcasts of self-improvement, life lessons and journeys of personal growth. I love the idea that I can learn a lesson from life simply by reading it or hearing it. Mostly, I enjoy hearing the stories of others and even their smallest positive revelation or forceful punch to the stomach that leads to self-discovery.
Tonight I had one of my many life lessons and I find myself having the courage to share it. For those of you who know me, I am not a fan of TV, pop culture and certainly embody an old soul personality. I often dismiss items such as current social (excluding political) events as I choose to not find the relevancy of such happenings to my own life. In fact, tonight I verbally let it be known to my dearest husband that I fear a life in which the TV and similar mechanisms of mediocre distraction, take over my free time. By vocalizing my isolated opinion, I in fact created a wall of judgement and separation between us.
Let me just tell you now that how I handled the situation was far from ideal. Not surprisingly, after the tiff I went online to see what new blog posts came into my awareness that could give me greater insight as to my feelings, reactions and behaviors. What I found was an article entitled, "30 life lessons for people in their 30s." While I am not yet 30, I found this very enticing and immediately opened the bulleted list of items 1-30. If I am to be honest and look deeper, one of the real reasons I love reading blogs and books is that typically the "lessons" are numbered and written within one sentence presented in bold on the page. This format is convenient for someone (like me) who wants to learn the lesson without actually reading (or living) the details of what the author went through the learn the lesson.
Nevertheless, against my pattern of behavior to read it, feel better about myself and move on, I decided to soak up one lesson in particular - "Life is a mirror of you." What you like about other people is what you like about yourself and what you do not like about other people is what you don't like about yourself. Being a social worker, there was no other natural action than to overanalyze how this applies to my life, both in the present moment and since childhood.
My thoughts included the following complex pattern. If I do not like behaviors of individuals who watch TV then I don't like such behaviors about myself. Why don't I like those behaviors? It could stem from having a father who spent most of his time isolated in another room throughout my childhood. Or -if I dig really deep within myself instead of outwardly blaming others - it could stem from my own beliefs of the type of people that watch a lot of TV. Like LEGOs I have trained my brain to think that people who watch TV tend to be placed within one section or area within a LEGO set - namely, they are uninteresting and generally complacent in life.
You might be telling yourself, WHOA! what a stretch Jaclyn. Well this actually makes sense why I have a negative opinion of it, as one of my deepest fears and worries is to be dull and uneventful with life, hence the searcher personality! Bingo, this is generally referred to as self-actualization within human psychology. My most admired behaviors reflect my incessant need to be a human GOing or human DOing rather than a human BEing. These actions reflect my general avoidance of self-reflection and resistance to learning my own dirty, unpleasant life lessons but rather prefer to learn vicariously through people that I have no actual relationship with.
My point being if I practice playing with LEGOs or allowing them to just BE within LEGO land and not have to move and always fight for adventure, I will soften my negative experiences of myself and therefore my negative perceptions of others. In fact, to quote another blog that I recently read, "we cannot control the actions of others, but only our reactions to it."
I have traveled the world and completed feats that individuals twice my age might never get to do. I am very privilege and at this point in my life, having a TV, watching movies, maybe even playing video games is just the challenge I need for myself, since I truly want to look deeper.
**I am posting again on this blog because I recently had lunch with a colleague who reminded me that while learning from other people is valuable, if we don't stop and think about our own experiences it will create in a gap in what we can truly learn. In fact, I have been thinking about posting to this blog not only as a way for me to share my own experiences and lessons, but also in the hope that others may read it and begin to feel any sense of community or similarity amongst all of us as humans.
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