Did you ever think you'd learned a lesson only to be confronted with an opportunity to do things differently and then realize you'd just made the same mistake again...even after being fully aware of what you should do...you go ahead and do (or in my case say and do) the wrong thing anyway. This is sort of like when I by accident start driving to work on my way to the grocery store. My car just wants to drive where it usually goes. It takes work to drive in a different direction. It takes real intention to drive in a different direction that you've never been in before. So I've been trying to basically be better or do better. The frustrating thing is that the knowledge of where I can go wrong is only part of it, then there is the actual execution. This is not so easy. I feel deeply flawed, often. Sometimes I think f it, I just need to accept my flawed self. Then I realize that is a cop out and I can accept my flawed self and still work on improving. Nice try, right?
So here I am trying to both accept flawed me and improve flawed me. Someone wrote on my facebook page that it takes 18 times of doing something to create a habit. That number sounded pretty attainable to me, until I realized that I may not do the actual thing everyday and so reaching the magic 18 might take a little longer then 18days. Also, I am sure if put too much time in between you are screwed with your 18 too. I just dont know what to think sometimes.
I guess it all really depends on you how you look at things. What lens you pick up determines what you see. When I was a kid I used to be fascinated by binoculars. My grandfather had a pair that he kept in this special red velvet lined black leather case. I was fascinated by them. I would look thru one eye at a time and frequently was looking thru the wrong end and seeing everything close look very far away. Do not ask me why, but I used to like this view more then the up close one. Even as a little kid, maybe I was fascinated by how things look from a distance. How everyday things looked special from a little further away. Somehow this idea occured to me a few days ago while I was driving...
When I was drinking I used to say that I got beer mircoscropes when everyone else got beer goggles. Beer goggles I think was a euphism for the ineviable lapses in judgement that drunk people make about picking partners. So while some people got beer goggles, I was convinced I had beer microscopes. That the addition of alcohol would somehow cause me to look at people up close and super intensely. Totally distorted and scary. Now, sober, I can see that even now I can pull out the microscope and not even really know it. Looking at people and events so up close that it actually distorts the picture and interpretation. Making small events into big events or assigning big meaning to insignifigant comments or tones.
So here I am. Armed with both binoculars and microscopes and evaulating my world. I dont know what it means that I do this. I dont know what it means that I am pathologically aware of how I look at things even now. That I can keep a not quite right contact on bc it reminds me to pay attention to what lens I am looking at things thru.
The grateful to be alive lens, the f the world lens, the mommy lens, so many different ways to look at my life. So many different thoughts that come with each view. Today, I am going to settle on keeping my eyes (not my binoculars or microscopes) on the prize. The prize to me is to be able to see what I have and not what I dont. This reminds me of how I used to draw negative space as this drawing exercise. You basically draw what is not there and you end up with a picture of what is. I think I spent my life looking at negative space. Now I just want to see what is there.xx
No comments:
Post a Comment