The Level

A few people have asked about the title of this blog “It’s All About the Level”. 

In 1999 my husband Jim and I traveled to what is now our permanent home in Florida to participate in a weekend course called UYO, Understanding Yourself and Others. In this course, there were discussions and demonstrations showing, much like a builder, the importance of having a tool belt. Naturally anyone building anything knows that a tool belt keeps everything available for use when it is needed. This concept was incorporated into learning to change your life and the tools that would be useful doing that.

Being a very literal person, my tool belt, at the time, consisted of a hammer to pound my point across, a screw driver to tighten my resolve, nails for security and finally, and the most important for me then and now, is the level.

In building a house for instance, if the walls aren’t straight and don’t align with the floor and ceiling, the house won’t work because it isn’t level. Same thing in life. If my happiness and peace are not level, if they are not treated as the most precious possessions I have, then nothing will line up. I will be bitchy, crabby and out of sorts. I will worry about everything and everyone and I won’t take care of myself.

There have been many challenges in my life this past 12 months including illness and death and I have lost that level many times. During those times, life was difficult, the challenge of the day more than necessary.

When I once again found my level, I discovered this pool of strength that keeps me going, keeps me strong and on the days when I want to curl up in a corner, feel sorry for myself and cry I allow that to happen because it is part of being level and whole.

Labeling

Labeling people causes separations that cannot always be mended. We separate individuals into categories of black, Hispanic, female, old, etc. We separate them not according to their accomplishments or expertise, but by their physical attributes. It certainly isn’t hurtful to call someone who is Latino a Hispanic, or a person of Oriental dissent an Asian.

Do you ever think about why someone is a bully? Could it be that they have been beaten down so harshly, that the only thing that makes sense is to hurt anyone they can? As hard as it is to admit, I have had fantasies of causing others pain. That hurts to say almost as much as the memories. I have never acted on these feelings and I definitely understand them. The pain of being rejected, of being misunderstood while being abused, can be so great that life just plain hurts. Add to that, the inability, strength or permission to express that hurt without being labeled a cry baby or some other such atrocity or even worse being ignored; all that anger bottling up inside until the body becomes a literal pressure cooker and explodes.

What about the other labels, the ones that cause pain, the ones that stay with a person for a long time? Fat, ugly, stupid, retarded, faggot, slut and so on. Fat and ugly were my labels, with stupid thrown in for extra punch. These were my father’s parenting tools. He used them repeatedly and often and with a great deal of malice. (This is not about pity or feeling sorry for myself.) I have learned to be at peace with the past he created and the influence he had on my life and the permission he gave others to treat me in kind. I remember being in my 20’s and traveling from Michigan to Ohio with my sister and her husband to see our older brother. When we pulled up at their home, my sister-in-law came outside and as I emerged from the back seat she called out “Oh, I see you brought the fat one with you.” (That is really a direct quote even after all these years because something’s you just never forget.) Was she being intentionally cruel or was she just fitting in because I had accepted my place in the dynamics of our family as the fat, ugly one? My point being, by using these detrimental labels, we teach others to use them.

How do we stop the cycle of behavior? It has to begin with each and every one of us. Maybe by teaching our children (and even ourselves) to accept who we are, to be proud of themselves and even their physical differences. Letting them be free to explore their strengths and develop habits to enrich their weaknesses. When we accept who we are and not judge ourselves, we don’t judge others. It will be okay for your son or daughter to stand up to peer pressure and not laugh when the “geek” is knocked down in the hall at school or the heavy set girl is ridiculed and called “fatty” or “slob”. It will simply be okay for them to be comfortable in their own skin. Loving themselves, and at the same time seeing the good in others, without the separation of labeling.

The final question for me is when I see anyone being mistreated, will I have the strength of my own convictions to stand up for what I believe, or will I just mind “my” own business?  

Personal Peace

I pray for peace and every day I have been leaving a quote by some famous or infamous person on my Facebook page about what peace means and how to attain it.

What I know is that peace has to be individual before it can be global. If I am not at peace with who I am, if I want what others have because they have it and for no other reason, if I am jealous of the number of friends someone has or their car, then I am not at peace with me. If I let the past I survived continue to beat me up and bring me down, I will not know personal peace.

How do I define personal peace? An individual’s state of being that is totally accepting of the circumstances that created the person they are, as being simply that, circumstances. The actions and words of others that impregnated themselves in one’s mind and heart to mean something about them that wasn’t true. Personal peace is about finding that center in ourselves that accepts the past for what it was and decides to be who they truly are in spite of it, with an understanding that we control how we feel about ourselves and the thoughts and expressions of others will not penetrate or crack our resolve. We choose to live in harmony with our own thoughts and feelings and simply be at peace.

Isn’t a bully someone who dislikes themselves so much that they want to hurt others? If we were all at peace on this great planet of Mother Earth, there would be no war because we would all accept the differences that we do not understand. It wouldn’t matter who believed in what Higher Power or who had more land or oil or gold. We would all be so content with who we are, what we believed and the importance of our possessions, that our governments would have no reason to be conflicted.

True Peace has to start with individuals being happy and content; spreading that feeling of surrender to others. Now I just have to figure out how to get my message to the world.

Messages from Everywhere

                We have all heard those stories that are meant to make a specific point. One may call them parables, others just old folklore. Two specific stories have stuck with me. There is a man who is warned that there is a flood coming and he says “I have no worries as I am a religious man and God will protect me.” The flood comes and he is stranded on his roof when both a row boat and a helicopter come to rescue him and once again he responds the same way. Well, the man drowns and when he gets to heaven he demands to speak to God. When he is before Him, he is appalled that God let him die as he had always been such a religious man and why hadn’t he been saved? God simply responded, “I sent you a radio broadcast, a row boat and a helicopter, what else did you want ME to do?”

            The second has great meaning for me. A woman is walking down the street when she falls into a very deep hole. People are passing by, ignoring her pleas for help. A wealthy man walks by and upon hearing the woman cry out her distress, he throws money into the hole. Then a member of clergy walks by and when she sees the woman struggling to climb out, writes a prayer and throws it into the hole. The woman now knows she is doomed to remain in the hole when she looks up and sees her friend walking by. The woman shouts “Dee, can you please help me. I can’t find my way out.” To her surprise, Dee jumps into the hole with her friend. The woman says “Are you crazy, now we are both in this hole.” In all her wisdom Dee responds “Yes, I know but you see, I have been down here before and I know the way out.”

            Sometimes life feels like one big hole that just consumes who we are and we do not trust ourselves and believe in ourselves enough to listen to that voice telling us, sending us the answers. Or maybe we just don’t like the answers or are not willing to push back what feels like this insurmountable fear that we will be so rejected or ignored that nothing we do will matter.

            The question for me then becomes how many messages does it take? I don’t believe there is a set number or that age or really anything else factors into the equation. I am afraid. I sometimes look at my life as being over, not in the terms of death, but in the reality that there are some items on that list that it is too late to consider. My head says this is nonsense and my heart hurts because the dream is still alive.

            Every day I dream about being a published author and every day I read the words of others. I dream of stories that I will write and I write nothing. I start in my head and nothing ever is written. All because: I am afraid. Fear stops us from doing so many things. Maybe the answer is to trust those who send us the messages, to trust those who believe in and love us so much that there is no question for them as to what we can be. I seriously pray that those messages continue until I feel that my life is not over.