Αναθεώρηση Part 10: Learned . . .

I am an inquisitive, indeed curious, person so it is unsurprising that I learned a great deal in 2011 – some things from my own efforts to acquire knowledge and understanding, and some from the generosity or genius of others.

Some things I learned from scratch while others I simply deepened or expanded my learning. There were also some things that I re-learned in the sense that I had all but forgotten about them or what they were.

All in all I am grateful for the things I learned although sometimes knowledge and understanding can be a burden as well as a blessing.

Here are my 11 things for 2011 that I learned or re-learned or learned more about:

1. Dignity

It may be a function of age or experience, or perhaps a softer philosophical disposition, but I learned last year a great deal about dignity. That is not to say I acted with dignity on all occasions that I could or should have – far from it, but there were some occasions that I did and I realized that not only can this be a good thing for me, but also it is often a much more gentle way of behaving towards others.

If I think to the occasions where I lacked dignity it was because my childishness and ego demanded that my complaints be heard, my situation be appreciated more, that I be the centre of attention and so on.

I think dignity is when we have every right to behave in one way – usually demanding, rough and raw, but choose to behave more gently, more subtly, in a more restrained way. It is an act of self-control in the face of easier alternatives.

It relates in some ways to compassion in that it is something we do because we CAN and not because we must. And when we are dignified in our behavior we are often putting the feelings and sensitivities of others before our own. It is kind.

It is an appealing behavior and, building on my learning in 2011, one that I certainly aspire to cultivate further.

2. Patience

Those who know me well would not immediately reach for the word “patience” when thinking of me. Indeed, they would much more likely choose an antonym or just laugh. However, I have made a little progress in learning more about the benefits and practice of patience during the last year.

It is always a battle for me to be patient – to fight my urges, desires, curiosity, insecurity and energy – but there is a time where patience is not only the best strategy, but also provides more satisfaction and well-being.

You see being curious, impatient, full of desire and energetic is often stressful and tiring. For me, and also for those around me. While it brings progress, makes things happen, advances things, it also saps energy from others, feels rough and aggressive at times. I realized that this last year more than previously.

Patience is an expression of trust. A belief that one can let things be and they will follow their own natural order without requiring intervention or influence.

Trusting things, situations and people allows one to be more patient. On the occasions I am patient, I think this is what helps me. The concept of trust.

There is another dimension to patience which is deferral – reprioritizing the thing that one is examining and thus deferring its immediacy and importance in our lives. This is also patience. Not everything has a unit value of 1. Not everything is the most important thing in the world. Not everything needs to be addressed now.

I must work on this in practice.

3. Understanding

“Understanding” in English can mean two things – comprehension and sympathy (or possibly even empathy).

“I need to improve my understanding of the situation before I decide how to approach it” – comprehension.

“Despite his aggressive and rude behaviour, she showed her understanding and left him alone to calm down.” – sympathy

I have learned a lot more about understanding this last year. Firstly from my committed interest in and increasing practice of compassion – which drives both the quest to understand and gain clarity, and then the expression of sympathy or empathy  - although it is perhaps not quite true that all sympathy or empathy is built on proper knowledge, clarity or understanding of the matter concerned. Secondly from my curiosity and desire for knowledge – this ensures that I think about, research, investigate, query and observe the things that interest me until I understand them or at least understand them better.

There is no greater frustration to me than not to understand something – it keeps me awake at night and distracts me entirely.

There is a possibility that this is not a good thing and that it is ok to just accept things for what they are without understanding them. I manage this when I have faith in something – I do not require understanding or explanation for that – so perhaps I should be more moderate in my quest for understanding – and that is my key learning on this subject from 2011.

4. Giving

Again perhaps part of compassion dynamics, but I learned some more about giving in 2011.

I am, I believe, generally known as a giving person. Generous with my time, my energy and my resources, it gives me great pleasure and sense of purpose to give and to help people if I can.

As I grow a little wiser with my years, I am increasingly satisfied just with the act of giving and much less interested in reciprocation. This may be a weakness and is certainly a potential vulnerability, but viewed within the compassion framework I cannot think of it that way.

I have learned however that “over-giving”, when one passes the comforts of recipients no matter how well-intentioned, is not desirable and I need to pay attention to that.

I give because I can and it feels right to do so. However, to be a good giver, one needs to think not only of the giving but also of the receiving. We should only give what someone is able to receive.

Something I learned in Greece all these years was the art of hospitality – φιλοξενία as it is known. Friendship to strangers or guests from its literal root – for as I have written about before, the Greek work for “guest” and “stranger” is the same.

My biggest learning when it came to hospitality – of which the Greeks are the world’s masters – was not how to give hospitality, but how to receive it. And the best host is the gentlest and most sensitive host. Discrete, dignified as well as generous and warm.

So to be a better giver, I learned last year that I must think more about how much and what someone can receive and not impose myself with my kindness or generosity if someone cannot accept it. For then the purpose of giving is defeated and instead becomes an act of aggression or pressure – and that is not the kindness that is intended.

5. Joy

Last year I experienced joy once more. I re-learned what it is to be truly and ecstatically happy. It ought to be something that is very energetic and stimulating – and there were moments where it was indeed like a burning, blinding light – but my abiding memory of the joy I experienced last year was of peace. Of calm. Of a sense of “fit” with the world and my existence in it. And the fact that I smiled and laughed a lot more.

Joy is temporary of course and we would not know it as joy or feel it as we do if it was not contrasted with pain, misery and all the shades of happiness in between. So we should not lament its passing too much as if it were to stay it would certainly diminish in force and strength. As written elsewhere in this collection of essays – we need the contrast in life to feel things.

My joyous periods last year were so bright precisely because they contrasted with the feelings and emotions of the period that immediately preceded them.

While I have of course known joy before, it has been sometime since I can really recall the feeling. I think my learning last year was to truly treasure the moment.

To live in the “now” of those moments and not be too distracted by the future or the past. I was somewhat successful in that attempt but not entirely. . .

6. Sadness

Perhaps somewhat predictably or inevitably I also learned more about sadness last year – as a flip side to the joy I experienced, but also as the world around me and specifically certain people around me underwent terrific hardship, change and experienced great fear.

Perversely perhaps, I learned there is a warmth in sadness – it is not always cold, steely and grey. When we allow ourselves to get as close as we can to the root of our sadness and allow ourselves to express our sadness in an appropriate (& dignified) way then we can find great relief, comfort and warmth from this emotion.

I also learned that sadness is a tiring emotion and one, which if experienced over a long period, can drain you enormously.

Fortunately, I am blessed with an ability to process sadness quite well – I digest reasonably quickly. Possibly because of my desire to understand and possibly because I am not afraid of sadness any more – so I don’t avoid it or put it off. Instead I tend to embrace it, deal with it, live it and then move forward.

I do need to learn more about handling my sadness with more dignity – because frankly, being a misery guts is not a good look – and to continue to work with my sadness in a constructive way.

7. Now

I spent a lot of time thinking about “now” in 2011. To treasure moments, to free myself from the future, to depart from the past – there were many moments, many reasons and many opportunities to think about “now” and I learned a great deal from it.

As noted in my lengthy essay on the subject (I promise I will get around to editing that one at some point!), “Now” is difficult. The present is the hardest time to live, and it is the only time we live despite our best efforts to languish in dreams and memories to avoid it.

When I have managed to center myself on being very present in my life and thus be very “now”, it has been an increasingly positive experience.

I am lucky in that I am a highly instinctive person with an intuition bordering on the extra sensory – so I am able to detach myself relatively easily from some of the infrastructure of my mind because I retain the comfort of my instincts and intuition as protection. But it being “now” remains hard and requires practice.

Meditation, contemplation and usually solitude help. I learned lots from my “now-ness”. Give it a try.

8. Compromise

I wrote about this topic in the summer and consequently / subsequently thought a great deal about it and tried to put my thoughts on the subject into practice.

I have traditionally a love / hate relationship with compromise – espousing it vigorously on the one hand as a mediating principle and the best example of balance, respect and mutuality, and on the other hand exempting myself from inclusion in the game of compromise because my ideals and goals cannot be compromised and my ego will not relinquish its selfishness.

That said, with conscious thought and analysis, and factoring in the motives for compromise – love, respect, dignity, compassion to name a few – I have found it also to be a worthy act and one which is both becoming and desirable.

But as with many of these worthy behaviours, I also learned it requires balance, perspective and propriety.

9. Confidence

2011 saw me get more of my old confidence back again. I learned to be bold once more, to take risks and to feel good about it.

Anyone who knows me professionally only will find this a very odd statement, as I appear very confident at work. Appearances, however, often bely the truth.

In my private life however, for reasons not worth going into here right now, my confidence has not been strong for some time.

My own mother asked me a couple of years back why I had stopped being funny and the only reason I could think of was because I had lost my confidence. It was a supremely depressing moment and caused me deep introspection.

Since then – and last year marked significant learning on the subject – I have worked on my confidence in quite a focused way. I am distinctly more comfortable with who I am and what I am than perhaps ever before (although this is not to say I do not have work yet still to do) and I am clearer about what I need and want in life – these two things alone allow one to be a little more confident.

But more than philosophy, I have empirical reason for my increased confidence – I have got my humour back (not all of it - I will be funnier in time – be patient!) and I have got my energetic spirit back into my personal life too. When put into practice in 2011 they worked well for me – people laughed, people engaged, I was my old self and I engaged much more with my interests such as music, travel, writing, photography etc…

I also learned that your real self is always more pleasing to others and to you than any assumed or acted self can be – and so the need to assume a self other than yours or act out a part immediately become redundant. That gives me confidence. Think about it.

10. Humour

As referenced above, my increased confidence has increased my humour quotient and I feel moderately funny again. This is important to me because I enjoy laughter and fun, and more importantly I enjoy giving it to other people – and I used to be absolutely brilliant at it until I lost my way.

Humour is a strange concept. Much of what makes us laugh is very ephemeral and eccentric. Much of it is also black – schadenfreude, irony, sarcasm, satire – all somewhat aggressive or negative and yet they make us laugh.

Other people’s misfortune is at the heart of much humour – and it is because of the psychological release we have when we realize that something bad is happening to someone else is not happening to US. Usually when the bad thing is not something deserved or foreseeable.

Example: Man slips on banana skin. Funny. We laugh, not because he is going to hurt himself, but because it is something random and unlucky (he didn’t do anything to “deserve” the banana skin) and it is NOT happening to us.

Beyond from the inherent humour in the misfortune or deprecation of others, I actually believe the greatest humour is really all about “wit”.

I cannot define wit in any meaningful or helpful way, but we all understand wit when we see it. It is a kind of intelligence combined with intuition and observation. And wit is an enormous platform for humour.

I do not like jokes. With very few notable exceptions, jokes are constructed witticisms to enable the unfunny to make people laugh. The least funny people I know, know the most jokes – because they are reliant on them. Jokes are an easy route to humour if wit has abandoned you.

But the really funny people – Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard, Dave Allen, Peter Cook, John Cleese for example – don’t tell jokes. They don’t construct humour from a formula – they observe, deprecate, challenge and point out paradox and obtuseness from everyday life – and they do it with great wit and intelligence.

I once watched Billy Connolly perform live in a theatre in London. A stage, a stool, a spotlight, a microphone and 4,000 people in front of him demanding he make them laugh. Within 3 minutes of his 2 hour plus performance he owned those people, controlled them totally. And what a rush! What a high! All that power, all the energy and all of it resting on his next word, pause or expression – where it could all be lost in an instant. Agony and ecstasy – I can only imagine how wonderful that must feel.

For me, I don’t see myself in the theatre anytime soon. I’m just not that funny. But I can envisage myself sending people into paroxysms of laughter at dinner parties or other gatherings once more.

I can see myself seeing more and more of the funny side of life and recording it, replaying it and sharing it. Why? Because I am a much happier person than I was. And because with my confidence returned, I have learned to be funny again. A bit.

11. My Self

Regular readers and even those who have just read my review of 2011, will have probably figured out that the thing I have learned most about in 2011 is my self.

It is no accident of course. I have wanted to and actively spent time on doing so. Many of my reflections, discoveries and thoughts on what I have discovered about my self, have been recorded as essays on this blog, while some are still too new, too raw or just too deeply personal to make it out here yet.

I continue to feel my self as a “Xenos” - my “nom de plume” and alter ego – my creative identity, my perceived self. The guest & the stranger.

But I am being much more hospitable to the travelling stranger inside me, being warmer and kinder and getting to know the stranger within a little better. One day I will cease being a stranger to my self and I have a good idea precisely which day that it, but until then I – as everyone – will continue to make the journey to self-understanding and spend time with the most familiar stranger I know.

What have I learned specifically about Xenos this year? That I must be compassionate to my self as well as to others, that the past doesn’t have to dictate the future and that “now” is where we all, including our selves, live.