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.
