Somebody that I used to know

Yesterday I was that, today I am this.  What, exactly, is ‘this’?  And why can’t I be ‘that’ anymore?

If I even wanted to be that.  Come to think of it, what was that, anyway?

Tags, identifiers, labels. We are what we are until we are no longer that any more.  And then what?

We sink (back) into just being us?  Our true selves.  Our default selves.

Which begs the question – what were we all that time in between?

And why did it take so long for the path to meander its way back here?  Back home.

How long were we gone?  Where did we go along the way?  What did we see, learn, feel, think…become?

A tightness in the face

My regular yoga teacher has this refrain (he’s my regular-ish teacher, I’ve only recently become something of a regular yoga-doer).

It goes something like this:

“Let go of the tightness in your shoulders, your neck, and your face.  Let it all out of your face.  Let go of whatever you’re holding inside that is ending up in your face, and crunching it up like that.  Tightening it.  Clenching it.  Whatever.”

Which brought me in mind, today during yoga, of a friend who asked me how my “face” was.  How I was doing with the smiling, instead of the scowling.  The being open, instead of the retreating/reserved.  The inviting, instead of the forbidding.

I will, at some point, dissect this piece-by-piece – that is, the face, and what it is saying to the world.  I think there’s a lot there for me to think about, to work on.

And to let go of.

Putting yourself out there

There’s a perverse, and seemingly converse, thing in this world about hunting for a new career.  There’s the art of timing.  There’s the odd footrace to obscurity and uncompetitiveness if you’re unprepared to be (uber)bullish on yourself, your abilities and your ‘you-ness’ (and the making of your you-ness into the perfect fit for that prospective employer’s their-ness).  Humility plays almost no part in this process, except if you count the judicious application of judgement to which adjectives are just a little too over-the-top or not.  But it’s a stretch to call that anything other than restrained or nuanced salesmanship. And being weighted-down by even an ounce of self-awareness, or holding the capacity for self-reflectiveness, can mean overcoming the voice in your head that argues the weaknesses in the very case you set out to make for or about yourself.   It’s like the unbidden public defender pops up to argue the holes in your case.  Then the lawyer for the defendant objects, and the judge either sustains or dismisses.

Fundamentally it’s about being convinced, and then confidently expressing, that you are “enough”.  And to be able to convince others of that, you have to believe it yourself.  And keep believing it in the face of the evidence, or the signs, symptoms and whatever else blows in like tumbleweed across the ego to challenge this belief. And you have to be “enough”, without being convinced (or convincing others intentionally or otherwise) that you are “too much”.

OliverTheWorld: Off the Beaten Path in Ireland: The Road to Torr Head and Carrick-a-Rede: Northern Ireland

OliverTheWorld: Off the Beaten Path in Ireland: The Road to Torr Head and Carrick-a-Rede: Northern Ireland.One family’s view of this blog’s namesake; one of my favourite places in Northern Ireland.

Noticing things

Walking along the street today, I sense (more than actually see) these pieces of something dropping from a tree.  They’re not leaves; not floating.  More like discards of some sort.  I look up, look around, and my eyes come to rest on a squirrel sitting there, maybe two feet above me – reachable by extending my arm if I wanted.  I stand there, watching him as he takes a shelled nut that someone has clearly left out for him, and peels away at the shell with her teeth.  It’s an industrious and persistent activity on his part.  Part head-bob, part gnaw, part genteel-peel; like if she were a human, she’d be a card dealer expertly whisking cards across the table to all the players. I stand there, oddly transfixed at the expert simplicity of his task.  And wondering how he made his way up that tree with this large nut in his mouth without getting distracted, losing his grip, falling to predators below…etc.

As I walk away thinking I have not really spent any time watching this very thing before in my life – and, frankly, that my ‘noticing’ has been of a very poor quality for much of what goes on in my life in the last number of years – I notice a cat sitting in a window to my right.  That cat is staring, intently, head cocked to the right.  I follow her line of vision back the way I came and she is staring very intently at the same thing I just was.

But for an entirely different reason.