In the event of a nuclear war, we’re told to bend over and kiss our bums goodbye. That could be a helpful technique when blaming others for our misfortunes.
Yes, the world’s an uncaring place, a spiteful place and a dangerous place. Everywhere we look there is mayhem, suffering and uncertainty. There’s a thousand and one injustices and a thousand and one causes to “right” those injustices.
We fix one hole in the system and another opens before us. We divorce our bullying spouse and find our son’s bullied at school. We lend a friend money, to stave off bankruptcy, and then our business fails. We take pills for heart disease and find they give us gout.
Czechoslovakia finally ousted the oppressive and fraudulent communists, only to discover their own leaders were more fraudulent.
The French ousted the ruling aristocracy during the French Revolution and then found they were stuck with hundreds of grand palaces and mansions and no money. So, to finance their cause, they sold those properties back to the ruling aristocracy and, in the end, nothing much changed.
At every level – personal, family, community, national – the potholes are filled in and more appear. The road of life is always under repair … just like the roads to your home!
Like your local council, we’re constantly trying to repair our road oft-travelled.
We go to doctors, therapists, healers, coaches, psychics, seminars, workshops and AA meetings and have to acknowledge that we are never cured of our addictions to gambling, alcohol, family dramas, financial woes, anger, depression, neediness, bodily failures … whatever addiction we’ve chosen in this lifetime.
Oops, sorry, this is becoming depressing, isn’t it? I really hoped to uplift you, today, but I’ve just rubbed your nose in the apparent reality of this flaccid, pointless life.
So, brace yourself – here comes the positive bit!
THE world is insane but YOURS need not be.
See, there’s 40 billion perspectives and, though we all inhabit the same spinning rock, we each live in different worlds.
The world the media and your friends want you to live in is theirs – you can choose theirs or your own world.
You might see bombing in Syria but you haven’t been bombed. You might hear of a traffic accident but you haven’t been in one. You might hear of drug addicts but you’ve never been one.
YOUR life, YOUR world, in this very moment, is what YOUR life is. You can choose to be there, in that tiny blessed moment, or you can choose to be in someone else’s moment, far away from you.
Now, two words – sympathy and empathy.
Sympathy is when you get upset, angry or depressed because a friend is. In sympathy, you give up your strength. You give up yourself. You give up on yourself. You become someone else and are weakened … no, it’s worse than that … you weaken yourself AND you weaken them by adding your angst, grief and pain to theirs. That’s sympathy.
By staying in empathy, however, you stay in yourself. You stay in your strength. You hold the Truth of who you are while being with your friend and sharing your power. You lend them strength, not weakness. You are fully with their pain or confusion but you’re there from your position of strength.
When we move from sympathy to empathy in every moment of our lives – watching TV, being with friends, helping in accidents – we take nothing from ourselves and give from strength, power and Truth.
And, magically, that shift in attitude, that shift in perception, fixes so many perceived potholes in our oft-travelled road. Somehow, that shift in beingness removes blame and removes victimhood. They quietly slink away into the limpid shadows they crept out from.
So, in every moment, there’s a choice:
We can bend over, give up and kiss our bums goodbye. Or we can bend over and kiss the earth for the blessings it bestows.
A simple, everyday choice.