Independence – Do any of us really have it?

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As we celebrate our 37^th Anniversary of Independence here in Saint Lucia it seems a good time to reflect on what Independence means.

We all grow up with our parents guiding us in their own way, to be independent. Some do a great job, others barely know themselves what it means, having grown up with the aim of securing a job upon which you will be dependent for the rest of your life, or for many of our mothers, securing a husband upon whom you will remain dependent till death do you part.

I’ve written on Independence before over on Sun, Rain, Or… but that’s the thing – what Independence really is turns out to be hard to pin down! Yes, it’s a level of self-reliance and self-sustainability, but since none of us exists as an atom in a vacuum, then our ‘independence’ tends to involve a whole myriad of relationships and alliances that are what makes life, well, life. And in many cases make life its best and its worst as well, right?! Lordy. What to do?

Relationships

Yesterday I read and posted this article titled: “The Smarter And More Independent You Are, The HarderIt Is To Find Love” Ok, well, it’s interesting and makes some good points but what true smarts is, is another question! Because being emotionally open and able to form relationships is definitely something that requires intelligence – just not the kind we have been brainwashed into thinking is the most valuable! But more and more you hear people referring to ‘Emotional Intelligence’ as being THE most important asset for the future we have ahead of us if we are to break free from the shackles of the world run by greed, money, power and mob-psycho driven war. Being able to relate to people in a truly intelligent way is what might just save us from ourselves…

My personal road to independence has been an interesting rollercoaster. I’m naturally someone who looks constantly at what is going on around me and tries to find the root causes, see values and meanings beyond the obvious accepted and often erroneous interpretations society has written onto the books for us, so in that vein, I am by nature, a very independent person. But I am equally not. I grew up very lacking in confidence – shy as could be and constantly seeking to fit in. Well, all that’s changed a bit now!!! Lol. Yeah, but it took quite some work to get where I am today and I am still not quite as ‘independent’ as I want to be!

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I am still one of those who seeks companionship of ‘that someone special’, though I know that person must be as enamoured of their own space as I am of mine and of equally as we may be of each other…  I am still someone who likes to dip in and spend time with people even though I’ll just as easily exit and spend time alone. Where ‘independence’ comes into it for me is that I can do this without feeling the need to answer to friends, family, partner or people in general, when I choose to do one or the other. Being able to comfortably say ‘no thanks’ and not feel compelled always to explain, even when not asked, but not being selfish either -that’s my idea of true independence in relationships, and of course it has to be reciprocal!

The Daily Grind

In work now, that’s another matter. Here is the hardest part I think many of us in today’s world deal with is the trade-off between the money we need to live well in this money-driven society we have created, versus the need to have a quality of life. And as we hear more and more stories of twenty-something year olds having strokes and 40-somethings dropping dead of brain aneurisms, it becomes more and more of a worry for us that we are selling our life away for no good reason. But then we only have to cast our eyes off our computer screens for a split second to be tamed back into submission by the hoards of chronically jobless people and their unenviable reality.

Where is our independence? Surely we can break free from this unhealthy, unsatisfactory, unholy alliance we have created for humankind.

Shops open 6-7 days a week now – many businesses operate a 24-hour shift. Tell me how many times you hear someone state that there is not enough time in any given day to complete the work that needs to be done. Yes, granted some people laze about on jobs, but you have to ask why – is it really that we are so lazy or that we are unmotivated by the drudgery and misplaced motivations for having a job?

We have created a cycle of dependence in our current social-work structure that is inherently flawed. We chase more and more money because the ‘cost of living’ keeps rising. Meanwhile the real cost of living is ignored - the price we pay for the money we earn – loss of health, loss of time to actually live, loss of enjoyment and fulfilment from the work that we do.

Independence for me I think involves a mix of things – a job/way to earn that is reasonably 

secure and brings in a reasonable amount of cash-money or tradeable goods or services and does not cost me my life! I would happily trade time for less money – the key being just enough solid income to live well – and of course, living well in my world involves a lot of alternatives that mainstream has not yet adopted – recycling, growing my own, bartering, cutting wastage, opting out of the super-wasteful ‘fashion cycle’ whether it be clothes, home accessories or whatever – moving towards long-term style & quality over throwaway fads…all that means I can enjoy a genuinely rich life without so much cash.

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Independence on a larger social scale I think could come from re-examining how we set up our work / employment systems and moving towards less hours per person with more hours per society – employ more people on a shift system for less time each, while teaching sustainable lifestyles as a core subject in schools. That’s the simple bones of the thing. Let us all earn enough and all live enough

Does society have what it takes or are we too enslaved by the system that exists to be able to break free? What do you think?

Let’s Talk about Love Baby…

It’s interesting as you grow older and look back at yours and your friends’ lives and the mix of experiences of love, relationships, marriage, divorce, single lives, freedom, loneliness and desires.

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Love. What really is it? Each heart you ask will give you a different answer and each experience of love a heart goes through makes pinning down what love ‘is’ as impossible as figuring out how many leaves will fall with each breath of wind.

There’s a repeating conversation that I suspect many of us have: The essence of it is what X person, should or should not do about their less-than-perfect relationship. In this conversation, there is usually a ‘good’ partner, diagnosed as being misguided in believing they ‘love’ the other ‘bad’ partner and so is enduring no end of misery.

Now, while there are definitely people out there who really are NOT good partners…is this what is really the core of the problem for most of us? How many of us have ‘loved’ someone who just keeps not measuring up to our expectations? How many of us have just grown away from our relationship, still ‘love’ the person, maybe don’t ‘like’ them so much anymore, but don’t know how to let go? How many of us have committed to a long-term, legally and / or religiously bound contract with someone before we really understand the commitment we are making and the very nature of what we are doing?

Well, this morning I read some corny ‘Granny Advice’ that was set in the context of a cheating husband, but I want to take it more generally. Long story short – the carrots, egg and coffee put in boiling water (do you know it?) They all go through the same trials, the boiling water. Carrots go in hard and get soft, eggs, fragile shell protects but inside they get hard…

The story says: “The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you. When the hour is the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate yourself to another level?”

Well, personally, I think that’s selling coffee short – that is not what happens with making coffee, one ingredient doesn’t change the other, the coffee and water come together to make something great. This takes both elements working in harmony. The two ingredients are in and of themselves complete, but together they make more.

That’s a pretty good starting point for what love should look like don’t you think?

But most of us are far from ‘complete' when we first commit to love really, right? That’s why my friends and I talk so much about what we would tolerate now versus back then, what we desire now versus back then. So let’s take that coffee story past its half-ass ‘finish’.

First off, it takes time and effort to learn about brewing a really good cup of coffee right? Most of us can easily make ’instant’ and that can be satisfying, but the truly amazing cup of real coffee that leaves you just wanting more of the same…that takes understanding and practice - you have to take time to learn how to do it right and mistakes may be made along the way, some of which will leave a really bad taste, but should we give up because of this? 

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Now tell me, what do you do with a cup of coffee? What good is a cup of coffee if you don’t drink it? And when you drink it, doesn’t it finish? If you leave it there undrunk, won’t it eventually dry out?

Coffee, like love, has to be remade over and over again. Each time you learn a little more and your appreciation grows, you grow. It may be that you love that one coffee bean for ever as it subtly changes as the soil it grows in and the hands that take it from green to roast bean change, but you change in harmony with it and you are still happy as pappy in love. That’s fine, that’s good…

But it may also be that your tastes and what you want from your coffee changes. And this, I think is as natural as life itself, but our socialized constructs about what love ‘must’ look like doesn’t embrace this and it is this that causes us the real grief and not the changes of love themselves.

As me and my friends always come round to saying – we have all grown and changed so much in the time since we first started dating, and this, we unanimously agree, is a good thing. But when it comes to love and relationships, somehow we just don’t effectively recognize the inevitability of change, the fact that we all grow and so must change, and so, that change has a very rightful place.

There is a lot to be said for ‘working things out’ I don’t dismiss that, but the nature of ‘working things out’ must fully incorporate a recognition of this rightful place of change.

Love can be just as true when it lasts only for part of our lives as it is when it lasts right through.  Can’t we celebrate both as equally beautiful?

Discrimination in the Workplace and in Life - What's the Cost?

Diversity Mask from Spiva 

Quite a few things have come up in the past few weeks and months that have pulled my attention back, again and again, to subtle and not so subtle examples of discrimination in the workplace and in life.

With all that’s going on in the US - in recent times especially easy to watch because of the internet - the issue of white racism against blacks and Latin against blacks and white against anyone non-white and Trump against anyone with an IQ over 40 … well, it is not hard to see that discrimination is alive, well and kicking serious ass in the US. The UK and many other nations are not so far behind when it comes to the BIG issues of discrimination. 

But that’s not what today’s post is about.  I’d like to take a look at the more insidious, less famous kind…the kind you often don’t notice until a few minutes past it happening…the kind that rarely makes the news but as it leaches possibilities out of our lives, immensely impacts us all.

This kind of discrimination takes many forms – it’s sometimes race based, sometimes accent based, sometimes clothing based, sometimes geographically based, sometimes looks based, sex based, newbie based, age based, faith based, makeup, too many smiles, too few smiles, voice, mannerisms, shoes, hairstyle, car, no car….you name it. Sure, some are more prevalent than others – race, sex, faith, appearance being the biggest I think, but it’s not the tripping factor of discrimination that interests me so much as the fact that it exists and what it does to our lives and our potential.

Why do we so often assume negative things about people? Judging potential not by examining facts, but by an assumption that is based for instance, not on what is being said, but some other characteristic of the speaker? Or even what will be said.

So many people do it – you recognize something that you associate with being an inferior trait – messy hair, darker skin, female, casual clothes…and your mind applies that negative feeling to everything else that person does or says. Think about when you’ve noticed a small shift in posture and an almost imperceptible change in facial expression that comes across a person’s face. How often have you seen that? A subtle, somewhat blank, ‘patient’ expression, or the slightly raised eyebrows, just a little, and widened eyes that seems to say with an almost imperceptible sneer, “Really, you think you are worth my time?”

I’m sure, if you are sensitive to it, you’ve noticed people doing thing. And if you think about it, you may find you also do this now and again…I suspect most of us do. I’d like to say I don’t because I really was brought up to ‘give the benefit of the doubt’ but my parents had their biases and they passed them on to us, as did our teachers, friends, colleagues…so I know I am not free of this shortcoming.

What is going on here really and why? Judging value based on a measure that usually has nothing to do with the ability of the person to contribute.

Yes, in some cases, pre-judgements may be based on the person previously having said or done something that was below par, but why is it that we often then let that flourish and grow while we lose our ability to give benefit of the doubt and perhaps act on an alternate assumption, for instance, that the person does have worthwhile contributions but perhaps is nervous or just finding it hard to articulate?

Think how much you have learnt in life from the mistakes you’ve made (Hopefully!J) …why are we so hard on mistakes other’s make?

“You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.”  Richard Branson

Why is it then, when we look at other people, that we so often default to locking down our ability to hear and to process facts; lock out our faculties of genuine reasoning in favour of our faculties to embrace negative bias?

I have heard so many varied people talk about how society will judge you by the norms, so if you are outside the norms, expect people to judge you for that. But really? Is this the limit of humanity’s mental and empathetic capacity? Is this all we are capable of?

Wasted Potential

Just stop to think of the wasted human potential of people with something to contribute being shut off and cut off based on a trivial prejudice or a minor, or major, previous stumble.

Just stop to think how many times this has happened to you.

Just stop and think how many times you have done this to someone else.

Why do we need this layer of self-protection? What is it that we really are afraid of? Do we actually have anything to lose by embracing people who have different ways or appearances to us? We don’t have to be best friends, but why not entertain that there may be more to gain from actively seeking to assist someone else to show their potential; make their contribution than there is to writing them off because of a trait that most often has nothing to do with the issue at hand?

Prejudices

It isn’t anything about people who are less capable of contributing. It’s about our prejudices and how they limit ourselves and by extension, limit our world. Limit OUR world - not just that of the person we’re being prejudiced against. Think about it for a moment. Think about how often you know your contribution would have made things better if only people could have understood / listened / seen…not pre-judged you.

Think about how often you have let prejudice in when someone is trying to contribute. Why not assume they, like you, may have had something really worthwhile to bring to the table. Think about what you may have lost in that process.

And by ‘prejudices’ I mean all our ‘societal norms’; the many, seemingly innocuous, things we are taught to judge people by that really are imperfect measures at best and downright damaging at worst.

“First impressions count” Yes, indeed they do, but often they are counted so many times over instead of being counted accurately, just once for their true - limited - value.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” We are all taught this wonderful saying, but then we are taught in so many ways, shapes and forms, to ignore this lovely simple core truth and judge cover after cover after cover. Just think what we lose.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” We can’t change how others do things, not directly. But we can change what we do. We can change our habit of judging people by misleading measures; we can choose to listen and hear and to assume value is there to be uncovered and so choose to be an agent of discovery rather than an agent of oppression. Just think what you would prefer in every situation you have been wrongly judged: Do that unto others and see if there is not more than enough to go round if we just stop killing off each other’s potential. See if life does not become better, fuller, and more successful…

Worth a try, isn’t it? What do you think?

 

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I call it as I see it

CIRCLES OR SQUARE ONE?

An interesting question on decision-making popped up on Facebook last week. Stan Bishop, one of my favourite local reporters asked:  “Which is better -- running around in circles or being stuck at square one?”

Well, for me, the answer was easy

Somewhere to go

“I'm going for stuck at square one. You know its square 1 and there are others to get to. Being stuck is only permanent if you let it be. Keep checking for a solution and you'll get one eventually. Circles....well, that's the definition of madness - doing the same thing over n over again”

But reading others’ ideas was interesting and made me realize, yet again, that whatever your problem, how you look at it determines how you find a solution – and nobody can tell us all the ‘right’ way to see things.

Stagnation

Vernita had a completely different take to mine: “The fact of being stuck at square one sounds very stagnant I have hot feet so I will opt for going round in circles. Maybe, just maybe whilst going round in circles I may encounter something or someone that will help change the circumstance.”

Two-for-One

Faye-Chantelle’s comment looked at both options “They are both equally bad to be very frank, however being stuck at square one allows you time to re-evaluate your strategy, while running around in circles takes you absolutely nowhere, but back to the starting point and of course provides good exercise...Personally, I rather the circles, cause it allows for wonderful physical activity while simultaneously offering much needed re-evaluation time... (Strategy-wise)... So in essence it’s 'killing two birds with one stone' and the best of both worlds... in an odd, not so productive kind of way :-)”

I read somewhere that when Buddha advised people to follow the path to enlightenment, he actually didn’t mean, do as he did, except in that you should find your own path, like he did.

Balance of Open and Focus

So, I just tried to write a few ‘take-aways’, (see list below - there are some possibilities in there J ) but really, the main thing is that we can tend to get caught up in just doing things the way we are used to, I call it as I see it…but this can result in our sight being (un)fairly limited. 

There are many ways to get somewhere: Being open to possibilities while focused on finding ways forward is probably the best combination of attitudes to get you going forward. Whether you adopt a meditative run round in circles, (labyrinths come to mind) or you stop for a moment where you are, at square one, (seated meditation?) and open up from there matters much less than being open and trusting that a solution is there.

Be ready to let go your assumptions, try a different approach, sometimes the change in habits is enough to crack the door and let the light in and be able to see something that you didn't know was there before

I call it as I see it...Mermaid

The Cutting-Room Floor clips:

• While “whatever works for you” may be good advice most of the time, there’s bound to come a point where we have to be able to open our minds and look for new ways to do things
• A leader, vs ‘a boss’ – Good leaders help people stay focused but let them use their own methods once they are able to get through to a solution
• People take different approaches and what works for you may not work for another
• Your answers are your answers and mine are mine, and they may or may not coincide.
• Whatever works for you is your right answer/right path

WINNERS!!! Well, I had exactly TWO (2) people take last week's challenge and guess how many emails I'd unsubscribed to in the week - both were nowhere near close - one guessed 15 and the other 527! Well, it was 104 at the time and is now 132 today. So both of you - Don and Jeannette - you'll each get a calendar - send me your physical address to this email: finolaphoto@yahoo.com and it will wing it's way to you...

Time is on my side, yes it is!

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Ok, so last weekend I started unsubscribing from blogs, newsletters, Facebook page notifications…I thought it’d take me a couple hours on Sunday and I’d be done.

Well, not so fast chappy! I unsubscribed to a lot of things on Sunday – I had both Saturday’s and Sunday’s emails to deal with, and the 3 main emails I still use - but what I didn’t expect, was that I would still be going right up to this morning!!!!

So, guess how many I am up to at time of posting… no, I’m not going to tell you in the post, have a guess. One guess each and whoever comes closest first will get one of the few remaining 2016 Nature Calendars I have in stock and if you have one already, well, they make great gifts J

What shocked me is the realization of how much time I allowed to be eaten away each and every day in the task of keeping my inboxes clear. And how much negative energy I was adding to my day if I allowed all that undealt-with clutter to stay in my subconscious.

Let’s do a little math:

10 minutes first thing in the morning while you look at the titles and select those you know you won’t read and delete them.

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15 minutes while you half-read some of those you ‘want to’ / ‘should’ read

20 minutes every 3 days when one catches your attention and you dwivay (divert aimlessly) down a path that may or may not significantly improve your life.

In a week, that’s 70 + 105 + 60(ish) 

= 235 minutes or nearly 4 hours of life.

4 hours…that rings a bell…Tim Ferris and his famous ‘4 Hour Work Week’ book (which I am yet to read, I got the gist of it from various blogs, but maybe I should take a read…). Now, tell me, if the theory is that in 4 hrs a week it is possible to do enough targeted work to earn you a comfortable living, then why, oh why do so many of us let such a significant chunk of our lives fritter away?

Think what you could fill it in with:

“Oh! I wish I had time for the gym! L”

“Oh I wish I had time to learn to sail”

“Oh, where will I find the time to visit some of the exiting spots in my island/village/town/country…”

“One day I will find time to paint, read, swim, learn Spanish, go to my kids’ shows, clean my store-room, write my novel, adjust those clothes, learn golf…………………”

So, I have resolved to stop asking people carte blanche, to subscribe to my blog – by all means do if you feel it is going to be a worthy read that will help you move forward on your journey – I have kept a small selection of subscriptions for this purpose, but otherwise, do the more important things! 

I’ve chosen to invest some time in figuring what my own special priorities really, truly are and to concentrate on putting things in place, bit by little-step bit, to make those happen. As I talked about last Sunday, I have signed up with a coach, Debra Ross, "Life by Choice"  and we are setting do-able weekly to-do lists. This is allowing me to have ‘experiences of success’ and yes, it does feel pretty darn good! I realize I am still not fully comfy with my goal levels and progress, but I realize also that that is a part of the process, so I am not beating myself up over it J

In this process of figuring my priorities, I realized there was an unexpected blessing in the challenges of my 5-day a week job that has been a real tax on my energy – physical and mental: I stopped being able to do my art/craft/other pursuits because I couldn’t muster the energy to do things, and this unexpectedly, opened up a space for me to see my priorities in a very different light.

Ok, I’ve been on this journey of self-rediscovery for quite a few years now and I’m sure that helped, but what happened was I found that as I lounged or went to bed early tired, but could not sleep, my mind wandered all over the place, thinking, wanting, yearning, being pissed, annoyed, occasionally depressed, over all that I was losing, what I felt I couldn’t do anymore.  

What this process allowed was that I gradually, (over a couple of years, but I’m sure it can be done fasterJ), figured out what I really wanted to do: I no longer ‘had’ to do these things to survive – I have a decent salary, that part is definitely a blessing of the day-job, so now it became purely a ‘what do I REALLY want to do’ and that question applied whether I went the path of keeping the day-job or moving forward to a new version of being self-employed.  So when Debra came along with her coaching – it fitted very nicely in to what I was almost unconsciously already doing myself. Now, with the coaching, it has much more definite focus.

Also, per a convo I had today: Don’t buy into that crap that you have to be all positive feeling and big goals all the time – positive affirmations are good, but ONLY if you are really ready to buy into the positivity, otherwise, if the bar it set too high, they can just seem like one more unattainable goal and big reason to beat up on yourself for ‘not being good enough’. Allow yourself to be occasionally sad, mad, depressed about something, recognize the feeling, respect that it exists and see if you can let yourself find some learning from it. Maybe permission to accept you don’t like something, maybe realization that you are asking too much of yourself or trying too hard to be what someone else says you should be…take it one teeny step at a time if you need to and know that sometimes, being still for a while neither moving forward or backward, just ‘being’ is just fine too.

So, Sunday morning finds me still a little un-used to the dearth of emails to deal with in my inboxes. It does give me a good feeling, but I am yet to really effectively reorganize my day to make best use of the time I now have. I can say I HIGHLY recommend doing this though. It is very cathartic and I know in the big picture it is worth a huge amount: I will put this new time I have to good use! 

Me n Suzie on top Pigeon Point - time well spent!

Time is so precious and modern life has so many ways of helping us waste it. Take what is yours back and do just one little thing you really want to do instead.

Don’t forget to put in your guess for the number of unsubscribes I have done! And if you do the same yourself, please do share your feelings on what it did/didn’t do for you J

PS I am not being paid to talk about Debra's coaching - I just genuinely feel this journey is a good story to share with you all and the coaching is part of it, so don't be put off by thinking I'm going the 'paid promo-blog route' I'm not, I am promoting her, but only because I think it's proving to be a very useful part of my journey.