The phrase in my title was my attempt to articulate a desire to find my tribe, which I still am searching for. I guess I need to elucidate further. The use of the word elucidate might help illuminate here. Most of the time, I have always been frustrated at what I perceive to be the imprecision of basic language and I am always searching for the perfect word to describe the concept I'm trying to convey in an effort to be as concise as possible. My best friend back in Ohio once described this as the ability to sum up some really really idiotic situation with a single word that always had him in stitches. But he seemed to be the only person who seemed to understand what I was trying to express most of the time. Most of the life I've felt misheard/misunderstood (a lot of that is tied to my relationship to my mother - which is going to remain outside the scope of this post -) and I've found myself feeling like I had to dumb down/simplify just about everything I've felt like saying most of my life. And the worst part was that when I felt the strongest emotions about a subject I often locked up completely.
So I coined the phrase "wanting to be able to sit around in my mental underwear" to describe how I wanted to be in the company of people where I could say whatever I wanted and be fairly confident that I would be heard and understood. The reality is that I spent more time trying to find the best way to say something that I rarely actually got around to expressing my thoughts freely.
An author who seemed to have this ability to express effectively a lot of his thoughts that were very similar to mine in terms of world view and emotional context was the late author Anthony Bourdain. I even plagiarized a quote of his to use as part of my Facebook intro:
"... my snark is never entirely genuine, nor is it completely irrelevant."
It's only occurred to me now that the snark I display is an expression of my emotion much more than it's a reflection of my intellect, which is fairly formidable if the results of certain test scores are accepted into evidence. (Now I have to take a moment to think about whether I've been more intent on expressing sympathy or empathy which threatens to take me WAY beyond the scope of this post but if I don't mention this here I'll likely forget.) But the original premise was to express my frustration at feeling unable to communicate the thoughts that were important to me at that moment.
I had a six year old violin student named Jason who reminded me of me at that age, he was also taking piano lessons as well computer coding classes and was clearly quite bright. His mom found him a challenge and noted the affinity that Jason had quickly developed for me so she asked me for some advice. I told her that he reminded me of me at that age, and to expect that he would really be excited about something, and he go on and on about something she'd not be able to comprehend, but the best way to respond to that would be to ask: "So you're really excited about this, huh? He would say ."Yeah!" and run off and be perfectly happy. She greeted me at the door the next week and immediately told me "You are a genius."
The point is that I've been able to perceive and understand some things at a level most people just don't seem to grasp. And I've spent a lot of my life trying to communicate not just the concepts but also the level of wonder that comes with such profundity. What I see now is that all these things were created - by a Creator - and it's not realistic to expect other parts of creation to understand or perceive the profundity - but the Creator will. And it follows that focusing on the profundity of the Creator is both natural and much more satisfying.
So I'm now pondering on mindfulness being just one way of acknowledging both the Creator and His Creation, while anti-mindfulness is the denial of that Creator, and making something else the object of wonder and worship.
No comments:
Post a Comment