My crooked teeth

I do not have a winning smile. My teeth are gapped, broken, crooked, misshapen, haphazard. They follow their own rule of order and I do what I can to keep them clean and polish off the red wine stains occasionally.

But it is not a movie star’s smile. I know this because I was told this, openly and unabashedly, by someone who knew a whole lot better than I. They said that for me to succeed in my chosen profession that I should spend thousands of pounds to ensure that I had a set of gnashers that would rival Mac the Knife’s. Then I would look natural. Then I would be beautiful. Well, they went on, I would be beautiful if I lost some weight as well. And perhaps reduced the size of my nose. And my boobs.

By the time they were done with me, I don’t think I would have had an original part remaining, had I followed their plan. They had remade me, they had made me stronger, made me better, like a million dollar man (more realistically it would be the Minus Million Dollar man for the money I would have to spend on my ‘soul home improvements). They had made me more acceptable.

But did I accept myself?

I do not have to postulate here about the plethora of suggestions of idealised body images splashed across billboards and screens for our every split second consumption, reminding us of an unattainable miracle that should yet be strived for through hard work and the right purchases. I do not have to go into the rising number of cases of anorexia being treated by our health system, or the increase in cosmetic surgery spend. That is news. It is all common knowledge.

What I will not allow is that encouraged self loathing, that idea that I am not enough. It is certainly true that there will be doors in my industry closed to my crooked teeth. And if I want to enter those doors, I must conform. I know this. And whatever decision I make with that knowledge will be made with every consideration of the arguments for and against that knowledge. For the moment my smile remains of the non-winning variety, and a hope that my heart-smile shines through my eyes and makes my less than perfect dentition secondary to all the other gifts I bring.

In the meantime, I still take pictures with a closed mouth.

Amor fati

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it. - Ecce Homo - Freidrich Nietzsche

Sometimes, we put so much pressure on ourselves. Sometimes we think that our life isn’t the way it is supposed to be, that there is something more that we deserve, something else we must acquire, something extraordinary that we are yet to become. We yearn and pine for the magic that seems to be happening in other people’s lives, but which eludes our own. We wait for that moment, when we are thinner, richer, smarter. We see where we are, our present moment, as lacking, as a resting point only, an interval before the real action of our life takes place. We are constantly in a state of expectation for the turn-around, the moment when our life’s light switch gets flicked to ‘On’ and we start truly getting what we deserve.

And as our sights are constantly set to that imagined future, the simple joy of our present is passing us by.

I am a little bit in love with this simple, yet effective concept as described in the quote above. Not just accepting your fate, but loving it. Loving the fact that your life is as it is, at this very moment. It means that I am present to embrace, acknowledge and participate in all that is occurring in my life right now, without the added pressure of my well- or ill-defined expectations of what it should be. It means that I take responsibility for the decisions that I have made and the behaviours that I have exhibited that have led me to right where I am. It means that I can change my mind, think new thoughts, say new words, get new perspectives, that will help me to lovingly create whatever tomorrow will come, without the added baggage of ‘could-a would-a should-a’s’.

If I love up my present, then my mind empties a little, the pressure is released, the brows unknit, and I fall into the arms of loving acceptance of all that is. The battle I wage on my life stops. Everything I do, I do lovingly in this moment. I want nothing to be different, because this life of mine is exactly what it is meant to be, even with its ugly parts and painful struggles. It is my struggle, my loving struggle and it builds me up.

Can you see value in loving your fate, in total acceptance of the life as it is?

The hour hand of life. (Nice one, Mr. Nietzsche)

Importing posts from my other blog. Here is one I prepared earlier. Enjoy.

Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Friedrich Nietzsche sure had a way with words. Got me to thinking about being an ‘intermission in the symphony of real life’, about being yourself a moment of waiting, being a Human-Waiting, a Human-Sitting, a Human-Longing. Even a Human-Being. And not a Human-Doing. I leave you with the quote to mull over yourselves. Be a Human-Thinking for a while. Then get outside and do something.

Water Which is Too Pure Has No Fish

Reblogged from Respect the Dress!:

People used to jokingly say “The Devil made me do it!”. Though the saying has lost it’s popularity the concept behind it lives on in most of American culture.

In almost every church on every Sunday you hear someone preach about how weak humans are tempted by Satan and how they can avoid the consequences of going to Hell by giving their “sins” to Jesus.

Read more… 249 more words

Reblogged from the wonderful Kita Kazoo. Never has it been so succinctly put as here, 'Reacting out of fear is bondage. Being afraid is Hell.' Brava, fellow blogger, brava!

Lessons from a rubber band

I wear a rubber band on my wrist. Every time I recognise that I am thinking a negative thought about myself, or wallowing about the things in my life that I see as not working, I pull the rubber band and let it snap on my wrist. The sting snaps me out of my brain and into focus on the pain on my arm. And that gives my mind an ease.

I borrowed that little technique after I learned that it was used with people who self harm, allowing them to substitute a dangerous behaviour with a painful, yet less dangerous one. And I led me to think that negative self talk and self thought is another form of self harming. I had to find a way to replace the potentially damaging faulty cognition that was on constant loop in my head with a less damaging action. And I replaced it with the rubber band.

What do you do to snap yourself back into the present, where you are nothing but unique, creative and unending potential?

Forming the formless - Defining the Me - Creating the Self

Reblogged from heaven4earth.com:

Who are you?

An intriguing question isn’t it? Who am I? There are several ways to answer this question, let’s look at the most obvious one. How am I defining Me?

Right now, you are probably defining yourself all day long, a ridiculous amount of times, mostly without being aware of it.

A very dangerous thing to do since what you define yourself ‘to be’, is the most powerful way to either block or unblock the mind. 

Read more… 412 more words

This is a beautifully expressed, wonderfully uncomplicated way of viewing things and thought I would share it with my own readers.

Absolute truth

I preface alot of what I say by first saying, ‘Now this is just my opinion, it does not make it absolute truth.’

There are several reasons for that. Firstly, because I express my opinion very strongly. When people encounter somebody who is quite assertive in the expression of their views, their own defenses sometimes throw up and this leads them to decide that they won’t engage because they feel that I have already made my mind up. Secondly, they hear what I have to say better, they hear it as an expression only of my own belief and know, inherently, that I am not judging them if their belief is different to mind. The sentence brings with it and implicit invitation to the sharing of their own views. And so discourse is encouraged.

There are many things I feel strongly about, and I know myself enough to know that alot of it is my own ‘stuff’. It is an emotional viewpoint charged with my own experiences, politics, personal and social history and philosophical stance. We all have them. Sometimes people are willing to defend that viewpoint to the death. But that is a matter for them and their God.

I can strongly express my views and still invite the other perspective because I know one thing for absolute certain… I am not always right. And there are very many things that I will never know, in this lifetime, whether I am right about it or not. There are things I feel I’m right about, but I have far too much respect for the choices of others to ever become fanatical about these things. I make the assumption that we are all operating on the same moral and humanistic plane, and I pray that our every effort benefits mankind in some way or another.  It is idealistic, I know and it is simplistic. There is room here for the argument of those figures in history who expressed their beliefs strongly through death and horror, and who did not have as kind a view on all humanity as I aspire to. But that is a matter for them and their God.

In this complicated world, of billions of ideas, benign, potent, inspired, destructive. Truth becomes dangerous if it exists in a vacuum. How do we learn to share what we believe without it becoming a thing of destruction?

How do you share your opinions with others, and are they openly received?

Things we find in the fire

At the start of March, I walked into my perfect storm.

My health and financial state were hit with blows from which I could see no way of recovery. The magnitude of the problems seemed to lead to the conclusion that by the end of the year I would either be homeless or dead. And struggling to cope with both futures was daunting and worrying, overwhelming…and strangely comforting. Because with each drop of rain, the end, an imagined and obviously overblown end, meant that I would no longer have to face the struggles.

And weirdly, it was the peace of that imagined end that brought me to a place of clarity, where I was inspired to action and truly believed that ‘small drops of water do an ocean make’. I moved myself, like a tide, and acted without the hours of thinking and agonising and planning that precedes most action with me. And death and debt were no longer the demon guardsmen of my life. Chaos was beautiful because it afforded me freedom to view all obstacles as I wanted to. I gave them their size, their colour and their taste. And decided to view them as the immeasurable pressure of the ages that is required to make carbon into a diamond.

So how do you view crisis? And what surprising and unexpected benefits do you discover when you find the courage to stand in the eye of your perfect storm?

The Space Between

There is a game I like to play.

At the moment I work in London’s fashionable West End doing a show. This means that I am often trying to get to work when people are rushing home after a hard day’s toil and trying to head home as folks are spilling out of the pub. Therefore I am always walking against the tide. It also means that invariably, three or four people will walk right into me, some just because they are hurrying and not noticing, and some violently and deliberately because they are hurrying and determined. Some even yell at me after they have ploughed straight into me, for my pains and the fact that I dared exist in their path. But that is by the by.

And so I have this game.

It depends on how I feel. If I’ve had a particularly stressful day, and I am not being present and mindful, and ill mood is getting the better of me, then I will look up and all I will see are the crowds. Then the onslaught of bags and irritation will begin almost immediately, as my foot hits the train platform and my mood will not be improved by the end of the ten minute walk to my theatre. However, if I recognise that we are all one, if I wish my fellow man well, and pray to lighten their burden of stress and worry, then I can alight from the train, look up towards the sea of bustling bodies and remind myself, “Look for the space between.”. More often than not, a path appears, bodies do not collide and I can get make the journey from station to theatre and back again with faith that we have a common goal, to get where we are going, without injury to all of our being.

it is a common enough modern problem, not being able to see the individual thing for being overwhelmed by the sum total. But, have you ever deliberately taken the time to separate out the tasks, problems, ideas and to recognise each thing as standing alone. And after you have done that have you ever used the space between those things to breathe, to solve, to find your way to the end product. Even when the space between is minuscule, it is still there, waiting to be noticed.

Waiting to be filled by you

Knowing me.

Have you ever found yourself being unkind about someone for no good reason at all?

 Have you ever found yourself laughing at how boring your friends with kids are, how gauche someone with money is, how ridiculously a fashionable person is behaving? Have you ever said a less than savoury word about a celebrity based on little more than the information disseminated in a gossip magazine? Have you found yourself expounding endlessly on the failings of your friends, holding yourself as the expert because you are in the know, turning a blind eye to your seemingly harmless betrayal?

 I have found that if I do any of these things, it is because I see the mirror of myself and my desires in the other and my own shortcomings are highlighted. If I make fun of the rich, it is because I wish I had their resources. If I make fun of the famous, it is because I wish I had their opportunities. If I make fun of the fashionable, it is because I wish I had their sense of art and style. I can explain away all the psychology about the reality of these wishes, I can find prettier words for them, but under a ‘plain and simple’ lens, these are the only reasons for my unkindness. Envy rears its ugly head and my thoughts and words become ugly. And I catch myself, and ask forgiveness, because each day I strive to do better.

 Have you ever found yourself being unkind about someone for no good reason at all?

 

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.  ~Henry Van Dyke