Tag: awareness

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He’s Having a Cornea

My 6th grade teacher had a heart attack right in front of us, in the middle of class. The thing is I had no idea at the time. I mean, I watched it happen, but the full weight of what was happening just did not connect.

He was talking and then he stopped. He put one hand on his chest and the other arm reached out, (did he grab a chair??) and he started to go down. Was it slow motion, or is it just my memory seeing it that way? I don’t know. He didn’t fall, he just ever so slowly started to bend his knees.

We had an open concept classroom at that school, thank God, so one of the other teachers saw what was happening, rushed over to help him before he could even go down and called, “He’s having a coronary!” to one of the other teachers. I had never heard that word before, but I knew that the cornea was part of the eye, so I was relieved to know that he just had something really serious in his eye. Did they dismiss us to recess? I honestly don’t remember. I don’t remember seeing the paramedics take him away. I don’t remember anything after seeing the other teacher rush to his aide and say what she said. And I basically put the whole thing out of my mind, and brushed it off because I figured he’d be ok once he got that thing out of his eye.

It wasn’t until many years later that I was talking with my mom about someone else having a heart attack or coronary that it clicked what had happened.

I was going to say that I don’t know whatever happened to him. Did he make it? Did he come back to school? But now as I am typing this, I think I vaguely remember that he did come back to teach after some time away, and I seem to remember that I was wondering why he didn’t have an eye patch––I mean, if you take that much time away for your eye, it’s gotta be serious, right? Like, serious enough to warrant an eye patch.

What impresses me was that they did a great job of shielding the kids from any trauma witnessing that may have caused––at least, I think so, I don’t keep in touch with anyone else who would have been in that class so I don’t know if they were affected at all. What amazes me, though, is how little I knew or understood about that and how much of that was that the teachers sheltered us well, and how much of it was my own unawareness? How much did the teachers/parents expect us to know and how much did they expect us not to know?

One thing I remember feeling often as a kid/youth is “Why doesn’t anyone just explain things to me?” I so often felt like no one was communicating with me. Not just about my teacher’s incident, but so many other things in life too. Why won’t anyone explain it to me? Would I have understood? Would I have listened?

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Writing My Story

I have recently begun a writing workshop, a 7-day book writing challenge by Hay House. I have been meaning to start writing my story since last fall as part of a business program I had committed to. But every time I determined to do it I would inevitably have all kinds of other things to do; my procrastination pattern I mentioned in a previous post was trying to rear its ugly head.

After Day One of the writing challenge, my story is pouring out of me. I have only begun to dictate bits and pieces in my Notes app as they come to me, but this is more than I have done, ever.

Four days before the writing challenge started, I wrote down my goals for this year; one of those goals was to write my story. One week before writing down my goals, I registered for the Hay House writing challenge–something a dear friend sent to me. And exactly one month before that, I made my commitment to write a blog post everyday for 100 days. This is the physics of progress, as one of my mentors would say. I’m biting off pieces that I can chew. I’m taking action and as my mentor always says, action breeds clarity, clarity breeds awareness, and awareness breeds certainty. Each step I take brings me closer to what I want. Each action I take brings me more clarity. And because I’ve set my intention, (and written it down to make it real), more opportunities keep flowing to me. Everytime I make another move that I know is congruent with where I want to go, my story becomes more and more clear to me. For the longest time, I didn’t think I even had a story, not one anybody would be interested in anyway. I was much too ordinary and insignificant to have a story. How many of you feel this way?

There are parts of my story that I am not looking forward to writing. I know it will be therapeutic, and it’s necessary for my growth and healing. There are things that, had I known then what I know now, I would have done differently. But, it is finally time to talk about those things, because I suspect that many of us have those things that we feel we can’t talk about. No matter how big or small, significant or insignificant they seem in our own eyes or in the eyes of others, we all have those moments that we wish we could undo, or do better; the coveted do-over. If I can talk about my stuff, I can empower you to talk about your stuff; to forgive yourself and learn to know and love yourself so that you too can empower others to know and love themselves and we can have a world full of people who truly love themselves.

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Control

So 2020 is almost over, and this year has been a real ride. It’s not over yet and I’m sure there are still many more surprises to come as we have basically entered a decade of challenges; challenges to the systems that are no longer working and/or serving us; challenges to the way we do things and the challenges that go along with adapting to new ways of doing things. And most of all, challenges to the way we think, feel, grow and change.

Many people are still choosing to live in the consciousness of fear and the invisible killer virus that isn’t really killing more people than would already die in an average year. But for most people that would even be reading this blog, many of us have realized this is all about control, or rather fear of the loss of control by those who currently possess it and an ever unquenchable thirst for more.

The one question that has been on my mind lately is “What is this need for control?” Why are there people who want to know everything about everything we do? What is this weird need/desire for them to reach in and have access to literally every facet of our lives? Why do they want to know about all our little habits and nuances to be able to market to us more efficiently and control our every movement for profit that can’t be taken with them when they die anyway? What happened to raising up people who would believe in themselves and who would subsequently do better and be better for society?

This need/desire to be in control has created problems that require evermore elaborate “solutions”, like the helicopter parent that has to forever be present because the need to control every circumstance has stifled the growth that would otherwise have superseded the need for control in the first place.

I once worked for someone who I noticed would become much more micro-managerial whenever they were more stressed about some issue that they had no control over––the seeming loss of control in one area would cause them to grasp for control in other areas, making things very uncomfortable, often creating more senseless work for others in their environment. Isn’t it interesting that our need for control causes us to grasp tighter thereby causing more havoc that we then feel also needs to be controlled?

It’s not new, but I found this need most recently in myself during a healing session for a rather intense pain in my arm. What was I not wanting to let go of? What was I trying to hold so tightly in my grip that it was causing pain in my physical body? (Thank you, Body, for that awareness. Thank you for bringing this to my attention so I could now let it go along with the pain it was causing.)

The thing is, control is an illusion anyway. Trying to hang on to it is like grasping play-dough in your fist, the tighter you squeeze, the more it oozes out of every little crack. How much more fun and creativity can we enjoy and express when we just allow it to flow and begin to take form and shape on its own?

The paradox is that the more we let go the more “control” we have. It’s the point where control makes way for surrender and surrender makes way for flow and flow makes way for ease. What else is possible when we give up the need for control?