Packing the 10 Essentials

My last blog entry got me thinking, so if the warmth of hospitality is one of the essential human elements I'd like to have for my own and take with me on the trip, what are the other nine, to continue the metaphor? I'm not sure (and you know I'll be trying to figure it out), but I have some thoughts about my next desired element on the list.

When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.

In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.

I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed–my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.

I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles