Pain is Water

A few days ago, I participated in a jam night with blues music as its focus. I very much like blues music. I very much like jamming. I did not very much like this night's jam as a participant. Perhaps because my ego got involved or perhaps because the musicians were more annoyed than inspired. I got hurt. I was not happy with the way I felt.

No one made me feel these things. I felt them. I'm not confident enough in my own emotional control to say that I chose to feel the feelings.

The world is a reaction.

Everyone is a microcosm of the world. I can either turn the butterfly wing flap of their words into hurricanes of anger, or I can west wind them over plain states in order to turn turbines and make a change through the charge I was given. After all, turning wind into the way you're reading this post is the new transmutation, ins't it?

Pain is water. We are plants. Too much pain, and we can drown. Too little and we can become anemic. Just enough and we can grow.

Pain allows us an opportunity to grow so long as the pain we've felt is looked at as something that can help us pinpoint our difficulties and take steps to fix them.

This is where poetry steps in.

The Prompt:

Think of a memory that has a lot of pain associated with it. (Sometimes the farther back in time this memory is, the better.)

Let it all out - every negative thing you felt, put that down on paper and let that stuff go.

Now, think of what actions this experience led you into taking.
Who are you now that you've survived the pain?
Who might you have been without it?

As for the jam I talked about earlier. I realized that my knowledge on blues chords is severely lacking. I can comprehend what a 7add13 chord is, but I have no idea how to fret one on a guitar. For this reason, I'm going to learn a lot more about how to play those chords. And I'll try my best not to be upset that I don't know as much as I'd like to.

Epiphanies Seldom Happen When We Expect Them

Tonight, a student told me, "The real question you have to ask yourself is 'Why do you have a lower opinion of yourself than everyone else around you does?'"

 I don't know. But it got me thinking.

What assumptions do I make about myself? What assumptions do I assume other people make of me?

Try:
Think of a time when you assumed the worst. What crazy chain of events would have led to the world's destruction from that event? Then: How did the situation actually turn out?

OR

Write a list of your craziest fears (no matter how absurd)! It's a great list poem format!

Not Enough Hours.

Sometimes the phrase "I wish there were more hours in a day" feels more like a vodka soaked plea than a wish.

Still, I wish there were more hours in a day.

I guess 24 will have to do for now.

If you could have a conversation with your former self, what would you say? Do you think you'd listen? Which version of yourself do you think would learn more?

Tragedy Is So Easy

This is another topic that's been on my brain for a bit now.

Tragedy is so easy. Don't get me wrong. Surviving tragedy is not easy. But we, as a society, have manufactured a different idea of what "tragedy" is.

I present to you the following phrase: "First world problems."

The coffee you ordered was too hot/not hot enough.
Your unofficial parking spot was taken by someone.
You're having a bad hair day.

I think one of the biggest problems with American culture recently has been our refusal to qualify things. I think part of this is a reaction to a small subset of people who are so focused on the semantics of something that it feels futile to qualify your thoughts. When people get shot down, they tend to not want to fly. When the emotion we're trying to describe is met with "I don't think that's what you really mean," then we stop trying to describe. We stop trying to separate out the big from the large. And there becomes an agreed upon understanding that certain words are going to stand for much, much more than they were meant for.

Interesting, awesome, cool, hot, great, good, wonderful, amazing... these are quickly becoming nonsense words. Their meaning is lost because they are overused. They begin to blend together into some amorphous mass. If our culture were a person, they'd be repeating these words until they lost all meaning.

Tragedy, in some respects, is like this. Tragedy is becoming a catch-all. Tragedy is not a catch-all. Tragedy is not simplistic. Emotions are not simplistic, but I digress.

Tragedy is easy to apply to ourselves and others because we use it so much. Tragedy is easy to relate to because it's begun to lose its meaning. Tragedy is becoming misery. And we all know how misery feels about company.

It's too easy to talk about our tragedies.

And it's tragically difficult to talk about our successes or to compliment others for theirs.

Part of the reason I'm embarking on this journey is to clear my head of some of these thoughts. And, hopefully, somewhere along the way, remind myself that it's not all tragic. And that it is okay to be happy and to tell others how great they are.

It's also okay to tell myself that I'm pretty baller.

So, with that last thought in mind:

Write a list of all the stuff you're good at.

Once you've done that, try writing a piece about how one of those items is your super power. Imagine a world in which its continued existence relies on that power.

Now go save the world.

Perception

Okay, okay. It's March. Some might think that this is just a reminder that time is inexorably marching on towards "oblivion" or something equally as depressing. Sure. I mean, you could also look at oxygen as one of the most corrosive forces on earth as opposed to, say, the stuff that you need to be able to admire all of the other corrosive things on earth.

Really, it's all about perception.

Now, I'm not saying that looking at the world and imagining that it is full of butterflies (Yep, butterflies, everywhere!) will suddenly make an earthquake shake into the product of a billion butterflies flapping their wings at once... but that is a pretty awesome image... No. What I'm saying is that the way we view the world has serious implications on how we feel about it.

And how we feel about ourselves.

If you think that everyone is out to get you; that they're keeping you in whatever hell hole you've been trying to claw your way out of, then just keep in mind that "YOU" necessarily falls into that whole "EVERYONE" category.

Ever wonder why you hate Bill in accounting for being so damn lazy? Well, my friends, you're probably Projecting your own laziness on poor Bill. In other words, the things we dislike about other people are usually much more informative on our own crappy habits than they are honest assessments of the other's character. I'm not saying that Bill isn't lazy; I'm just saying you dislike Bill because you hate your own laziness. It's just that it's easier to dislike someone who isn't us first.

This is probably the greatest and most humbling lesson another individual can teach us.

Anyhow, back to perception.

The point of talking about Bill from accounting was to point out that humans very often do not have objective ideas about reality. We are stuck with our animal instinct perception of everything. Granted, you can train yourself out of this way of thinking by focusing on Mindfulness and Awareness (two good reasons to do Yoga, Kung Fu, or Meditation), but most people suck at being mindfully aware (self included - but I'm working on it). Ahh, but this brings us right back to Perception.

The world is a vast and expansive place. The oceans still hold mysteries. This place is pretty damn cool. If you view the people around you as miserable bone bags who just haven't woken up to the fact that this place called life is a Ronda Rousey fight (short, brutish, and ending in all your limbs being broken), then your view is essentially right. And painful.

However, if you view the people around you as trying their best and who just need a little help every so often and you view yourself as both student and teacher... Well, then you're right too.

I can view all the painful crap that happened to me as reminders as to why life sucks, or I can view all those as reminders that I wouldn't know the brightness of the light without seeing how bitter the dark is.

So, what do we do with this? Simple answer: write poetry.

It's not cold outside; it's the world reminding us to hold someone close.
I'm not sleeping; I'm rewarding myself for getting crap done.
I'm not crying; I'm offering up a salary of tears like a tithe.

The prompt for today:
Think of something from a minor annoyance to a big frustration and redefine it using a metaphor. What implications does that have for the rest of the world? For all the things around it? What changes must be made for this metaphor to stay true?

This can work to varying degrees with tragedy, too but that's a topic for another day.

Remember, perception is one of the poet's most important tools.