What Poems and People have in common

I mentioned in a post titled “I wish I could hate you” that I like poetry but dislike poems.  When I first wrote that, it served as a moment of self-discovery.  Part of me has always known this truth about myself, but writing it was like discovering it for the first time.  It made it real.

Admitting to not liking poems is kind of like admitting that you don’t like dogs.  Side note: I don’t like dogs, not even when they are puppies.  I know what you’re thinking but I’m not a cat person either and dislike cats even more than I dislike dogs.  I don’t like chocolate ice cream either.  Now that you are all enraged and confused, let’s talk about poetry.

Why do I like poetry?  Well I think it’s because I like things that fit.  Things that tie up or reconnect well.  Things that flow smoothly and then abruptly stop… only to pick back up again.

I like the poetry of life and the poetry of art.  I like the poetry of a great movie or a song that’s particularly touching, but it’s only on rare occasions that I actually appreciate the poetry of poems.

Why do I not like poems?  The majority of poems that I have read seem superficial and vapid.  I struggle to connect with them because many of them are void of context.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying.  There are some poems that I really love but I have to search hard to find a poem that makes an impact on my emotional psyche.

It is difficult, at least for me, to derive meaning outside of relationship and outside of story.  Reading poems outside of their authors context, places the burden of meaning on me and I don’t want that responsibility.  Many readers enjoy this burden because the poem inspires them to be creative and then they can manipulate the poem to mean whatever they need it to mean, but I hate it.

I want to know what the author meant.  I want to know who he or she is and how they felt writing their poem. I’ve found that when I do know the author, or at least something about the author, my enjoyment of their poetry is dramaticly increased.

As I think about my relationship to poems, I can’t help but draw a connection to my relationship with strangers. 

When I read a poem but don’t know the author, the poem becomes a fairly meaningless collection of consonants and vowels that struggle to make up words.

Similarly when I meet a stranger, but don’t know their story, they become just a body.  A collection of arms and legs that have the appearance of life but, at least to me, have not become a person yet.  A body, void of personality and story, is just a body.  It’s just flesh.  Easily objectified, judged, or ignored.  But add a back story, a personality, a sense of humor, and what was just a body or collection of words becomes a PERSON, becomes poetry.

It is a struggle to make the shift from seeing people as a just bodies.  It requires that we transcend the physical and look to the emotional and spiritual, and that has always been difficult for me. I’m clearly not the only one either.  Superficial objectification and judgment are not just my problems.  They are our society’s problems. 

It’s much easier to judge a book by its cover than it is to read the book and then review and interact with its content.  It’s easier to make assumptions based on a person’s clothing than it is to take the time to get to know their character.  It is much simpler to see stature than story, boobs than brains but I’m not satisfied seeing people this way and so I am working to push past the physical in order to connect on emotional and even spiritual levels.

I’m not perfect so I welcome ideas from any of you that have struggled with this.  I will say that the thing that has helped me the most recently is to notice a person’s eyes.

It’s been said that, “The eyes are the window to the soul” and so it is only natural that the eyes become the road that we travel on the journey from body to soul. 

Eyes are emotional body parts.  They are first physical and therefore part of noticing the way someone looks but they also express and show the emotional side of a person.  Looking into a person’s eyes helps me transition from noticing their body to noticing their soul.

When I remember to notice a stranger’s eyes, it becomes much easier for me to connect with them and have conversations deeper than small talk about the weather.

What things help you connect to people and see them as more than just a collection of body parts?

How to actually let go and move on

This post is part 2 of “I wish I could hate you”. If you missed that post you can find it here.

 

There’s an old proverb that says “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”. 

This proverb was, I’m assuming, designed to help minimize risk.  I can see it being advantageous in military or business endeavors.  Maybe even in sports.  In those situations knowledge of your enemy or competition is key. It makes sense to say that having an enemy you know, is better than having and enemy that you don’t know.

I thought the phrase was interesting, and I’m a nerd so I spent some time trying to find the origin of the phrase and something kidna sad emerged.  Like any old phrase it has been misquoted and distorted over time but the most common modification that I found completely changed the entire meaning of the phrase.

The most common misquotation goes something like this: “Better to have something bad but known, than something (that could turn out to be good) but is (currently) unknown.”  How sad is that.

We’d rather settle for familiar garbage than pursue spectacular dreams.

Our fear of the unknown imprisons us to the negative impact of the known.

When we hold on to things, ideas, or people; what we are actually doing is giving those things control in our life.  We are telling those things that they get to decide the scope and range of our options.

So what would happen in your life if you let go of the devil you knew and pursued the angel that you didn’t?

Maybe your devil is a person but maybe it’s just the idea of a person that you can’t seem to shake.  Maybe your devil is a job that you have but don’t like.  Maybe it’s the car that you’re driving that keeps breaking down.  Maybe it’s the gym that you go to but always leave feeling crappy after working out with a bunch of muscle-bound meat heads surrounded by botoxed-Barbie dolls.

(I hate gyms but kind of like alliteration, can you tell?)

Whatever you’re devil is, it’s time to let go.

Here’s one way to start.  Take out a piece of paper and write down your devil on that page up at the top.  Once you’ve done that make a list of things that YOU can do to let go of, and remove that devil from your life.  Notice that I capitalized YOU.  The only person that can make a change is you. 

Often we think of letting go as a passive action but that is why we never ACTIVELY let go.  Letting go is an action and we must act in order for the action to take place.  Your fingers and arms (and probably your mind and emotions) must move away from the object that you are holding and then in many cases they must actively push that thing away.

Now, Listen closely because this is where people mess up.  (Ask me how I know.)

Once our hands have done the action of letting go, we leave them open and they just kind of sit there.  But unlike objects at rest that tend to stay at rest, hands that open tend to close.  If we don’t push away the devil and then close our hand around something that is positive, our hands get bored and tend to reach back out and pick up the very thing that we set out to let go of.

The best way that I have found to successfully let go of devils (aka addictions or vises) is to fill my hands back up once I’ve emptied them with positive habits.

Don’t just let go of laziness, grab on to a day planner.  Don’t just let go of a bad relationship, fill your life with positive ones.  Don’t just let go of an addiction, build positive habits.

I’d love to hear about the devils that you are letting go of but what is more important is the angels that you are picking up.  Let me know in the comments.

I Wish I Could Hate You

I love poetry but don’t really like many poems. More on that later.

I did go through a poem writing phase in high school though. Who didn’t?

Most of them are garbage but I ran across one today while going through an old file that isn’t half bad.

It was inspired, like all good High School poetry is, by a girl who broke my heart.

Wish

I wish I could hate you, You broke my heart
I wish I could be mad at you 
For ripping my world apart
I wish I could ignore you, Forget you existed
I wish that it wasn’t but it is
And I’m pissed
I wish I could hate you, But I can’t let go inside
I wish I could run away 
Bring my pride, leave your side

I hate that I can’t hate you, I want to so bad
I hate that I can’t forget you 
Can’t get you out of my head
I hate that I can’t give up on you, My dumb ass keeps trying
I hate these damn tears 
But here I am crying
I hate settling for non-answers, I just want to know
I hate that I don’t hate you 
and that I can’t let you go

I struggled to move on from that heart break for a long time.  Mostly because it’s hard to process getting your heart broken, especially for the first time, but a lot because I just couldn’t let go.  Not being able to let go really hindered my ability to move on and grow as a person.

Looking back at my life I can unfortunately see a bit of a pattern. Holding on to things that should be let go of is a problem for me, and I think it’s a problem for most people.

Think about it.  We stay in abusive relationships.  We keep our closets stocked with clothes that don’t fit us and aren’t in style.  We look back and try incessantly to “re-live the glory days”.  We keep insane amounts of clutter.  We feed our habits and addictions when we know that feeding them only further imprisons us.

Why do we do this?

I think that one of the main reasons is fear. Fear of change, or fear of the unknown.

                               (Check out this post that I wrote about facing fears titled “Pee into the Wind”.)

While fear is a huge part of why we don’t let go, I think that it goes deeper.

The mistake that I’ve made for much of my life is that I try to diagnose myself logically when I should diagnose myself emotionally.

It didn’t make logical sense for me to still be in love with a girl that had led me on and then broken my heart, but it made perfect sense emotionally.  I was in love.

With hindsight being 20/20 and then adding what I hope is a bit of maturity, I can say that I was really only inlove with the idea of her.  But that idea was a happy, pretty, emotionally awesome thing to be in love with.  I didn’t want to let that go.

Now some things, are worth being held on to, but maybe today would be a good time to evaluate your life and ask yourself, “Am I holding on to something that is keeping me from achieving my goals?”

Maybe you are holding on to an overly idealized self-image, or a subconscious value that you no longer actually hold.  Maybe like High School Andrew, you are holding on to the idea of someone else and that ideal is making it harder for you to know them as they actually are.

Let me know what things you are holding on to in the comments and check back next week for a post all about how to actually let go.