Ahhhhh.

It works, it works! Once again we can comment here!! Huzzah!!!

I'm going over the the new, temporary blog and bring that one post over here for "normal" reading and commenting.

Life is good again!!!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

REFLECTIONS


I see the reflection in the mirror, and I hardly recognize it. I’ve grown old. Impossible, for my heart is young. How can my face hold wrinkles when my spirit is ready to turn somersaults in the grass? What am I to believe? Surely the mirror doesn’t lie, the eye sees what is there to see. Or does it?

It is the same in all of life, I believe. We believe what we see or hear, touch, smell. Yet if one person describes what his/her senses are saying, and another person experiences the same sensory input, would the words of the first person words fit the other’s perception? I think it would depend on the experiences each had prior to that experience. If I’ve been close to a forest fire and see a picture of a large fire in the woods, I might say the picture looks hot, stifling, fearsome, and I might express feelings of anxiety. You, a person who has not had the close-at-hand experience as I did, might describe it as a wonderful, big bonfire, ready to roast marshmallows and hot dogs and keep us warm through the night.

If both persons are open to the new view, both might learn from this. I could come away with the softened interpretation of fires in forest settings. You might realize that a bonfire in a wooded area can be dangerous under some circumstances.

So does it help us to see the reflection? Do we believe what the reflection tells us, or do we stick with our personal experience and internal views? If the former, then I’m an old woman who fears fires in the forest. If the latter, I’m only as old as I choose to believe in my heart, and all fires in the forest aren’t disastrous. As I see it, there are benefits to giving some trust to the reflections, as they help us to interpret what is around us and what is inside us.

Balance is essential, in my opinion. If I forget my outward appearance, believing that I can still do what I did at 30 because I feel I can, I’m likely to over extend myself, and the possibility of physical injury or stress become paramount. So I look in the mirror and come to realize that instead of a day-long hike in the wild as a form of exercise and communing with nature, I will settle for a smooth path through a wildlife refuge to satisfy those needs.

We all learn to adjust our views according to the sensory stimuli we encounter as we live. How we interpret it is important. How we use the knowledge is important. But that we are open to new information that might change the schematics of our lives is most important. Without being open to both first-hand experiences (touch, smell, hear, see, etc) and secondary ones (allowing information from other people), we wouldn’t have made it through childhood and school years.

Remember sitting in a classroom listening to those boring teachers droning on and on? They gave us secondary information about a lot of things that didn’t mean squat until we experienced some part of them later on. Those are the seeds planted in soil that seemed almost hopeless, I’m sure, to some of those teachers. But later, the next day or 20 years later, some of us experienced something that made that seed sprout and grow into one of those “aha moments,” when it suddenly makes sense. I suspect most of us don’t realize it and say, “Gee, I’m surely glad Ms. Snodgrass prepared me for this moment!” It just happens.

When we leave school, do we stop having secondary experiences? No! Or at least most of us don’t. I have met a few folks in my life that made me wonder, for they seemed to be still working with only what was inside their brain on the day they graduated from high school . . . or maybe sometime during junior high school. The rest of us accept input in varying degrees from others. It seems to depend on the content of the information (is it believable, given my current constructs?) and the source (I won’t believe that idiot, or OK, that person seems reliable).

So where do you stand in the mix? Do you have your opinions formed and are content to stick with that? Are you still open to input, willing to try new ideas? Do you live by the reflection in the mirror, or do you operate from the gut?