The Naked Jumper – Pt. 5

“Mirror, mirror on the wall…”

Are you sure that’s “Me”?

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In the half-darkness of twilight we all hide our crimes and misdemeanours carefully underneath a hard shell of well-worn words; words chanted hypnotically to convince and remind everyone  and ourselves of our “goodness”, “grace”, “kindness” and “caring”. This “virtue” chant conveniently conceals the deliberate and intentional mismanagement of ourselves and is traditionally accompanied by our eternal litany of excuses for this, that and the other. Counting virtues and flaws is the preoccupation of those who like to kick up a fuss over their misbegotten mediocrity and have nothing to talk of apart from their misgivings; either of themselves or others. Few, if any, can hold a candle to this “circus of self” paraded by the “better than, worse than” crusaders and we all, to a lesser or greater degree, come under this circus tent; we love to moan, rant, whinge, bitch and complain.

There is no real reason for it but it’s kinda understandable; it’s difficult to swim against the tide of what’s “expected” of you, whatever that is, be it positive or negative. No matter how much we might like to kid ourselves with our efforts of “fitting in” the irony is that nobody really “fits in”, everybody is a peculiarity unto themselves and everybody secretly knows it too. It’s a most public secret because if everyone did “fit in”, everything was the way it was supposed to be and everything always worked out there’d be a lot of smiling but instead, you see sad eyes trapped in miserable faces.  “Fitting in” has a cost, both to ourselves and others. It breeds an insidious and vicious cycle of hidden apathy; a culture of “settling” for things we “didn’t particularly want” that we “make do with” because we “can’t” see any other option or choice. Why? Because “that’s the way things are” and “that’s the way of the world”; we never question, nevermind challenge, such assumptions. It breeds a culture of fake contentment, deep insecurity and savage bitterness. We’ll go to extremes to “fit in”, we’ll willingly carve away huge parts of ourselves and others to achieve a “good” fit.

The non-smilers come in all shapes, sizes and colours, mostly garbed in the ego-centric trappings of conceit that belies a deep personal insecurity. The majority of non-smilers, will look up from their misery and then blurt “I’m just so unlucky” and the bitter non-smilers will just completely and utterly bathe in denial; switching on hyper-drive to harp on about their delusive “happiness” at their  dissatisfying lot; lying to themselves and insisting to others that they’ve got what they want and that everything is “perfect”.  The uncommon truth is that, we are acting in an artificial manner to “fit in” and hiding the discomfort that this causes; we practice so hard that these actions become engrained, habitual and seem “natural” to us.  So much so, we merge this behaviour into what we call “self” but in reality we have created an almost impenetrable blindness to our own actions.

This blindness results in a raft of contradictions in the way we feel and view ourselves. Our defence of our “self” develops into a hard-wired “blindness” or “oblivion” to our actions.  We are no longer able to pin-point the source of our distress because everything we do seemingly “makes sense”. Thanks to our blind spot we come to the misguided conclusion that our feelings don’t matter and are irrelevant, and thus we bury them. As our “blindness” becomes a permanent feature we notice that troublesome events (i.e. results of our actions) keep recurring, instead of taking notice of our feelings and treating them as warning signs of problems we need to deal with, we deliberately ignore them.  Instead, we arrogantly infer events are further evidence of what we deem as our “self” but somehow unfortunate consequences that emanate from those events are “circumstance” that we cannot be responsible for. Consequently, we end up founding and building our lives on and around this  blindness we label as “self”.

If we stop for a moment, we may wonder what to make of the miserable armies of non-smiling people and go “was it really their fault for the way things worked out for them?”.  “Surely”, we say to ourselves, “that wasn’t their intention, it couldn’t have been deliberate or knowing?” and we end with “of course, they didn’t mean it”. We go “it doesn’t make sense, nobody wishes bad stuff or unhappiness on themselves, that’s ludicrous!”. That’s true, nobody “wishes it” upon themselves but they do engage in the same actions that repeatedly result in the same undesirable outcomes. Then the logic goes something like this, “well, anybody can make mistakes” but if this is the case, it’s very striking how many people don’t learn from them and repeat the action, over and over again. Our “blind spot” shows up as duplicitous, repetitious behaviour; striking peculiarities of purpose that are easily spotted in others are conveniently overlooked in ourselves. We end up ignoring, excusing and even encouraging particular flavours of blindness if they are similar to our own, or conversely, we’re extremely judgemental if they’re not. We see it all the time in strange recurring, uncontrolled excesses of behaviour; people who cry for help but don’t need it, people who senselessly and compulsively brag, deride and ridicule,  people who are insidiously greedy, vicious and nasty… There is an endless list of extreme behaviour and all this comes out because we can’t keep the feelings in.

We are our own worst enemy, the tricks we play on others are the same tricks we play on ourselves; we will eventually become victim to our own delusive games until we give ourselves no choice. What’s very bizarre is that this “blind” spot behaviour finds more and more general “acceptance” and is increasingly written off as incidental and minor;  dismissed as things we are supposed to and expected to “put up with” and “shut up about”, rather than highlight or challenge. We may like to say things to ourselves and others like “oh well,  that just how I am”, “I can’t help it”, “that’s just me” and invent reasons and excuses for  behaving badly but, in truth, we have none. We are responsible for our behaviour, the things we do, how we feel and for the consequences of who and what we choose to be; the consequence to ourselves is inescapable, after all, you are the only person who lives your life.

dmojo
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©Dmojo, 2008-2009.

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