Re-Thinking

I haven’t been able to write and I need to do so. But I have been reading to write (writers will understand this concept). I ran across something that I wrote in 2012 and posted in 2013 on Facebook. For some reason it moved me to post it here. Maybe it will help someone else. It helped me to revisit it…

 

Some years ago there was a Luzianne Iced Tea commercial where an old man who had drank Lipton up until that very second stared out from a porch, looking pensive. He had just “discovered” that Luzianne tasted so much better than Lipton’s tea. He then looks into the camera and says, “it makes me rethink my WHOLE life.” We are, of course, supposed to know that this taste of tea was more than a “game-changer.” It was a life-shattering, life-altering, reality-breaking moment.

I had that day yesterday. I am always examining my life–some of my friends think I do it too much. But I don’t know how one lives in a world where she or he is not willing to see the way her or his fingerprints, footprints, hand print, life is affecting people around her or him, the environment, the planet, the universe. But yesterday I ran into the walls of self-perception and self-deception. Perhaps I have been deceiving myself, I said. I HAVE been deceiving myself, I said. Damn! I have been deceived! I said. And I have been the Deceiver. (If enough people reflect it back, maybe it is you, and maybe the “others” are reflecting your own distorted self-perception).

We all have our “version” of what happened in history. I know because I come from a big family and sometimes when I listen to the telling of an event where I was present, I don’t remember much of the details or emotions I hear being described. None of us is deliberately lying (I think that even when I think some of us are purposely embellishing). But the way we remember, and what our memory stores, is directly related to where we “were” in the cosmos when the event occurred–where we were emotionally, professionally, spiritually, psychologically, etc.

That then, is why one’s memory of a thing can change as one is healed, reconciled, or just does not care anymore. But listening to other’s telling of “a thing” becomes important to correcting our perceptions. I don’t ever want to hold on to a distorted perception that will kill relationships. If an experience really is “life-altering,” my great hope is that I’ll be able to learn from it again and again as I hear and see it from different angles and out of others’ memories. I want to be better, all the time–which means I don’t want to live in or help create deception.

(This Reflection was written and not posted on January 11, 2012–I’m sitting here wondering what the “experience” that I considered so significant was. I don’t remember–and that too, is a part of the point of this post on October 26, 2013 [and now, on June 21, 2014]).