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This article is about relating… relationship…
…and what can go wrong, what always goes wrong with relationships… And how the same things could go right with just a little thought… Everything the internet says is shallow, surface, and cheap… instead I suggest distinctions.
I live in a two-family home. I live upstairs. This apartment used to be the owner’s… when their kids got too big, they bought another house and started to rent both apartments.
I know the owner, I know his wife, and I know that people in this street still remember how they used to fight, cats and dogs, scream loud enough for everyone to hear.
Now his daughter is renting the downstairs apartment….…She lives there with her boy friend, who yells at her a lot. He finds fault in everything. He is a redneck, he operates heavy machinery that digs the ground… She has a college degree.
He makes a lot of money, about as much as a specialist doctor, just in half the time: he works only in the warm months… from April till November.
She grew up with this constant yelling between her parents. And must have invented a way to cope… a way to drown out the yelling: she shrieks at a very high pitch. It sounds playful, although occasionally I have been imagining her being tortured, hurt or something.
They plan to move out… he bought a house. In Syracuse, NY, from his income he can buy a small house every year… easy.
Why am I sharing this with you?
For two reasons:
- You may want to know what are the background sounds when I write an article, when I talk to you, when I run a webinar. I need to completely disconnect from the background to be able to say what I need to say, to stay connected to Source… because…
Yelling, arguments, in and of themselves aren’t, or shouldn’t be a big issue, except… except when you have some personal history that is incomplete.
I promised my students to complete my relationship to my mother, maybe to yelling, and I have been doing my darned best, and it hasn’t been enough.
- The other reason is because some distinctions in the area of relationships could be useful both for you AND me.
Obviously I am not very good at relationships… I am not very good at even being in the same house with others, or I would have someone, want to have someone in the house with me.
I am a committed introvert, I am enough company for myself.
Both my brothers have a big family. I have none, and the only person ever to knock on my door is my landlord…
There are many scales I can, I could measure the differences between my mother and me… and I bet on all of them we would not see eye to eye.
I once imagined what the world would be like if everyone were like me, and I didn’t like it.
Luckily I have room for people being the way they are, even though I have a preference that they be in a way that helps them make their lives count, makes them matter, makes them feel good about themselves.
It is hard to do that when someone is ready to attack, considers everything an attack on their person, and yells, or sulks, or gets angry.
I watched an episode of the BBC show Silent Witness, where a woman considered an offence on herself that her daughter was seduced by her husband, the girl’s father, and got pregnant in the process.
Then she gave birth to the illegitimate child from incest, and that made her even more angry. A personal insult…
So eventually killed both the daughter and the grandchild.
Some people… everything is about them. A weak person’s self-concern. A strong person isn’t touched by everything another does, says, of has. Even if it makes them look bad.
Some students make me look bad. When they don’t implement, when they don’t use what they learned, bought, I did for them, they simply say to the world: her stuff is worthless.
Even though, most likely, their worldview says that I should do it for them… But I should not… mostly because I can’t.
I can do a lot of things for you, but unfortunately for both of us, everything that I have to give is co-creative. It turns off if you don’t implement it. It is worthless.
If I were like my mother, or that woman in the BBC series, I would be murderously angry… and I am not.
It is due to me being able to distinguish that I can only do what I can do… the rest is up to you.
In my conversation with Bonnie yesterday, we looked at my teaching style… My teaching style is not structured, it is meandering.
Most ‘education’ is structured, a lot like memorization. Never meandering, and never relating to any distant dots that could be connected…
You do this first and you do this second and outcomes the finished product.
Most ‘education’ doesn’t teach you to think… to see… to deal with complex issues, like life, like your internal conflicts, like relationships…
The pitifully low truth value of anything and everything you could read, watch, or learn is testament to this inability and unwillingness to think. It is like eating McDonald’s, it is like eating pre-chewed food… no effort from you to put stuff together, match the tastes, ingredients, or even chew.
Comprehension and implementation is the way you attain knowledge, attain anything worth having. But as long as you have your eyes too much on yourself, on how to look, how you sound, how you are perceived, your comprehension will suffer, and your implementation will be inaccurate.
And if something is missing: speak up. Ask for it. Context is missing? You want to know where this conversation is going? Ask for it. It is 100% your responsibility.
And if you tell me that without knowing, every step, where we are going, that it’s worth taking that step, I’ll make sure I take time out to repeat where we are going every 5-10 minutes… because you asked for it.
The latest Distinction podcast is all about relationships with anyone. Relationship with people who disagree with you in their approach, their worldview, their way of dealing with life.
If you have no distinctions by which you can recognize what is the issue, you’ll think it is all about you, and all against you.
With distinctions you can see that they see the world differently, and it is their right to do so. And yet, because of the distinction, you can accommodate them so there can be harmony, cooperation and maybe even love… but at least affinity.
I am in no direct relationship with the people in the downstairs apartment. but having spent time to understand their background, now they can shriek, yell as much as they please, I won’t be touched by it… I understand. I have compassion for them.
If you want an infusion of distinctions weekly from me and Bonnie, you now can. You can sign up to my weekly Distinctions Podcast and it will be delivered into your mobile phone where you can listen to your heart’s desire.
And don’t worry, it will start making sense once you get used to my style… which is definitely meandering.
You can get the first 3 audios of the Distinctions Podcast if you buy today… including yesterday’s… on self-knowledge and creating workable relationships with others.
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