I love learning. When I look at the ways I spend much of my time — whether on YouTube, listening to podcasts, audiobooks, some reading, exploring somewhere new, or looking closer at somewhere old — discovery is ever in waiting, everywhere.
The people that come across my path are fascinating. I couldn’t have it any other way, as I tend to bore easily. Everyone is, arguably, interesting — but the characters who’ve enriched and touched my life always have something else… And because self-knowing, personal growth, spiritual expansion, and discerning my place in the world are top priorities (alongside freedom, honesty and harmony), the catalysts are essential to the story.
It has caused me worlds of pain, and in fact, has helped me to explore emotions deeply in all areas — positive and negative. Too often, it has caused overwhelm, unfortunately. Us extraverted feelers can frequently get our sensitive, empathic, why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along asses kicked by a deeply traumatized, callous, cynical, brutal world.
At least, that’s one perspective.
As we come to understand ourselves, our true values, our personalities, and our psychologies, we re-adopt and re-integrate our fragmented or dissociated aspects. At the time of this writing, I am 42. Still, almost daily, I discover some little thing or unearth some grand holy shit revelation that puts another piece of the puzzle into perspective.
It’s not that the pieces were, or are, missing, but grasping the full gamut of the tapestry of our lives is at times quite daunting and disorienting. We really need to give ourselves a break.
We can have an idea about where we are, where we’ve been, and where we desire to go, but life isn’t about to start coloring within the lines.
Get to know the real you. I’ve discovered profound and useful insights through the MBTI (INFJ), or Enneagram (4w5, 5w4) personality profiling methods. It’d be easy to merely adopt one label or trait or type, but again, who we are is organic, multidimensional, fluid and flowing; there are fifty shades of everything.
Our tendencies and preferences may be hardwired, perhaps, but how we show up, embrace and implement what we are, is how we serve the greater story and our souls.
We have an unnatural bent in our society toward falling into the “being wrong” or “being broken” trap. We invalidate each other at every turn. We’re too busy to care. We’re too tired to listen. We’re too overwhelmed to feel.
We’re too invested in the distortions, the dialectical and the polarized. We’re violently divided within, and without. It’s no wonder that the uneasiness, angst, anxiety, and frustration is perpetually boiling, just under the surface we work so hard to maintain.
Weird, is beautiful. Be real.
Solvitur ambulando