Today We Celebrate!

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The Best Music

Based on the recent postings on happiness, I've decided to start a new trend for Rantings; every entry will start with something I'm thankful about. In Trinidad, we are coming into the season of the Poui. Poui trees are beautiful, wild, tall, deciduous trees that flower in pinks, yellows and oranges around this time of year. They make the usually richly green mountains brilliant with colour when they are all in bloom. I love to watch out for the very first Poui bloom of the season, and slowly track the progress as others begin to follow suit, because they are so quickly gone, blending in to the lush greens of the mountainside. I am thankful to live in a landscape paradise. God has done great, great work here.

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Today, I am thinking of any really excellent piece of music; have you ever noticed how there are always ebbs and flows to it? I really enjoy classical music, and in this genre there is often an indicated crescendo  (escalating) and diminuendo (de-escalating) moment which adds drama and movement to the piece. In other styles of music, sometimes it is the darkness of the lyrics that creates drama and the emotion there is appealing to the listener because it is honest, or raw, or relate-able to the bobbing states that every person experiences in life. In an interview I saw with the British musician and songwriter Adele, she said that after all of the success of her first (19) and particularly her second album, 21, she found that she was happy. Both she and the interviewer joked that something needed to happen before her next album, as happy doesn't sell as much as anguish does.

The fact is, we all go through the low moments and the high moments that life is made up of.  Sometimes, we can worry ourselves into believing that there is something wrong with us if something is wrong with us. I say that very tongue-in-cheek, because I have seen many clients who think like this, and I have definitely seen it in myself - if something makes me sad or acutely emotional in any way, if I can't fix it right away then I begin to rebuke myself. "Snap out of it!" I can't tell you how many clients panic about being crazy if they have an unpleasant emotion for too long.

Now, don't get me wrong; in mental illness (for example, depression), people can definitely get to the point where they are catastrophizing every event in their lives, and they can become consumed by negative emotions. In these cases, sometimes medication is required to return the biochemical mechanisms in their brain to the proper balance, and sometimes the therapist's main intervention will include re-framing the client's spontaneous thoughts, and seeking to alter the thoughts that a client chooses to focus on. My point in talking about feeling bad when things happen that are hard to deal with is to say this: it is okay to feel bad sometimes. In my life, I have felt bad because I have been depressed. I actually remember crying one time because I couldn't believe I was feeling this bad. My depression depressed me. Why? Because the message is usually that negative emotions are a bad thing, and we shouldn't ever focus on them.

I don't know, maybe I'm just not like everyone else, but I think that the negative emotions are a really important part of our lives, and their expression is CRUCIAL to mental health. In my life, the first 25 years or so were spent being really emotionally closed, being really really far from my emotions in relation to everyone else, and the reward was that no one really knew me that well. People saw me as strong, sure, but I was never at liberty to say "I'm hurting" or "I need..." In the last two or three years I've been actively changing this about myself. I've been intentionally admitting to my world that I am a whole person - I am the strong, independent and wildly hilarious person that is impressed upon you the minute you meet me, but I am also soft hearted, sensitive and immensely loving. None of these are secrets I wish to keep. Cut me and I bleed. When things go terribly in my life, I cry about them. I'm not at all sorry about this.

To go back to the title statement, the best music ebbs and flows. The best people have all dimensions. Excellent people's stories compel you because they aren't made of success from start to finish. The bigger the trials a person overcomes, the more inspirational their story is at the end. When my life is over, I want my loved ones to look at my life, maybe read my journals and say "WOW look at how much there is here!" I want the bad to be represented as much as the good will be, because this is what I have overcome, and this is the music I've made with it. 

Hedonism makes us Happy (Part 1)

I am definitely not the first person to talk about this idea of faith-inclusive hedonism. In fact, John Piper has developed a whole ministry based on the idea that "God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him."

What do you think that means? From his position, I have gathered that he wants listeners to invest their attention in the pursuit of Godly pleasure, to become so lost in the worship of God that they become satisfied by His spirit. Biblically, this seems like the goal, simplified. We want to worship God, to be positioned so squarely in His presence that we are totally satisfied, because God is more than enough. While this is a belief that I agree with and hold, I think it may be a bit too theoretical for me. I don't think it is really telling people how to be happy in God, or even just in general. To me, it feels like saying you can have higher self esteem by sitting next to all your past successes printed on paper or depicted in pictures - look at them everyday, and you'll have a higher self esteem! I don't know if that is enough information. While you stare at them, you'll probably feel better, but the fact is that none of us can just sit in the same place for the duration of life, chewing on only the theory that we could be happy. We also live in an animated and physical world that impacts our feelings about self, and life. Below is an excellent twelve minute video I really hope you'll watch, it's about the mechanisms that people tend to use to assess and to achieve happiness.

Dr. Shawn Achor is describing a principle of positive psychology which says that people tend to be in pursuit of normal, when normal is merely an average, and often times not an accurate average, but skewed to too many negative examples. There is a tendency to relate and focus on more negativity than positivity, and the result is a population of people who believe that the regular, everyday norm is just not that good. His suggestion? To actively pursue the good. His research has been able to demonstrate how the inclusion of random acts of kindness (such as sending an encouraging email or opening a door for someone), of journalling about one positive experience everyday greatly improves a person's mentality, and this is actually more predictive of success at work and school than is IQ alone. I find that very interesting, because it suggests that we can manipulate our own habits and thinking to literally create more happiness.

Happiness has been marketed as something that some people have, and some people don't. It is spoken of in reverent tones when noted in someone else, and people generally aspire to attain the things that will, one day make them happy, too. I have been chewing over this idea for a couple years now because in my own life I had been completely convinced that being a goal setter and plan follower, doing everything you maturely and thoughtfully set out to do was the way to happiness. Ongoing success makes you happy, right? I'm learning that that is wrong. Success makes you desirous of more success, and like Achor is suggesting, it just means you're aiming for a moving target.

My newest thought has been to be where I am, and do good, be good and see good right there. I am saying happiness is something that you take from life, not something that life gives to you.

10.) I will do good anyway. The Paradoxical Commandments are a list of life statements and guidelines written by Dr. Kent M. Keith that have really spoken to me recently; I encourage you to read through them.

The tenth resolution I wrote for 2012 references The Paradoxical Commandments and I find that this is a good springboard into the challenge for the year which is to literally be good. Many of the references here suggest that good is, but humans don't naturally choose to see what is good, but instead see what is less than  ideal, less than the goal, good. I like the paradoxical commandments because they remind us that there is always a little struggle involved with doing (or being/seeing) good, but that you should do it anyway. In my mind happiness is the product of knowing and seeing what is good. Happiness, to me, is the result of a superior understanding of what is all around us.

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And So We Revel

 REV·EL
    [rev-uhl]  Show IPA verb, -eled, -el·ing or (especially British ) -elled, -el·ling, nounverb (used without object)1.to take great pleasure or delight (usually followed by in ): to Revel in luxury.2.to make merry; indulge in boisterous festivities. (Source)

Tomorrow is "Carnival Monday" in Trinidad and Tobago. I have taken the four day weekend as an opportunity to go to a family friend's beach house about two hours from home. So far, it's been absolute bliss. What a treat after my second week at work (which is going well by the way!); I am already tanned and feeling really relieved of the week. Today is going to be a short one, but I really want to ask you this: what is revelling, and is it a bad thing? In carnival, there are (at least) 48 hours of non stop revelling. People involved in the reveling are having the time of their lives, and Christians in this culture turn their noses up at all those heathen sinners with their complete abandon. I wondered to myself when was the last time I saw such a happy group of Christians? I can't answer that, because I don't remember. Why is that? I've been coming to the point of embracing hedonism within the confines of my faith.

I'm not going to go into the details tonight, but I thought I'd give you a little something to chew on. At every opportunity of late, I've been looking for ways to enjoy everything around me. I've been working hard at experiencing pleasure from all the little and big blessings that seep into my day. Below are some pictures I took on my travels.

Balandra, North Coast, Trinidad

Close to Big Bay, North Coast, Trinidad

Close to Cedros, South Coast, Trinidad

Hopefully I can talk more about this later this week, but I am currently on a challenge myself to invest in finding and/or seeing the good. My encouragement for you this week is to be inquisitive, be hungry and determined in your pursuit of good. 

Tomorrow I'll be Eighty (The Voice you have)

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Last Friday was the end of my first full week of work. I came back on Wednesday, February 1st and I am amazed that I've already had two Fridays on the job! Time really just flies by at gale force. As I have been at work though, I've been thinking about the way people perceive others, based solely on the tone of their voice, or perhaps their style of speaking. If you are soft spoken, people tend to think that you are soft, and likewise, if you have a loud or deep voice, people tend to think you are forceful.

My next thought was about the tone of our language. If people make assumptions based solely on the booming or whisper-like nature of a person's tone, do they also make assumptions based on the strength or passivity of the language we use? In science, researchers reporting their findings and theories are told to use the passive voice because it lends to the nature of research, i.e. incomplete understanding. A researcher is told to use the passive voice for reporting because they should be objective, less self-convicted, and more aware of the existing mysteries in what they are researching. In everyday speech and fictional writing, the passive voice creates ambiguity and can be a tool (for politicians, for e.g.) to give information while being vague about the details.

I titled this post "Tomorrow I'll be Eighty (The Voice you have)" because I was just thinking about how fast the time flies, and also about the Resolution below. Feeling as though you contribute and are being purposeful in my mind, has a little something to do with what you are saying about yourself in your actions and in the voice you use to communicate you to the external world.

9.) Wherever I go, there I am. This relates to Res 2.) and 3.), but is important in its own right, because this speaks to one's state of mind at every point. This is especially important in those transition times, in the times where you are fed up of where you are, and every day increases your angst. All [last] year here I've been looking at ways to combat feelings of meaninglessness which erupt most when you aren't doing everything you wish you were. The goal of this Resolution is to find any and every thing that could make you feel like you are contributing and purposeful where you are. I really think people need to know that they add to their space, and deciding to be present wherever you find yourself is my answer to an uncontrollable restlessness. 

In my opinion, there is always something that you are absolutely sure of. For me, purposefulness is the key, or one of the keys to happiness. I don't mean having things to do when I use the term “purposefulness” though, I mean having an increasingly clear picture of what you were made to do, and doing it. Abraham Maslow called this “self-actualization,” where you are the person you envision yourself being and your needs are being met. What I have learnt is that there is a certain amount of liberation and more importantly, increase in happiness when you actively insert yourself into your days. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be so wound up because I'm completely dissatisfied with everything that I have and everything that I've been doing all day. My theory is that we feel like that when we know of other things we could be doing, we know we didn't say things that we believed and that we were basically letting life happen to us all day long.

When I die, I want it to be true that I happened to the world around me. I want it to be true that wherever I went, I made the environment different. I want to know that my humour brightened up my office or my therapy session. I want to know that my determination made someone try something new. I want my blog to have touched someone. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m using my own personal examples, but I really want to challenge you to be thinking about who you are. Ask your loved ones what your best qualities are, what really moves them about you, and see if you are cultivating that in every aspect of your life. Do you know why you are at the job you are at? Do you see how your skills differ and improve your environment? If you don’t, I’m encouraging you to find out, and make sure you’re using them. I'm saying be present and active in your own life. If you like, you can come back and comment or message me (which a lot of people seem to like to do) about how you find that experience, if you think that is always possible and what are some things you can do in the situations where it's hard to be an individual.

Life seems to just fly by, and in my opinion there is a lifetime and not much time at all. I see you as having great potential, and the world is so very blessed to have you in it. Imagine what the world would be like if more people were being active in the voice and the actions that they use. My challenge for the week is for you to be wherever you are, because at the end of our lives we will look back and my hope is that you'll be able to say that "That was me. I did that, and I'm so glad that I had the courage to..."

Validated Wholly.

You will all excuse me while I silently freak out about compromising my highly valued privacy in today's blogpost. This post is in some ways a revisit to another post I wrote, that has been one of the most popular entries in the history of Rantings. I'm here to talk about how we as humans can become caught up in what I like to call identity by comparison. In psychology, there are loads of studies that talk about elements that impact the way a person assembles their view of self - what parents say/do, what their peers do, what society says people like person/group X does, and what is inherent to the individual (their nature) all form a person's identity.

Recently, I've been thinking about my own identity and the parts of that identity that I don't need to own. In my theory, there are at least a couple sources of identity in every individual. The first is the true core and essence of you, the values, hopes and preferences that make you, you. The second is the identity that someone gave you. This is what your parent, a teacher, a mean boy/girl at school, a boyfriend/girlfriend made as a statement about you, that you have taken ownership of. This is what you believe about yourself, solely based on what you were told.  Now, it isn't necessarily bad, and we're going to talk about how, as one of the good examples of this, God also gives us an identity, one that we can only own through faith. In my opinion when your true core identity can find the truth and the words that resonate from what people have said, and still be fully represented, then you have found your ideal self. This is the identity that Rantings sets out to encourage you to seek and live by, because it represents you after you have sifted through what you've been taught, and is what you truly believe.

This morning, I went to my parents' church for fellowship Sunday and in their special "Thanksgiving Service," I gave my testimony. I related what has been going on with me, and I said that in some ways, I am still living in one of my worst nightmares, but the thanksgiving can come now, because I am completely, 100% convinced that God is with me, and that He has a plan to use this for good. I have no dwindling in the faith department, only in the confidence department, but I remain sure that God is present, and somehow, in this He has neither left, nor forsaken me. I can see that He has not, so I can stay on the current course, without wavering, even when people suggest to me that I try an alternative.

Now, into the topic of the day. Who am I? I was freaking out earlier, because it is impressed upon me to drop the general nature of my posts. I am professing that there will always be a piece of myself in EVERY post I publish; not just in the way the writing is assembled, or the humour, but a direct insight from my heart on what I'm writing about. Today I am going to insert some self into my thoughts on singleness and some of the processes I've had to have on the matter in order to move to a more healthy place. I asked the who am I question because I want you to think about the statement answers you have to that question. For me, one of the answers I had, based on what the world told me about it, was that I was alone, and that alone wasn't quite right.

When I entered my mid-twenties, it hit me like a ton of bricks, bricks that "they" had said were looming over my head, but that I had always assumed were never going to be my problem. I finished gradschool and immediately realised that I was in the majority - I wanted the cliché in it's entirety; husband, 2.5 children, and white picket fence. This was a strange place to move into, because I had prided myself on my independence and my career driven ambition. I never really factored in a very persistent, present desire for a husband and family that would, at times, supersede my professional ambition.  I knew that I wanted to get married, but I saw this as a natural progression, a bi-product of my living.

When the desire for a spouse and a family became an entity of its own, somehow morphing into a full fledged goal in my twenties (adding an Mrs. degree to my Ms. and my future PhD. ambitions) I began to feel nervous, because the world categorises people into these rigid subgroups, and I was contemplating where I fit into these. Was I a single career woman like I'd kind of been marketed as up to that point? Was I in a relationship? Well, don't I want to get married? I'm past 25, and by some standards, withering as we speak! Was I one of those lesbians then? What steps was I taking to make this pesky singleness go away?

Those are the types of questions, implied or voiced, that I felt my world asking me. I felt a great deal of pressure, all of a sudden, and some of it was from my own internal dialogue. I took the commentary of the world around me about the identities I had to choose from, I considered my own heart's desire and then I came up with a belief about myself, based on these. I was single for too long. Something is wrong with me. I am going to be alone forever if I keep doing everything that I am doing now. I'm too picky. My standards are too high.

There are a number of reasons why we believe the things we do, anything from what someone was able to convince us of, to the actual details of our lives that have supported some theory in our heads. I realised about six months to a year ago that I was starting to believe those statements about myself, based on what my world was saying to me. That was an area of vulnerability for me, because I wasn't completely confident, and assured of my path or my future in this area. Number one, this particular identity directly involved another person (my future spouse) choosing me and therefore acknowledging my identity as a wife, and children, forcing all to acknowledge me as a mother. Secondly, I wanted these things, and didn't have them, had no known coming or existent suggestion that they would, in fact, be a part of my future. Now some people can just put this out of their mind and not worry about it, but I wasn't one of those people. For me, I feared that if I wasn't expressing the identity that I wanted, then I had to choose from the other identities that my world offered in this regard. I was in misery attempting to do this.

At some point, my prayers rotated from the hope to see these things come to pass, to indignant comments at God that this is how the world saw me, and I have no power to change that image. I felt like God taught me an important lesson through this struggle, though. The question came to me during one of these rants as to why I felt that these were my only choices. Who does God say I am? Does He call me alone, deviant, or withered? Also, is there any other area in my life where I let the world have this much commentary on who I am? Do I accept what the world tells me I can have? Or, do I usually teach the world about what it can do and have? Am I innovative or compliant? I realised that my life's philosophy was one of innovation, but somehow in this area, the devil was able to convince me that I needed to comply. I wanted to be a mother, and I felt the question raised in one of my rant moments with God of why not be a mother, then? There are many people already in the world who need a mother's love, so why wait until I feel validated by society to express that trait? Who are these people anyway?

I dissected my thoughts about womanhood, and questioned myself on why I felt as though my feminine identity was tied into my relationship status. I realised that the world had told me that these were related things. Now, because I had an insecurity in this area, I walked around thinking that your femininity was  voided if you weren't being validated in a relationship. I had this idea that you needed another to confirm your identity as a woman before it was truly yours. Why? For me, it may have been because as a child I was a tomboy, and not very classically feminine at all, but somewhere in my early twenties I realised (with a vengeance) that I didn't want to be viewed as anything other than a woman. I worried that I wasn't being seen that way because the world was saying "you're not very womanly if you're single" and I began to despair because I wondered how I could express myself as womanly in this world when I have never been the type of person who could be in a relationship just for the sake of it, or even for fear of being alone.

And so, in my personal reflection and my conversations with God, the flaws in my thinking emerged. My identity was being too much affected by what others were speaking over me. Even if I didn't believe the negative statements, I felt the weight of them, and despaired over the minute they would become more than mean or hurtful things that someone said, but actual truths in my life. I acknowledged my belief that we are authors in this world. I believe that people speak into our lives, but that there is a life inside of us that others do not have any authority over. I believe that there is  purpose in the dream identity we each hold for ourselves, and the only person who can take that away from us is, you guessed it, us. What that means is that as an individual, you need boldness to argue for your own hope and vision, you need the strength to say I heard the world say one thing, but this is what I believe. More importantly, in my most honest relationship, the one with El Roi, God Who sees me, there is no mystery to the desires of my heart, and there is no judgement for the shape that my walk through the earth takes, certainly not in the case of my obedience to His mandates.

Psalm 119:1-8

The Message (MSG)

You're blessed when you stay on course, walking steadily on the road revealed by God. 

   You're blessed when you follow his directions,
      doing your best to find him.
   That's right—you don't go off on your own;
      you walk straight along the road he set.
   You, God, prescribed the right way to live;
      now you expect us to live it.
   Oh, that my steps might be steady,
      keeping to the course you set;
   Then I'd never have any regrets
      in comparing my life with your counsel.
   I thank you for speaking straight from your heart;
      I learn the pattern of your righteous ways.
   I'm going to do what you tell me to do;
      don't ever walk off and leave me.

I might not express every element of myself the way that I had in mind originally, but to know that there is at least One who sees me fully, loves me the same and is solely interested in good plans for me is my refuge in a world that doesn't always acknowledge my identity. God is our validation, and I understand that as long as we walk in obedience to Him, everything that we desire to be is validated in Him.