How are you with Layers?

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One of my favourite things to do is witness people experiencing their passion. Last week I had the pleasure of going to a couple recitals at Trinidad's National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA). The first was a Jazz concert, and the second was a classical set. Both were meshed very creatively with a Trinidadian musical  influence and the latter came complete with local spoken-word interludes. They were fantastic. One of the many things that captivated me as I sat in the theatre was the fact that each recital was made up primarily of original compositions, in honour of the country's 50th anniversary of independence. Being an amateur musician, my fascination grew as I considered how well these composers differentiate and organise the layers of sound. Together, there is melody and structure. I thought to myself about how good music takes several sounds and puts them into a context that the listener can appreciate as an identifiable piece. 

I took a couple things from that. When I was in high school, I studied music. The flute was my instrument, but a part of my training involved listening to a piece of music and identifying the number of instruments in it, and if I had a really good ear, naming each. The idea behind this exercise was about being able to differentiate the sounds, and that doing so required more skill than simply listening to the music and acknowledging it as good or even identifying the melody. I understand now that the reason my instructor made me do this was because that is the baby step to composing a piece for an orchestra. A composer takes the unplaced notes and organises them  into not only a melody, i.e. the identifiable format that lets you differentiate one piece of music from another, but also into sounds by instrument. The most celebrated composers have this title because of how well they are able to marry complex sequences of sound into a single musical iteration.

"Displace one note and there would be

diminishment. Displace one phrase,

and the structure would fall. It was

clear to me. That sound I had heard

in the Archbishop's palace had been

no accident. Here again was the very

voice of God! I was staring through

the cage of those meticulous ink-

strokes at an absolute, inimitable

beauty." - Old Salieri to the priest, Amadeus (1984)

I love the above quote from the movie Amadeus; a revisionist tale of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. If you've seen the movie, you'd know that the character of Antonio Salieri displayed what I would deem pathological jealousy and a consumption of comparison of his own abilities with those of Mozart. He also seemed to have had an oppressive and controlling God-image, but I was thoroughly captivated by Salieri's little monologues, especially where he described his experience of music because they were so descriptive, so passionate. The quote above is a particularly good example of this, as it describes what Salieri saw as perfect organisation in the music he read. As I experienced the recitals last week I listened for each instrument and followed the musician with my eyes and thought that beauty exists in sounds, but the composer's talent is in taking layers and layers of beauty and lodging them together like a puzzle that instantly loses its linkages and morphs into a seamless piece. What could be a chaotic experience of several different sounds sharing the same space becomes artistry when a composer has the vision and the ear to separate and then put back together vastly different sounds. The more layers you can organise aesthetically is the more impressive your composition.


This brought me to my second thought, about whether beauty exists naturally and we simply clutch and organise it, or whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and hence, doesn't really exist at all. Eduard Hanslick and Geoffrey Payzant write on the aesthetics of music, saying that many other forms of art have provisions made for aesthetic quality that fall outside of the consensus of being beautiful. I think one of their points was just that something can be put together really well without being considered beautiful by a large critiquing body. It can be aesthetically excellent because it is a novel use of two or more media or ideas and they work perfectly together, much to the studied consumer's surprise. It can be aesthetic without being subjectively beautiful to everyone. 


I would like to apply these two thoughts to our everyday, normal life because I actually think that as individuals, our goal should be to be aesthetically pleasing over being subjectively beautiful to everyone. If you think about it, the mere fact that people have differing tastes means that to please everyone's taste is a complex and perhaps impossible task, and it also means composing something that you aren't even hearing in your own head. That is, trying to be who you think the world would like best. I definitely see how people end up thoroughly stressed out after months or probably years of trying to compose a self that everyone can agree on as beautiful. I think that people are happier and better adjusted when they try to compose what is already inside of them, the ideas and images, sounds and objects that stir in their hearts. The most celebrated people are the people who break the mould. If you reflect on any public image they are most likely there because they are revolutionary, because they are outlandish and no one has ever seen anyone like them before, or because their talent is obvious - whether you like their work or not. 


So my thought for the week is that people have access to both external and internal layers in all the forms of media and in their own hearts and minds. My opinion is that true happiness comes from listening internally to the stirrings of your own heart, finding the music that other people haven't heard, if you will, and putting the layers together yourself. Tell the world "This is what I heard, and this is what I made with it. I didn't leave anything out, because I wasn't too busy trying to make someone else's music."


"I made my own."

Ode to Progenitors

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You know what I've been thinking about lately? In my own life, I have changed whole ways of being, when comparing my present to my personal expectations of three or four years ago. Even being a confident and secure individual was not enough to stop me from seeing things about myself that desperately needed to change and doing so. If I've only learnt one thing from the difficult year that I've recently left, it is that you never learn enough to stop needing to improve. You never learn enough to never need to change.

That being said, I've always been kind of fascinated by parents and the fact that whole other humans generate inside the woman, and then become big, self-sufficient creatures (relatively!), adults by definition. If you've done/are doing it, don't you find that highly interesting and awe inspiring? If you haven't, isn't it weird? Imagine having small humans that depend on you for everything, that you and society mandates a great amount of responsibility for; little beings that must learn everything there is to know about the world, and they have to do it from people who don't know everything there is to know about the world. I say this very circumspectly, because I know at least this much - I don't know NEARLY enough about life, God and the world. I think about trying to be a parent at this age, and I feel such a great sense of respect and gratefulness to any parent who has grown or at the age of understanding children that know their parents love them and that they are worthwhile. I know my parents deserve some kind of an award.

My point for today's post is simply this: it is incredibly hard to navigate this life. It is a beautiful and complicated journey, but not at all easy. Even as an adult with very few responsibilities there is conflict and drama and disappointment and I shudder to think how this doubles when given the responsibility of other lives to navigate simultaneously. I just wanted to take a minute to appreciate that parents have it H-A-R-D.

I could go on to cite research on adult development and how the individual's personal needs drastically change over a lifetime, especially with the inclusion of those life stages (young parent, parent of teens, parent of a disabled child, empty nester, parent of deceased child/ren, parent of older children, etcetera) but I would like, instead for us to take a minute to think about our particular situation - whether from the perspective of the parent or the child and appreciate the journey that parents have to take. I have to pause and thank God for my parents who work hard at walking the journey with me, and with my siblings and for never giving up on me.

More is coming

When John 3:16 Isn't a Cliché

John 3:16

New International Version (NIV)

 ¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

The scripture above is probably the most quoted of any among the followers of Christianity. It is popular enough to have become a tad cliché to people like me who've spent years and years as members of the faith. It is to the point where last week, the Easter holiday, I actually rolled my eyes at people who posted pictures of Jesus on the cross or updated statuses with "He is risen!" I thought that people's interjections were so obvious, expected and just cliché. What does that even mean to us? I questioned. I surfed the cable channels and I found a few showing The Passion of the Christ and I quickly advanced the dial thinking that I really don't need to watch that gruesome movie ever again.

As the week progressed though, I felt it laying heavily on my heart that I was losing understanding or appreciation for what that verse is really saying. In this world that we live in, it is very unpopular to be a religious fanatic. You can have faith, but you have to be progressive and cool about it. In the vast majority of western culture, morality is a loose and sliding scale. In my generation and the younger ones, we value inclusivity, and have a greater dialogue going on the negative impact of bigotry and fanaticism. Here, I wondered if my progressive and inclusive modern Christian thinking was leading me to forget or compromise my fundamental beliefs. So, the story is that God sent Jesus (The word) to earth to be born of a virgin (to become flesh) and grow up to live among us, only to be innocent but accused, eventually being crucified like a criminal for all of our sins. These are some of the verses that tell us why Christians believe that Jesus' crucifixion lead to our redemption:

2 Cor. 5:21, "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."

1 Peter 2:24, "and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed."

Rom. 8:3-4, "For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, 4so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit."

And so there are several biblical references that tell us of Jesus' feat for man on the cross. A flesh-and-blood man, yet the incarnate God, came to earth, willing to be brutalised for the sins of man, that we might live eternally. What does it mean? I was beginning to struggle with that because as adults walking around, breathing, and even living relatively successful lives, it isn't always easy to grasp. It isn't always real to me, as in something that I can understand or walk in that I was going to die, or that I was going to live in total separation from God (and from true liberty) if Jesus didn't symbolically die in the ultimate sacrifice for my sins, years before I even existed.

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I said to myself, okay, so where does that leave me, then? What does Jesus's death on the cross mean to me? This was the point where I began reflecting on John 3:16. Here is what I got: understanding the weight of my sin for judgment, especially in this "all things are permissible" world that we live in, is more difficult but understanding that the human fate is to perish, is easy. What I mean is, the world we live in today doesn't make it easy for us to even consider punishment for our bad choices. I mean that there is very little point of reference in this world to think that just bad behaviour, just less than pristinely moral, could lead to any valid judgment. These days, you could argue that it is bigoted intolerance if anyone puts any kind of value judgment on another's everyday behaviour. Even laws, which are generally the only still accepted judgment, can be challenged to suit the empowered people of today (e.g. abortion, gay marriage, the right to bear arms and kill another in "self-defence").

My point is just that there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that there are any consequences to making choices based solely on your own personal agenda. If you aren't breaking any laws, and you aren't hurting anyone, then what's the problem? I know that this is the place that a lot of people today are coming from, and so I wonder then, how we can still receive from a verse that says God sent His only son so that we would not perish but have everlasting life? I realised that while it is harder to grasp that "the wages of sin is death", it is easy to see that if you don't believe in anything, then you perish. In my own life, I perish in the moments where I don't see purpose, when I see suffering and experience hopelessness. In my life, Jesus is my redeemer from the moments where I wonder nihilistically. For me, belief in a God who is supreme, who loves totally and understands all things brings me back to life, where I would have perished. And so, what if one of the ways that this verse stays really relevant is in the fact that to continue in our selfish little lives the way we're used to, to become consumed with the regular, run-of-the-mill life that we see in front of us is to perish?

Here's what I think: If we don't have belief that we are redeemed, if we can't hope that our own human stupidity isn't permanent or a deal-breaker to a future life in paradise; if we can't even look forward to a future in paradise, then we all perish. In the world we live in now, we are plagued by our own imperfection. We get into relational drama, we lose our focus, we change our minds, and we make poor choices. I think this is the exhausting part of being human, and if we can call this an effect of sin, then that scripture becomes completely relevant to our world today. Today, we all perish as a result of our sin this way. We all suffer as a result of our imperfection, and to consider that Christ, my redeemer, died on a cross to carry the burden of my sin, (this sin), is to have my aha moment, is to say okay, that is real today and that is life-giving. Christ offers the cross on a daily basis to me for my sin-burdened life.

In this view, it isn't someone else making a judgment of what I've done, to tell me I am unclean and living immorally, it is me taking a good long look at my own heart and life, and saying "Oh! This is hard and heavy." This is me looking upwards for redemption from my personal burden. While I can repent of what I did yesterday, everyday I sin, and everyday it burdens me, but Christ offers eternal life - He can take my burden. The image of the cross is my lighthouse; where I become sick on a sea of my own sin-burdens, I can look for the light (which is Christ) and say "I believe in You, God."  If Christ offers a shift from the burden of a sin-based life to a spirit-based one where I find communion and comfort in relationship with Supreme, All-knowing God, then excuse me everyone, while I update my Facebook status to John 3:16. 

Making Shapes with Clay

"Stop giving someone else the job of making you happy"  - Joyce Meyer

This has been a full week. Between getting all kinds of riled up about the new limited practice, the self-work for me, continues. This week I've come into the realisation that I am everything, and nothing yet. I was driving around somewhere and I just remember thinking that there is no law saying that I, or you, have to be one way and one way only. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I think by the time I hit 23/24 years old I was sure that I had become me. I have always been the mature-for-my-age, introspective, self-aware sort, and based on this I was secure in who I was. In my mind it meant that I'd still learn things, of course, but I was a building and you could add bricks, increasing height or width, but the structure was concrete, plastered and relatively finished. I don't believe this any more.

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Now, I think that we are like a large piece of clay, sitting on a display slab. If we are clay, the display slab is life and you don't know what conditions exist on the slab you find yourself on. You could have a barren, empty space with no thing or no one to clue you in on what your clay could make, who you could be, or you could find yourself on a display slab that already contains objects and suggestions for what you might become. In my new interpretation of life, I see us all as having the ability to break off little pieces of ourselves and roll them out, set them down and shape them into whatever little thing we need that piece to be. I see each piece of clay as its own personal interjection - be a model air plane enthusiast or a semi-professional golfer with a little piece, and a father or mother, a CEO or a cashier with another piece. I believe that the colour of your clay is like who you are - this is the one place I see consistency living - where I thought that being consistent meant being one way, I now think that your heart should be in everything you do. I think the colour of your clay, your heart, should be easily seen in every shape you roll out.

For me, I find this freeing, because it means that I hold myself to the same accountability of being genuine, but I take it a step further, because now I'm not trying to take my whole bulk from one place to the next expecting it to fit there. I'm not saying that I am definitely only what I have already seen of myself, and I am no longer of the opinion that all of me has been discovered. There is enough clay in me to be making shapes for the rest of my life. This is also liberating because it means that there is room to create. There is room to breathe in a world where everything that will be is not yet. Mystery excites and refreshes! The grounding qualifier is that you keep stock of all your shapes - you hold yourself to the standard that brings all your facets back to the same clay, but the facets can be endless.

Naill Doherty describes it this way: if you have a rigid self concept then you assume that you know exactly how the world works and your place in it, and that is dangerous. Yes, it is important to know who you are, but adding fluidity to who you could be is, I think, where freedom comes.

So, in a world where you have the freedom of versatility, what shapes would you make?

Dealing with Feeling

Lately, I've been on a personal reflection rampage. I'm about to start a small private practice in a health clinic, and as a part of good practice, I've been trying to face some of my own emotional issues before I open my doors. There is something both petrifying and deeply, deeply satisfying about discovering, and then airing your dirty laundry. On the one hand, you feel as though you must be too broken to function normally ever again, but in a more lucid moment you realise that dealing with the difficult things will actually make you a better, and more complete (whole) person.

The research suggests that many people report improvements in their mental state early into therapy, regardless of what therapeutic technique is being used. Why is this? The most common theory is that the very act of voicing your feelings is therapeutic and healing. In my own life, I've been dancing around an undulating emotional land, and that has been disconcerting, to say the least (I don't dance). The really interesting thing though, is that I have learnt so much about myself, my past, and about where I stand in the scheme of things.

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A piece of personal truth? I am very much of the mindset that you (and I) should happen to life, but I did not believe that I could change the emotional response that other people gave me. I believed that patterns from my past were my emotional destiny. I thought this and I preached the precise opposite! How completely hypocritical! Well, if you'll all forgive my ignorance, I'll tell you what I'm learning. I am freshly coming into the understanding that I can look those emotional deficiencies in the face, I can look directly at the personal disappointments of my past relationships, and I can say "This happened, it hurt, but it isn't who I am." In this situation, it is more about what you let those relationships teach you about yourself. Did you walk out or grow into them believing that those areas where needs of yours were not being met were areas where you expected too much, or where the output of most people in the world would never reach the input that you needed? I admit that I took home this message sometimes, and it was killing me!

Imagine coming to the point where you understand that what you thought was admirable self-sacrifice was really more like self-abuse, and that you were helping yourself out of personal satisfaction with that belief? What I am learning is that you exist, everyday. What I mean by that is that if you do not attend to your personal, internal, secret needs, it does not make them stop existing. I watched a really interesting TED talk the other day on vulnerability by Dr. Brené Brown where she pointed out this idea that human beings have a tendency to try to suppress negative emotions, but that it was impossible to be selective when attempting to suppress feelings. The result? Generally, being less feeling and expressing the negative experiences through physical health issues - obesity, heart problems etc. and NOT experiencing the positive emotions as much, either. Her premise was that the people who were more able to admit to their feelings (both bad and good) and their needs were the people who believed more completely that they deserved to be heard and to have their needs met.

I am personally hit by that, as well as really interested in the idea. This blog is about being genuine and in endless pursuit of your best self. As a result, I am excited to tell you that I have had to wrestle with some of this in my own life; I am proud to say that I've learned something, and I am working everyday to be more comfortable saying to my world "this is me, and what I would like is..." It isn't about being selfish, but it is about being honest. You exist, and the people who love you really, really want you to. You add value, and when you make yourself vulnerable this way, you also make yourself a little more real.