once upon personality-type revelation

     I drove in circles for nearly 45 minutes in search of the perfect coffee shop experience. coffee that is actually good (this narrows the field dramatically even in a town like New Orleans) Not too crowded, not too hipster, not too commercial. When I finally realized how long I'd been driving, and how many different directions I'd turned, "maybe this place, maybe I'll go downtown..or no maybe way uptown..." I settled on the Village Coffee and Tea Co. on Jefferson and Freret: decent coffee, poor service, but quietly busy enough with other people doing more important things that I can feed off their energy, find something important to do. and perhaps most people are not doing anything of any particular importance, but they, too, are feeding off the energy of expectation of this small cross section of coffee addicts, and thus becoming more productive.  Now that's what I call reciprocity.
     I'm an INFJ, according to Ms. Katherine Cook Briggs, and Ms. Isabel Briggs Myers. I'm an outgoing introvert, with a knack for counseling other people, and the pleasurable burden of usually being right with just enough insecurity to keep me from trusting my own judgement. It's on this fine, brisk Sunday that I've hit my maximum of alone-in-my-house time, and am filling my pail with alone-with-other-people-around time. Thus, the coffee shop excursion.

Getting what you want

Is it possible to get what you really, deep down want out of life, even if you aren't entirely sure what that is..

I only made it part of the way through that book-made-documentary " The Secret" because I felt foolish watching it. So, I can get everything I want simply by willing it to myself?  As a young Catholic, people used to tell me that I just needed to pray for God to help me to get what I needed. Maybe the opposing theories, one of total self-centered power, the other of powerlessness in the face of the will of God, have created a perfect mental storm leaving cynical apathy in its wake. Or maybe the Catholics have it right and God just simply says no quite a lot. I imagine God--a terrible imagination--shaking his head at me in condescension, "Poor little thing. She never asks the right questions." Alas, am I destined for the divine head-pat for ever? I suppose I shake my fist at the sky far too many times a day to be taken seriously.  

       I think the only thing more annoying than this abysmal communication gap between me and the divine universe is the self-awareness vacuum I encounter on a daily basis. It is said that we despise most in others what we see in ourselves, and I think that's true. And worse, we condemn others for that which we refuse to see in ourselves. And we are ALL capable of seeing ourselves for who we really are, excepting perhaps those with certain documented mental illness. If you think otherwise, I recommend Von Trier's rather disturbing movie, "Dogville." (In fact, if you are due for a soul shaking--and if you think you aren't than you most definitely are--I also recommend Breaking Waves and Melancholia. )

People are amazing--horrible, wonderful, powerful--and I guess this is also a premise behind things like "The Secret," and even in Christian teachings. The first thing we do that makes us worse, less human, is surrender our power.  (I can't help it. I can't change because...) The second, likely simultaneously with the first, is we fear knowledge---knowledge of self and knowledge of another--and blithely ignore the consequences.

Maybe the first step in getting what we want, or even merging with we need with what we want is making a pattern change in these two areas...

Let's WAKE UP, people.  

It's a new year, another year of hustle, too much to do, but never enough hours in the day, too little sleep whether due to the aforementioned too much to do, or else insomnia,  one of the cruelest jokes the universe loves to play on me. And indeed, it is only one of the cruelest.

As I lie here for a second consecutive night without the ability to rest my mind, I remember a time when writing was a solace, when my vocabulary and memory were better. My memory, in fact, now is so bad that I've begun to worry about early onset dementia, or perhaps some form of stress-induced psychosis, the early signs of which are a sudden drop in one's ability to remember things that you've done only seconds earlier. Am I becoming the man from Memento? Will I start making choices in life knowing that I'll forget them when I wake up the next morning and document according to how I prefer to remember? When I sat down to clip my fingernails and found, upon moving to the second hand, that it had already been clipped--no recollection of the process--I realized that something must be done.

As a teacher, I feel like I spend most of my life working to make others see, mostly kids of course. I try to inspire them, I try to give them tools with which they can clean out their own souls when they need a good mucking. This is utterly depleting, as much as I do love it. But the ecstatic, ego-boosting and momentary bits of insanity to counter the true insignificance of a single action are matched in amazingness--as in I'm still amazed-- only by the ages-long-weeks of no progress, or even regression. Thank God for moments of blissful insanity or teachers everywhere might be on suicide watch, one sob story, ungrateful kid, or short sighted parent away from a the nervous breakdown.

Ironically, as I work to help people "see," I prefer, perhaps to my own detriment, to remain unseen. Thus, I have opted for a public writing forum--a perfect medium for hiding in plain site. Where anyone can read, no one really cares to. Where there is no secret, there is no desire to know.

There is always a secret.

Source: ninbra.tumblr.com via Dorian on Pinterest