A little thought on appreciation & a challenge

I was reading The Wednesday Club and a little throwaway dialogue stuck with me:

 "Perhaps that is one of the shortfalls of reality," he said. "That we have to improve it even when it is at its most beautiful...Unless the shortfall isn't in reality, but us?"..."Like Garbo, perhaps," Mrs Wiik suggested. "The whole world admires her perfect profile, but all she can think about are her big feet."

 Isn't it funny how people don't see their own beauty, or fail to value their achievements? Some people who have achieved so much are always comparing themselves to others, and feeling like they've fallen short.

I travelled halfway around the world, and spent a small fortune to see the elusive Northern Lights. After only seeing the white grey ones, I will admit I was a little disappointed. I was talking to a Russian lady, later in the trip, who grew up in the Arctic circle in Russia. She said "We saw them all the time. I didn't even know they were anything special until I moved to New York at 20. People kept going on and on about them. They were no big deal to us."

 For me seeing the Northern Lights is such a mystical, magical experience - for the Russian, it was just something that happened all the time, like a full moon.  The same thing had a very different effect on us both. Our appreciation of the Aurora is what made the difference.

What makes something special is the value you place on it. So start placing value on yourself. On your achievements, on your successes, on your looks and personality. Start to appreciate all that you have, and all that you are. Don't diminish what you do when talking to others. And don't let anyone else belittle your efforts.

I know that all sounds a little silly, but give it a go this week and see if it makes a difference. I'd love to hear you responses.

Linking with #BooknificentThursday

Do we ever really know a person?

While I was in Amsterdam, I went to Anne Frank's House, well worth the two hour wait (though try to book tickets in advance to avoid that if you are planning to visit). Obviously there's a lot to discuss there, but there was one thing that really resounded with me, and still pushes into my thoughts. At the end of the tour, Otto Frank, Anne's father discusses the diary, and his experience of reading the diary.
"It was quite a different Anne [than] I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling. She talked about many things, we criticized many things, but what really her feelings were, I only could see from the diary." He elaborates “And my conclusion is, as I had been in very, very good terms with Anne, that most parents don’t really know their children.”

We must remember we never really know the inner turmoil that people are going through, even if we live in the same house and see them daily. Add some friction and it's near impossible to see the wood for the trees.

Teenagers are by nature secretive creatures. It's our job to watch ever so carefully, and even then, the best detective can still miss the signs.

If you don't understand your child, or you discover things are not as you thought, take heart that even a parent who had a great relationship with his daughter, trapped in a small space with no outside distractions still had no idea who he was living with.

It is human nature to process events with our own filter, to make assumptions about the feelings and actions of others. I recently had my own motives twisted up by a friend to feed their own vanity. I was more taken aback that she'd distorted something I'd done many times before (and have done since) with what I thought was clearly kindness and generosity than her actual bitchiness and betrayal. She made my gesture seem so mean and petty. I felt she didn't know me at all. Hearing her badmouth me in such a way, in turn, has made me question her motives which I had naively and incorrectly thought I knew. I see her behaviour in relation to me a little more clearly now, and can I see how it has tainted some other past interactions, that at the time I found odd  but couldn't place why.  It's all makes more sense to me now.

If adults well into middle age can still get it so wrong, imagine what the teenage brain does with their perception?

I got tickets to see Flume with my eldest, thinking it would be a nice bonding experience. They were sullen and vile the whole night, so midway through I gave up even trying and just danced with the 20 year old next to me. On the way back to the car my child sniped "Don't you think I'm a little old to have to go to concerts with my mother now?". I replied "This wasn't about supervision. This was about me having no one to go with. None of my friends like Flume! I thought you'd be happy for the free ticket!" I pointed out they'd been to a number of concerts with their friends already. I could see the genuine surprise as they registered the answer. It also explained the ungrateful pissy mood that had ruined my evening. I had assumed we were on the same page but clearly we weren't at all.

As parents, it's our job not to be dummies or turn a blind eye and more importantly,we should not be dismissive of the weight these teenagers may be carrying on their shoulders, no matter how it manifests.

The 'troubled teen' is just that, troubled by something. Maybe it's better for all if we park our judgement and try to unravel the issues and reset the outcomes.

We need to listen, engage, spend time with and talk to our kids, even when it's a thankless and arduous task. Even when they don't want to. More importantly, even when we don't want to.

We will never really know another person, but we must try our best to.

Linking this old post with  #Blogtober21 on teenagers. 

Perception

I had an aha moment on the weekend, that nearly made my head explode - it was a good thing it didn't as I was in the car and that would have been a mess. We were listening to Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast (from the 1.9.16) and he was rambling on about a great vodka over ice or something, and he was saying that you had it on the porch like you were in the 1800's and then he said 'We won't dwell on that because unless you were white, that was a really bad time for you'. It hit me. I furnish every mention of history completely differently to others. In my head it was all white crinolines and Jane Austen/Southern Belle/Days of the Raj with gin and tonics on the verandah but 1800's doesn't just mean that. It means slavery, oppression and a myriad of other things depending on the colour of your skin.

I have talked about how we can never really walk a mile in someone else's shoes before, but this was such a clear and succinct example. And something I'd never thought about. We are taught history in 'bits'. This happened and then this happened. However, it's all happening all the same time. I was taught 'White' history. However that was not the only side to history. When you visit Vietnam, you get a very clear idea of the different versions of 'history'.

When we talk about something, we think everyone understands it the same as us but everyone is furnishing it with their understanding. There truly is no reality, only perception. It's worth remembering that when dealing with children, especially teens. Their reality is completely different to ours. What they hear us say is not necessarily what we are trying to tell them. In the movie 2 Guns, there's a throw away comment "If you're hearing something, it's only because you're hearing it, not because I'm saying it". I think that's more profound than I realised at the time. What I'm saying and what you're hearing can be two different things, depending on your experience, as was the case with the casual Burr comment. Hugely different things.

I guess all we can do is try to check ourselves. When talking to our children, especially teens, try and speak their language a little better, so that what we're saying is also what they're hearing.

Linking with #OpenSlather

Can you walk a mile in my shoes?

As someone who loved To Kill a Mocking Bird, I was quite taken with the quote "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.". However, forty odd years later, T.I raises a slightly different aspect, in his song Ready for Whatever, when he says he can't be judged (by the listener) for what he's done because he thought he didn't have a choice, given what had happened in his life, and how it framed his decision making, and he ends with: 

'You'll have to put yo self in my position

You can't expect me to think like you 
'Cause my life ain't like yours’

As someone who strives for empathy, I had a startling realisation to the truth of this statement while in Vietnam. I was reading a lot about the country, and I had started reading The Trader from Saigon by Lucy Cruickshanks.

Over the years, I've read a lot about the fall of Singapore and a lot of books set in Malaysia both during the war and after, however the Vietnam war was quite new to me, so I read a few books on the journalists and the fall of Saigon and then picked the Cruickshanks book because it wasn't focused on the war, and the rich Vietnamese history is so much more than that period.

Part of the story focuses on the rationing, and a stolen ration book. So it was that poverty post war, and familiar territory.  I'd read about 150 pages into the book when I suddenly noticed this on the back cover:

I was stunned for a minute while I recalibrated the setting. In my head, the book was set in the late 40's, not the mid 1980's! It completely threw me. Logically, I could see I'd just moved history around in a nonsensical fashion, but if you talk ration books, my brain immediately jumps to WWII, not late ‘70’s. All the other books I'd read set in Asia are referring to WWII if they are post war. 

Without the actual date mentioned, or defining situation, my brain just furnished the fictional world in dress and setting of the late '40's. It took what it knew, what it had learned over the course of my life, all my knowledge and put it into the world I was reading about. And it was wrong. Very, very wrong.

We are the sum total of every life experience we have, every lesson we are taught in school, everything we read and see, and it frames our world view, often without us even knowing. It's so ingrained, it taints every we see and think, and we're often completely unaware it's filtering our thoughts. Maybe we can't really ever walk a mile in someone else's shoes. However, we can and should, try.

If someone chooses to leave everything they know, there must be a very good reason. If they choose to risk their life fleeing, there must be little or no safer option. Maybe we need to understand more of their actual life, rather than sitting making judgments from our cosy living rooms. We can’t have a proper understanding if we are furnishing their world like ours, and giving them options and choices they really don’t have the luxury to make. As T.I says, we can’t really think like them if our life isn’t like theirs. And thankfully, for so many of us, it isn’t.

Linking with #BooknificentThursdays