Are you Dangerous? in Journal

Soft eyes is how we describe the relaxed awareness of a good rider. Hard eyes is a focused, lazer-like attention at is particularly alarming to prey animals like horses- for obvious reasons I would suppose. I have of course practiced the skill of soft eyes because I was quite the avid rider for more than a decade. However, my default is the characteristic intense vigilance of having hard eyes.
I’ve been told that I am very observant. And I am. I had to be. I am vigilant. My nervous system has been wound since birth or before or some vague formative time in the past to help me survive in the world that experienced. That environment was created for me by a disturbed, fragile, chronically anxious woman.

There is a point in which I moved out of the necessity for my mother and her resources. There was a time- I don’t know that any particular moment can be identified, but certainly at some point there was a specific choice; to face the world and bear the discomfort of not having been prepared for it, or to pursue the relative comfort of my competence in managing unpredictable, dangerous environments.
And how did I make that choice? It isn’t really the choice itself that matters so much as the methodology with which I made it.
This is the distinction that makes a person fundamentally dangerous, or not.

Somehow, I observed that the reason for my mother’s instability, chaotic moods and immoral behavior was because she has no external standards. Nothing objective by which to measure against. My mother lived, makes choices, and still lives by her own subjective feelings. Her worldview conforms to what makes her most comfortable. The fragility in choosing this method means that she had to manage reality constantly and forever in order to avoid the collapse of her ego. Managing reality is, of course, impossible. But, the attempt to manage reality to appease some inner state is the cause of aggression, violence, brutality, abuse of all kinds, and surely every mental illness and dysfunction that can be named. There is nothing whatsoever to stop the behavior- so long as it accords with the individual’s inner vision of what is right, true, or how they feel. There is nothing external whatsoever that can be used to appeal to such a person’s sensibilities if it does not first accord with their view.
Somehow- and I don’t know how, but that is a really fascinating question- I discerned this on some unconscious or conscious level. Somehow, I absorbed that reality was my only hope of survival. This truth hung like an impossibly small silver bell in my heart. It’s vibration shaped my being; the way in which I made choices would be to subject myself to reality. And the way to know if anyone in particular was a danger to me was to find out which method they employed in living.

These thoughts are coming to me as I ponder the difference of someone who has had the immense good fortune of being modeled rational empiricism and, well, me. And to be clear I don’t think anyone is strictly one or the other. It is a function of a person’s integrity. Or their cunning in presenting as having integrity.