Never Getting to Perfect in Everyday Ramblings

Every Sunday morning I send out a reminder email to my students about what we are going to explore in class during the coming week and any housekeeping “stuff” they may need to know about. I’ll send links to germane articles or videos as appropriate. They tell me they appreciate these communications. I try to keep them pithy and slightly poetic.

I just sent out a one liner this week. No Class. Give the sextons a break from setting up the room(s). My Monday class is big enough we use two rooms with the partition open between them.

This week this short class I am taking called Mythos: The Stories We Live By begins. It is lead by a theater director and storyteller and could be very good or awful.

I continue to listen to The Great Courses lectures on World Mythology. I am now in African Mythology and I find these lectures not as engaging as the others so far. The professor jumps around in all sorts of time frames and people groups and I get totally confused and can’t tell if they are influenced by other cultures.

The Trickster archetype baffles me. In any mythology. I grew up hearing all the myths of the local First People and didn’t understand the Trickster in those stories either. There are teaching stories in there and I do get those, but many of these are stories of random pranks that have a dark side.

I am not a big fan of pranks. They make me uncomfortable and often I don’t think they are funny which leads me to wonder if I have become a disapproving old biddy.

The other night while waiting for a bus to come home with groceries (me not the bus) I saw this gorgeous young couple laughingly run through five lanes of traffic to catch the same bus and then practically sit on me on one of the back side seats so much so that I needed to move. Then they were chattering excitedly and loudly over something on a phone they were sharing. I glared at them but they were oblivious and I thought, oh god, I have become a disapproving old biddy.

The director of this new movie American Honey, Andrea Arnold, (a movie about teenagers) said in an interview recently when asked why she made films about teenagers…”I always think every time I work on a project I’ve kind of got to work something out for myself.”

That made me reflect (as I was putting on my noise cancelling headphones) if there might be something about my teenaged self that still is buried in here that I might need to work out.

I was a very difficult teenager and then and now I admire people enormously who enjoy them in a way that is non exploitive. That ease and acceptance are a wonder to behold. Seeing them in better circumstances might be helpful too as honestly they tend to act out on the bus. And that is the one place I encounter them the most.

This is somehow tied into how I hate having my picture taken and my distorted body image; something else I am dealing with now (you may notice on Facebook) in terms of profile pictures. All of which blossomed when I was a teenager.

Yesterday I was sitting behind a woman at Weight Watchers who just hit her goal weight for the first time at 65 after a number of attempts. She looks marvelous and healthy and is lovely and I thought no one was making a big enough deal about it so I stayed to talk to her.

She was telling me how she was just learning about perspective, that one’s weight is such a small thing compared to say finding out one has cancer or a child with cancer or losing a job or… the space this preoccupation takes up in our heads! Particularly if it starts when we are teenagers.

I can get up in tight fitting clothes in front of 20 people and let them look at my body moving into all these odd shapes because I know they will feel better if they do what I do, but if you asked me to look at a picture of me doing that I would be profoundly uncomfortable. Profoundly… Painfully…

My higher self, my connected wisdom consciousness knows this is all a matter of radical acceptance. That I need to accept who and what I was as a teenager and I need to accept the old biddy I am now. :)

And leave the disapproval far far behind. Or at least make friends with it.

We love all of the people we love. The good and the not so skillful. Even though we may tell ourselves stories about how we need to be good and perfect and the amazing things we will do when we get there.

Hmmm, maybe the trickster reminds us we never will.

Last updated October 03, 2016