Relocating Fingers

I’ve written elsewhere about how easy it is for one or two of my fingers to become dislocated – and about how I manage to put them back in place, to “relocate” them.

In addition to the entirely physical nature of this whole set of actions, there is also – for me at least – a metaphorical angle, in terms of non-useful mental habits; of habitual behaviours and ‘trains of thought’ learnt over many years. And here is where I come to view them as being akin to dislocated fingers; except that they are dislocations that are left alone and NOT re-located.

Bodies compensate

Imagine a dislocated finger just left “out of joint”. Our bodies are very good at taking and making compensatory action – so eventually we would “get round the problem” and endeavour to use our hands, and fingers, by finding the next best way possible. We’d do this by some trial and error process, and then consolidate the change by “learning” the compensation.
It is rather like, by the same token, if we have a foot, leg or back injury. We’ll walk with a limp, or twist and contort ourselves out of shape so we can still move around with the least amount of discomfort. The longer we endure the original injury, the better and more ingrained our compensation becomes.

Minds compensate

The same applies to mental dislocations. However – the difference with mental dislocations is that we rarely have a sense that a “dislocation” has taken place. We just make the compensatory adjustments we feel are necessary and incorporate them into our lives.

Feel here is often a key component. If we make compensations that are inadequate – we’ll know about the inadequacy because we’ll still feel the discomfort somewhere, usually – as it happens - in our bodies.

To take just a couple of examples; whether it is a childhood fear of the dark, or a reaction to things said about us – they all started with something that filled us with a discomfort, an unpleasant reaction, an insecurity of some kind.

We’ll then start to assemble a strategy of compensation – rather than an action of relocation. We may well have heard that old adage about “getting back on the horse after being thrown or falling off,” but we’ll rarely bite that particular bullet. We’ll look to take the softer option by assuring ourselves that getting round the issue would cause us less immediate hurt than re-confronting it by “getting back on the horse.”

A Fear of the Dark is quite a toxic one, because it can telescope out into a fear of the unknown, of the unfamiliar, of anything new etc. Once we are aware we can grow our fears in a whole variety of ways, we might view falling off the horse and getting back on it from a totally new perspective.

It all starts with an original horse, and an original dislocation (maybe from the saddle!). If we can approach ANY original instance from the perspective that relocation is going to be better than making compensation – then we don’t put ourselves in a position of growing thoughts, beliefs, behaviours and skills that won’t in any way serve us well in the long term.

Childhood Fears

How private do we keep our childhood fears? How much do we share and how much do we keep inside?
Children tend to have extremely fertile imaginations, and the notion that almost anything is possible when we are young, including the content of our dreams, is accepted very readily. It is only life that teaches us the more likely or the more credible outcomes and considerations, as we can see here.

For Britney, at home in her darkened bedroom, the Wardrobe Monsters would present a far greater and on-going fear than any REAL burglar coming in through the window. 

For Daddy, however, the opposite is the case.

When it comes to playing out the “WHAT Ifs” – again Britney’s and Daddy’s will be quite different, although for each of them these are still played out in their respective imaginations.

The thing is – for Daddy to really help Britney and her fear of the Wardrobe Monsters he’ll need to step into her reality, her mosaic of the world, and then take the relocation journey with her. AND, by doing so, he may – just may – sort out some of his own dislocated fingers along the way also.

Things People Say

The internet is full of scams, some overt and some covert, designed to get us to click on a link that allows gremlins into our computer. These gremlins and viruses can infect and spread their toxicity into our security – by attacking our operating system, invading our financial and personal identity.

Most of us, by now, have become cognisant of the fact that emails that start “Most Honourable Sir,” and that emanate from West Africa, are ones to avoid and delete at all costs.

However those of us who walk within the cathedrals of social media have become subject to something much nearer home in terms of our vulnerability, viz:

“Have you read what they are saying about you?”

This tag line, plus a pernicious link, personifies how the ‘scammers’ attempt to get through our guard. They frame it up by reaching for our fingers and trying to dislocate them.

Now if we met someone in the street who actually did this in reality we’d understand the assault, and then look to get a doctor to put our fingers back right again.
But THIS is different – or so it seems!
And yet it is also far worse – for it plays upon our inner insecurities.
“What ARE they saying about me?  How BAD are these things? WHO else has, is and will be reading them? I’m under attack – I must defend. I cannot defend against the unknown so I must FIND OUT.” And so on.

If we are sensitive, then our metaphorical fingers will be dislocated on a regular basis. Our sensitivity began somewhere, and we compensated rather than relocated in that original instance. From then on we always took the softer option, until that no longer worked for us. Then we learnt how to take more soft options to compensate for the earlier softer option that was no longer working. And so the strategies build and the habit forming goes from strength to strength.
But that strength takes us further away from the most effective solution for us.

So – in the case of things people say – is that relevant? Is it important, to you, really?
We can make endless compensatory excuses to hold that relevance and importance in place – if we so choose! With each excuse, we weaken the hold on the joints of our fingers.

Conclusion

We are never, ever, stuck with having metaphorically loose-jointed fingers all our lives. We can put them back, relocate them, and build their strength. Good strong joints is the way we were born, is the way we are meant to be. With them we can then be dextrous in life, rather than distorting ourselves out of shape.

And – as always with my perspective – it is just a thought, an idea, a notion. And – as ever with your perspective – it is always there for you to choose.

Operate at 100%

Tangent

In the cosmic scheme of things, quite a profound moment for me in my mathematics secondary education was concerned with the tangent – that straight line that just touches the circle.

Now just what was SO profound about this particular geometrical “given” - for me?

Well it was the way our maths master introduced and explained it, because a classroom debate then ensued about what was straight and what was curved.

Our teacher’s premise was that where the tangent merges with the curve of the circle – in that very moment of conjunction – the circle ceases to be a perfect curve and the tangent ceases to be a straight line.
As we stand back and view the bigger picture, we see the form of both and conclude both their straightness and their uniform curvature. The thing is, we then take that impression of form and assume that (a) it is real and (b) it applies at all times.

Imagine that circle as our planet Earth, and the infinitely small dot on the surface as being ourselves. We have a perception that the Earth is flat.
Of course we KNOW it is not flat through the proof of Mankind’s scientific discoveries – yet there was a time, not too far back in history, when Mankind believed the world WAS flat.
There is another thing about Mankind’s discoveries and it is this – they unfold basic knowledge to us through time; basic knowledge that we neither saw nor knew existed until we gained some comprehension of it all. We give cast-iron credence to firmly held beliefs until they are questioned and until their reality is challenged and disproved conclusively.

So how CAN an infinitely small part of circle be a straight line? How can a perfectly straight line assume, by conjunction, to have the same properties of curvature as a circle?

 

Memory, Now and Future

I have written elsewhere about time, and where the only “pure” time is Right Now, the very present. Everything else is outside of the moment – either in the past, as memory or in the future and yet to happen.

Another thing about memory is this – if something did not happen then there would be no memory. So, for us to remember something then it had to have happened – it had to be part of our experience. Our experience is our proof that it happened.
We might never have experienced certain moments in history, but we read about them and were told about them and we accepted the beliefs of others that they really HAD happened. Because we never question literally everything we are told, beliefs about things that happened, existed or just are in being, are thus established and take their place as part of our experience; our knowledge and our proof.

The future, on the other hand, is just pure imagination. Some of it is projected out from models based on certain premises, just enough sometimes to chip away at the veneer of make-believe of course. The rest is fantasy. And when asked,
“So what would you like to do? What would you like to have happen?” You then go ‘inside’ and start making some projections of your wishes and desires.

So where does Time sit with all of this you may ask!

Well all memories and imaginations are suspended in time. And by suspended I mean they exist in time, and we see them, notice them and acknowledge them as being either really real memories or really real figments of an imaginary future. If they didn’t exist in time we wouldn’t notice them. But we do, because we have placed them in time, and they hang there, suspended.

On the other hand, with Right Now, the present, TIME is suspended. And by suspended I mean it is motionless, it appears to not move along a path from A to Z. The moment we notice it has motion then we have stepped out of it, we are ‘outside time’. When we are ‘inside time’ we are totally absorbed in the moment.

 

Absorption

Being absorbed in time is not on/off or either/or. It is on a sliding scale for each of us and with everything we are engaged in.

We are, in the course of a day, engaged in many activities of partial absorption. We do, however, switch part of our conscious awareness to the idea of time – for the purposes of keeping ourselves aware of the motion of time – of time “passing”.

We need to be somewhere at 3pm – so we run a programmed loop that will keep telling us as that time approaches. We perhaps need to do things that will prepare us for whatever we are going to be doing at 3pm. Again we are engaging our consciousness with some programmed activity. These programmes are oriented in time; they have a time component to them; we are not therefore TOTALLY absorbed in whatever we are doing in the moment.

And the results of NOT being TOTALLY absorbed in what we are doing in the moment – Right Now – may often be very apparent to us. Especially if there are errors in our thoughts, words and deeds – be they errors of inclusion, exclusion, action, inaction, judgement or oversight.

“So, Pete, are you saying that multi-tasking should never be attempted?”

The key to the success of ANY tasking (multi or single) is our level of absorption and – for perfection - doing it 100% in the moment, and every moment. Multi-tasking is quite acceptable provided we are absorbed ‘inside time’.

Take driving, which is a prime example of multi-tasking. We can be doing up to something like seven different things at once when going from here to there. Watching the road ahead, using the rear view mirrors and our peripheral vision – feeling the steering wheel and gear stick, with our feet using the pedals – listening to the radio while talking with passengers – noticing the quality and contours of the road – and so on.
When we are just doing it then, in varying degrees, we manage it all pretty well. AND, because we’re only human after all, we’ve undoubtedly got an amount of low-level thinking going on inside our minds as well!

Now low-level thinking is manageable – BUT, the moment we add in “I need to get there” with some time constraints (say), then part of the absorption we previously had dedicated to the multi-tasks has now been ascribed to Time. We have diluted our multi-task absorption. Our attention fills up with more and more distractions which can be categorised as Time important. The quality of the real experience of our driving diminishes – it is impaired. The impairment may only be slight, and we may not notice what has gone on. However, if we become agitated at slow traffic or other frustrations, then the impairment is more than slight. Errors - of some kind or other – ensue. We find ourselves driving badly.

 

Reflections

So, whether you view your life as being linear, the straight and narrow from birth to death; or akin to, let’s say, the circle of life, where you see yourself on the endless path unwinding; I would invite you to take a look again at the image of the tangent and the circle in terms of how you want to live your life Right Now.

At that moment of touch at point A when the tangent and the circle are conjoined, the true nature of everything about you, and every single thing you think about and do, just IS in suspended time. These are moments that, when assembled, make up the narrative of your life.

And take it, with a microscope, right down to the Nth degree in terms of detail as well. For only in the detail will you notice the things you’d like to change or improve to make the overall sensation of life an even more compelling experience of wonder and amazement.

Just let everything come to A point.