A little self-reflection...

After five days of being down with a cold, I'm bouncing back up and suffering only the residual effects (mostly a sore nose). My state of mind, however, could use a little boost so I thought some self-reflection might do the trick.

Over the last 24 hours, I finally came to the conclusion that life is not worth living when it's situated only within the frame of someone else's view - that is to say, if someone else is holding MY camera and taking the picture on which I base my actions, something needs rearranging. Here's a (completely hypothetical, of course) example:

• Let's say that I have worked somewhere for, oh I don't know, about nine and a half years and during that time, I've found it next to impossible to get the financial support I need to do the job I'm being asked to do. Then, imagine that about eight and a half years into that job, the institution for which I work hires one or two OTHER people to do jobs very similar to mine and pays them about 1.5 to 2 times what I make annually. You can imagine my (completely hypothetical) frustration when I see that resources are being poured into two new positions that recreate the wheel on which I've been steadily devoting my energy into shaping for nearly a decade, because I know that with 1/3 of those resources, I could have brought my work to a new level, thereby impacting many more people in a positive way. The frustration would (hypothetically) eat away at me, wouldn't it? It would probably make me feel run down, unappreciated, ineffective, and in some ways worthless - but ONLY if I viewed myself through the lens of the person who made those decisions. I would probably go through a phase in which I blamed the wrong people and pettily denied their right to their jobs, although they had done nothing but defer to me time and time again because at least they recognize that what I'm doing is valuable. But I would only be making the situation harder on myself if I allowed this situation to shape my response to my coworkers, friends, and place of employment. I would effectively be denying myself the right to be as happy as possible and get as much done as possible with what I have.

Good example, right? For me, it demonstrates just exactly how powerful someone else can be when you lend them your camera - even worse, when you outright give them your camera, let them do the shooting, and then hang their portraits up on the wall, where you can admire them day after day after day. You'd lose a little of yourself in the process, wouldn't you?

I've finally matured enough to accept the fact that some things can't be changed and certainly won't be changed by allowing myself to become a bitter, unhappy old coot. This, I think, is what the Buddha meant when he talked about mindfulness. This must have been what the monks who self-immolated during the Vietnam War knew all along - that you can immerse yourself in a truth so deep and encompassing that it surpasses the physical pain of living in the corporeal world, a pain that is caused by nothing more than allowing your camera to get into the wrong hands. They must have known that the wrong-intentioned world powers who were so hungry for personal gain that they would sacrifice the good of the whole were not real and could, in fact, be denied by demonstrating their un-realness.

A little too esoteric, perhaps...it's early on a Monday morning and I've probably had too much coffee. Still, I think there's some truth to the idea of just letting go of the many insidious ways I've allowed other people to get in my head and under my skin. I guess I'm reclaiming my head and my skin as my own - not a bad way to start the week :)

All those "urgent" voicemails that people left while I was laid up in bed for three days last week, all those hundreds of emails that gathered in my inbox...not critical. And in fact, while I was reading an issue of Oprah's magazine - oh, smirk if you must - there was an interesting article about this New Age-y woman named Byron Katie, who counters every self-important question with four of her own, the first of which is, "Is it true?" Thus, if I closely examine the initial thought that all these people who leave multiple messages and send multiple emails really need me, I will most likely find that it's not true. No one will die without me. And it feels pretty good to admit that.

I guess the trick is to balance your own peace of mind with the needs of others so that you don't completely devalue what someone else finds important. But at the same time, people are just so self-important, aren't we? We really believe that there's no one else who can do the job like we can, that each of us is a "unique snowflake" (Fight Club, anyone?).

Well, short of the left parenthese on my keyboard, which does not seem to be working and poses quite the problem when I'm trying to type a treatise like this one, I don't need anything just now and no one needs me. Ain't it a beautiful world?

t.