Discovering Me Discovering Life

When I was a little girl, I thought life was listening to bedtime stories, a stroll by the seaside with my father, vacation in the farm, attending Sunday School, playing house in the backyard, etc.

When I became a teenager, I thought life was having good time with friends, studying, watching movies and listening to music.

Now that I have grown, I am beginning to understand that life consists of my continuing response to the constantly shifting weather conditions of my existence. It is a process which has its highs and lows but in which I am always a central organizing presence.

In my experience, the more I enter into life, the more clearly I feel the pebbly cloth of the human fabric of my existence. And this is because I feel the problem of being human. This problem is a difficulty I cannot shake off and it is one problem I know not how to solve. In fact, there is no solution to it. I only need to learn how to live with everyday problems.

Eugene Kennedy says that everyday problems "come in connection with growing. These are invitations to develop and to come to grips with the difficulties that arise in each new moment."

And I believe him. I feel I have grown as a person after experiencing difficulties in life. For instance, it is not always easy for me to live with myself, my unnoticed changing moods and hidden bad temper, my disappointments and discouragements, my sensitivity and impatience, my health, etc. I felt the challenge to refine and deepen my own unique personality. Meeting this challenge is not at all easy. The everyday problems I encountered reveal me as quite vulnerable and yet at the same time quite as strong. what to me appeared as a weakness at first turned out to be a strength. The times when I had to swallow my pride and chisel my stubborn personality has been treasured moments for me because what I saw as an awkward misfit, I came to know later as a strong and beautiful person.

A healthy person is one who can accept and live with authority, recognizing the right of other individuals in institutions to possess it an understanding the need for some system of rules and regulations as well as that moral standards must govern any developed culture. And further on, if a person senses a need to rebel again ts authority she is far freer even to question or disagree with it when it seems the correct thing to do in his life. The sense of authority is built on a deepening awareness of appropriate relationships with other persons. This involves us, in other words, in acknowledging that there are times when we respond to authority and times when we exercise it.

Indeed, everyday problems exist in relationships within relationships. It is our reaction, whether to an emergency schedule, rainy day, lost bunch of keys, the heavy traffic, a stupid or moody companion, that shape the problems. Reactions are always part of the problem because it is in and through them that we experience the sadness, pain or tension that subjectively define a problem situation.

Life with others is the problem if living. It is at once the best and worst of human experiences, the hardest and easiest, the most of everyday challenges and opportunities. It is together that we finally find and express ourselves and are able to understand where the real treasure of existence lie. It is when we stand close to each other that we also know the region of the heart where the pain can be the deepest.

Feelings in Colored Lenses

When you are wearing sun glasses that are tinted blue, everything looks a bit bluish. Things that are not blue look blue because of the lenses you are looking through. In a sense, we are always looking at the world through colored lenses. We never see things the way they really are. Our feelings are like colored lenses that makes it impossible for us to see things the way they are.

For example, consider what happens when you walk down the sidewalk. To an old lady carrying a shopping bag, you are one of those wild youngsters. To a child on a bicycle, you are an obstacle. To a friend, you are a pleasant sight. To somebody from another neighborhood, you are a threat. To a construction worker who is trying to put some new concrete, you are a nuisance. To a member of the opposite sex, you are a feature attraction. To each person, you are something different. The difference is not in you. It is in the feelings of the people who see you.

Feelings are not things we choose. They rise up in us spontaneously. We have feelings all the time. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste or touch gives us feelings. We have an immediate emotional response to everything our senses put us in contact with. Our emotions may be strong or weak, long- lasting or quickly passing, but there is always some emotion.

If we look over our past experiences, we may so able to understand our approaches to many of the ordinary situations in everyday life. Most of us have a regular set of feelings that rise up whenever we encounter old people, members of our own sex, members of the opposite sex, parents teachers, dogs, water, flowers, the color red, a knife and so on. The key to understanding our emotional response to all these things may lie in the past experiences we have with them. If we recall the past experience, we will understand the feelings.

However, past experiences are not the only source of our emotional responses. We also learn many emotional responses from other people. Very few women have had any painful experiences with mice. Yet many women become afraid at the sight of a small gray mouse. This is an emotional response that little girls learn from their mothers and then pass on to their own little girls in the next generation. Most prejudices against a certain nationality or race or religion is learned by children from their parents. The emotional responses we have learned from other people have become as much part of us as those we learned from our own experiences. They have become part of our way of looking at the world.

Besides our past experiences and what we learned from others, our present fears and hopes color our view of reality.

Loneliness After Dusk

Each of us has been alone. We have all at one time or another been starved for companionship. Each of us had endured days, weeks , months, perhaps even years without finding meaningful relationship that could relieve us from the loneliness that was slowly eating away our inside out. We have to admit to ourselves that at some point in our lives that we were lonely and afraid.

I remember my long walks to and from school. I remember how my heart cried out for a friend with whom I could share my innermost thoughts and feelings. I remember the countless times since my childhood when I feel the pangs of loneliness. However, I am not sad about all that. In many ways, loneliness is a blessing. It can have a sobering effect on man. Loneliness has a way of causing man to realize things that would otherwise go unnoticed in his life.

A woman who has experienced deep loneliness is in deep position to enjoy that tremendous feeling of exhilaration that comes about with love. She is more sensitive and appreciative of the blessings that friendship brings. When a person has been up the whole night, she becomes very much aware of the slightest trace of light that signifies the dawning of a new day. When a woman has gone without love and deep friendship for some time, it takes just a little bit of tender loving care to cause her to feel deeply what others might take for granted.

Lonely people are easy targets for insecure persons who are alert enough to understand how little love and affection can have such a tremendous impact on the one who feels that she is living in a world without love.

A woman who has experienced crippling loneliness fully realize the beauty of love and the value of friendship. She treasures every tender moment that her faithful friend offers her because she is reminded of the total isolation and the tremendous suffering that almost destroyed her emotionality.

The lonely woman tends to review her life. She remembers the bitterness of the past and how it need not have been. She recalls those moments of intense loving and deep sharing she wishes that they could have been more numerous and longer- lasting. She becomes aware of the incidents of petty dishonesty in her life and suddenly realizes how silly and useless they were. She remembers the hurt she had caused other people and feels she could very much like to make up for her cruelty by whispering a few loving words to the offended person.

The lonely and isolated woman searches for answers to life. She looks for a better life. She is willing to sacrifice many things, even herself, in order to attain some sort of union with somebody in order to drive away from her life the feeling of loneliness that is slowly driving her to the edge of madness.

Perhaps for the first time in her life, she becomes honest in facing conflicts and problems. She longs to validate her values and priorities in order to reassure herself that she has done right and is in the correct path.

Deep Inside Her Heart

She walks on the streets with downcast eyes and sad countenance. People are busy, cold enough to stop and smile. Everybody is moving so fast, pushing, trying to get their way through. Somewhere in the depths of her being a struggle is raging,But they were just too busy to know what's going on,

Deep inside her heart.

She silently enters a hall, Her head bowed down out of shyness and uncertainty. But all they can see is her tight lips and serious eyes That they somehow perceive as a sign of cruelty and meanness. They clung to their distance and indifference Because they don't want to be her friend. But they just don't know all the anxieties that she feel,

Deep inside her heart.

She does her best to be friends with people, Trying so hard to open up to them. But all they thought was that she was too difficult to handle. They were afraid, intimidated to help and share her burdens. For they thought they were too weak to carry the yoke,

Deep inside her heart.

She enters her room in private and forgetting all inhibitions, She threw herself on the floor. Right there, crying and wailing, trying to shout it all out; They all refused to see her pain, her sufferings of rejection, Betrayal, insecurities and frustrations! They refused to see the things that have been consuming her,

Deep inside her heart!

From that time on, she made herself a vow Never again to be attached, Never again to reach out, Never again to trust! As her wounded heart got numb, As her broken soul collapsed And her shattered spirit concealed themselves in total apathy, She knows from within that she longs to love...

She longs to love and be loved... Deep inside her heart!