let go

We have so much invested in our own decisions we seem unable to accept the decisions of others. I was trying to tell a colleague about my interest in Steiner/Waldorf schools for my children and there was a barrier. She kept stating that the local schools are very good. They are, in fact, good: for what they intend to do, and good at doing what the parents who send their children there expect them to do. If I wanted my children to follow the philosophy of state schools, I would likely be sending them to the nearest school and be glad for the quality. The trouble is, I like a different educational philosophy. I am not telling my colleague she made the wrong choice, but it seems that by telling her that I am on a different path - I become an obstacle in her view of the world. This links so quickly to others in my life, those who have had stronger need to tell me what it is they would wish for me. I want to say:  Do not be bothered by my path, for it is mine; no reflection on you. We are different people, at different places, seeing the same things in different ways and getting very different meanings which then re-affirm or question our worldviews. It is difficult to let go of the need to manage others, to be the critical or nurturing or anything else parent. for those of us who have wounds from childhood, and seek to dress those wounds, we need to let go of the need for others to serve as our children, and slve those wounds.  Let us be adults together, in a way that I can speak my mind and not fear that my experience of the world will cause you distress. Let it be that you can admit that you never liked x because it made you feel creepy, without fearing that you will be labelled a social degenerate.  By admitting biases, anxieties and needs, let it be that we might all just be simply showing where we are on the path of experience. Let go the need to keep all non-normed (as we learn it to be) feeling and thoughts tightly bound in a coil in the base of our spine, to be seen only in the darkest rooms during our midnight visits, or to burst forth in a blaze of self consuming destruction, captured by tabloids for all the world to gawk. Let go judgement, whether justified by biblical quotations or Dawkins-esque flagellations: why on earth do we spend so much time reinforcing the material prison we already live within?

The Soviet state was the best metaphor of modern times for what we do, almost every one of us, to our own spirits: we keep ourselves locked inside: the rules and laws of our society are nothing compared to the self-strangulation we exert on our own richness. The Soviet state said the restrictions were to protect their citizens from the contamination outside - but they fooled very few. Unlike us who were "always free" - on the other side of the walls looking in: we have all been in the same prison. We ought take responsibility for the walls of our own creation, and we resist. We even resist admitting there are walls. In the UK we have given up our freedoms more than many, and almost enjoy being on CCTV cameras whenever we leave our homes. We seem to think being under observation is for our own good. That might be true if we were filled with evil. But we are not. The tragedy is that we hold our normal thoughts and perceptions in the centre of our vision, and present them to others as if that is all there is: we pretend there is no peripheral vision, that there is no African elephant to accommodate. As if marriage/partnerships and the children in our lives and the parents we care for (whether alive or in memory) and the career and the interests and the diversions - are ALL socially acceptable and good and wholesome. That it is all of a piece and that piece is homespun. But we deny coincidence, and the hairs rising on the back of the neck, and the unnerving stare from a cat, and the pain in our hearts when we consider the despair of the cousin who comitted suicide. We deny that our roads all have big honking potholes that sometimes rip the axle off the car - and that is as it must be. It's what we signed up for when we incarnated. We forgot and we deny that we are uncomfortable about some people, for reasons we do not wish to say. We like who we like, and we don't want to let go of safe and familiar things - but to learn, to really learn from our time in this life and to bring back those experiences to whomever sent us here to gather them, we need to open up our battened down awareness to the possiblity that it is precisely our scariest admissions that give us the most room for growth. And to be non-judgemental about others means believing, really believing that different paths really only mean different paths - it does not secretly mean better or worse. I had a friend who mouthed those words for years, and then when i could not help him, the judgements in all their unmasked glory came pouring out. It may be especially hard for a post-colonial (maybe not even post) class-based society to manage, orperhaps it is harder for a post-colonised society to manage, it is certainly not easy for any group to manage, but without letting go of the need to judge others, there will ever be only one yellow brick road, and far from leading to a wonderful wizard, it will only bring us to a guy behind a curtain.