Twelve Blog Posts of Andrea (#5)

"In order to leave this portrait of himself as a memorial for his friends and relations, he makes a number of trials - for such is the meaning of the word essai (essay), which he invented as a literary term- in order to test his response to different subjects and situations.  ...he is making a trial of himself and his opinions, in an endeavor to see which of them are permanent and which are temporary; which of them arise from the passing circumstances of his life and the particular climate of his times, with its pedantic scholarship, its religious dissensions, and its cruel civil wars, and which belong to the man himself, Michel de Montaigne."

From J.M. Cohen's Introduction to Essays by Michel de Montaigne 

INTRO

I write these briefs essays oftentimes in response to something I have read or overheard. I write to push against widely and fiercely held ideas. I write essays to try out other ways of looking at notions we sometimes just accept as so. When I begin to shake my head, that is a signal to me to write, to explore alternative points of view.  Most of the time I write short essays, like Monsieur Montaigne, to put my own thoughts and viewpoints on trial. What better way to know one's own mind, and to decide which thoughts are worth keeping and which needs to be dispensed.  What follows are a few micro-essays on a variety of topics I have explored this year.  

(FIVE)

What other people do may have an affect on our thoughts and feelings. Nonetheless, each of us is 100% responsible for our thoughts and our feelings about our interactions with others. This does not mean that we cannot confront another about the actions that prompted the thoughts and feelings of inferiority, but we cannot hold others responsible for our internal stuff. We all filter every single current experience in our lives through our previous experiences. The more we recognize how our past experiences and how we have thought and felt about them influence our present feelings and thoughts, the better able we will be to pull back, recognize the strongholds in our mental and emotional processing systems and overcome them to better maintain control over our responses. When we try to make other people responsible for our feelings, we lose our power to heal ourselves and become confident, healthy beings who can be vulnerable yet strong. We miss opportunities to grow up and become more spiritually, emotionally and mentally mature. We may put a burden on other people that diminishes their ability to be authentic and genuine in our presence because they begin to fear doing things that will offend and hurt us easily. No doubt, those with whom we have close or intimate relationships can and must own their stuff. An example of this would be someone with whom you’ve had a conflict acknowledging that their tone was disrespectful which triggered you to feel disrespected. But if when others accept their part in our hurt, we still expect them to fix or take away our pain, we put an impossible, unnecessary and unhealthy expectation on them. Putting away the pain is our responsibility. And that can only come with a decision not to indulge in self-defeating patterns of picking at the wound, such as, perseverating over the hurtful episode, entertaining one-sided, unsubstantiated stories about the other person, indulging self-deprecating thoughts, or expecting a certain level of emotional response from the offender.  No one can make us feel anything. We feel what we feel because of our perceptions, beliefs and the schema we have developed over time.  People can for sure be jerks. Yet, we have the power to not allow their jerkiness to lead us to feel poorly about ourselves.