There are many lessons for me in this life. Sometimes I’m up to it, sometimes I’m not. Ultimately, I’ve noticed, mostly I’m the one who suffers. In this case, I’m learning something new about compassion.
First, it has taken me a long time to get that compassion is multi-valenced. It works in multiple directions. When I am able to feel it for myself, I’m more able to feel it for another. I’ve been starved of compassion, because I have not been compassionate enough. Some strange paradox, inner and outer, rules this process. Anyway, life is growing me by sensitizing me to a new awareness. I have some compassion for myself as I am learning more about compassion.
It was a big surprise for me, when I began to realize that not-knowing was a key to becoming more compassionate. I have spent most of my life trying to accumulate knowledge. It was, in some ways, a passport to a kind of prestige, a certain way of being somebody. Giving that presumed benefit up, has not been high on my priority list; it was tantamount to a form of self-immolation. I haven’t been game for letting that much mystery into my life.
On the other hand, I have worn a lot of other people’s projections. Over the years, I have experienced the acidic wear and tear of the ways I have been thought about, and reacted to. Too much of the pain in the world has come into my life through the misdirected ways others have held me. I have felt incensed, aggrieved, and dismayed by the injustice of this part of being human. I developed the capacity to not take it personally, and to see that projections often told me, a lot about the projectors. Still accepting that component of life hasn’t been much fun.
What I have come to see is that I project too. Not just because I am unconscious, but because I am alive. I am always imagining the world I’m in, what I’m about to do, and alas, the people I am involved with. These projections, they can be for better or worse, run my relationships, and often determine my false sense of the world. I am constantly painting reality, and particularly my relationships, with the brush of my limited knowing. What I rarely notice is how much damage I do. Because, while I am busy projecting all over others, I’m focused upon, how much others are misperceiving me.
I’ve known about this hole in my ability to perceive accurately for some time. But, it has only been recently that I made the connection between my own emotional reactions and my failure to be compassionately available. When I allow myself to get too stirred up by the unfairness I perceive, then I focus even more intently on the other with my own brand of thoughts. That is, projections mostly.
Now, I’ve come to think I know too much. Or, perhaps more accurately, I think I know, too much. It is obvious I project all the time. So, I misperceive people, reality, and myself regularly, naturally. There is no compassion to that. My desire now is to experience reality and others, as they are. To let my emotional reactions inform me, about myself, and to let that form of thinking I know, go.
I am a more compassionate being, that is one of the benefits of getting older. Another, is that I can see more clearly. My desire for sex has waned, and over the years, my desire for connection has grown. Learning how unknowing frees me, to practice a more compassionate form of connection, is a major by-product of learning. I know enough, to know I don’t know much of anything. And not-knowing allows me to have more of an experience of the moment, and to be more compassionate while I’m at it.
