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Sunday 23 February 2020

Navigating the Sea of Life

I see life as a series of tests & learning experiences. Both good & bad things which happen are opportunities to better understand others & yourself. - But only if you are able to hear & internalise the messages. The concept of "readiness" in Buddhism means we have to prepare ourselves & make ourselves ready to understand. However, like my younger self & Maths, there are things I am able to process & things I'm not!

One of the problems with relationships is how individuals process what family & friends actually say. Disagreements can blow up in all facets of life because what someone meant to say is not how the hearer receives the message. Similarly there is a lot of evidence about the fallibility of our memory.

"Eyewitness testimony is a potent form of evidence, but it is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses. So memory can be remarkably accurate or remarkably inaccurate. Without objective evidence, the two are indistinguishable".

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/teaching/myth-eyewitness-testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183265/

Throughout my life there have been times when, in all honesty, I either said or did things tactlessly & spontaneously. There have also been times when I said or did things which I believed to be true, but was on dodgy ground because the other person wasn't able to deal with the message. If someone says something which we don't want to hear, our tendency is to be defensive & angry. So the situation escalates & morphs into something it wasn't meant to.
life-roughest-storm-proves-strength-anchor-inspiration

Now I'm in my middle 70's I have navigated a fairly turbulent & often difficult sea of life. I know what I believe in. I know what is important to me. I also know my own value & am not afraid to be assertive - One problem is that some people can't cope with assertive women. Women are still expected to play true to a certain type.

The sum total of my life experience has made me an independent thinker who faces up to whatever the sea throws at me. I do try to calm troubled waters, but not if it compromises me. It isn't always easy. 
calm seas motivational quote 

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