Maintaining a balanced mindset is the key to evolution — PART 1 of 2

Guess what?

I received my first corporate sponsorship, readers! Isn’t that what you call it when you get free shit? I got free shit!!!! And it is some GOOD shit, too!

(Legally purchased and given as a gift. Respect the rules, people!)

I’m trying the raspberry flavor of Nasty Jack’s candies, and the high it’s giving me produced the words for a 2-part blog. You get half now and half later. Patience is a virtue.

Anyhow, onto my epiphany: It’s about what throws us off balance and makes us cling to walls on the left or right side of us. You know, the blue or red side? Let’s start at the beginning:

At first, the childlike side of you gets to have the most fun and make the newest discoveries. They get to laugh like ALL the time….or at least several times a day. They get to use their imagination and run and play and not have too much “work” to do, which leaves them available to dream fantastic dreams, come up with brilliant stories of being a cop or robber, princess or jester, good guy or bad guy. (Btw-I think the next “opposite” we have to acknowledge is the religious vs. the tech-savvy, don’t you? There’s a LOT of folks willing to risk their lives to get together and talk about “the good book” during this pandemic. It confuses me, yet I respect their right to hold opinions that don’t always mirror my own).

The belief in the “bad guy” never goes away. And if there “has” to be yin, there “has” to be a yang. Right? What goes up must come down, and all that nonsense? I’m calling BS, but that’s for another post.

Anyways, back to being a child.

It’s so great. You get to feel moved by whatever music surrounds you, be it religious or not, fast or slow, country or hip hop or reggae or gospel or classical or jazz, they always made you want to dance because you didn’t even know what “embarrassed” was yet. You got to be the authentic, playful, creative being you are, with no effort or fear involved. What an amazing time!

Then you start to get older and find out what it feels like when someone points something out about you in front of others, leading to them laughing at you, maybe pointing a finger, and being ostracized from the group; feeling that first primal feeling of fear. It used to mean death for our ancestors, that shit’s scary AF on a primitive level!

So you started building your walls and creating your persona, one incident like this at a time. Whether it happened to you or someone around you, you used these instances as educational building blocks to make up who you are. And how you act. And the more experiences you had, the more you learned about “what to do” and “what not to do” around other people.

You kept growing, though, and realized that not ALL of the rules you learned applied to all people. You may experience “EEW! Gross!” and pointed fingers when you flatulate with one group. In another group, they may find it hilarious and turn it into a playful contest. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Or anywhere in between.

You found that you have something in common with everyone you meet AND that you differ somehow with everyone you meet. You always have to try to balance in the middle until you feel like you can’t.

While growing up, you latch onto the opinions, habits, and sometimes even beliefs of the people you spend the most time around. You find these rules to be the safest way to continue discovering who or what YOU even are. Every positive reinforcing experience you have/had swayed you into the likelihood of continuing and repeating that action or behavior.

Unfortunately, you are sometimes successful being the finger-pointer, so you keep that trick in your back pocket also. We all do.

Block by block, or cube by cube you are building who you are. And the building gets high. ANNOYINGLY high, like one of my kids’ Minecraft houses that they spent MONTHS (about 34 minutes) building!!!

When the blocks get that high up, you lose sight of who you were when you started. The feelings that once came so easy to you were all of a sudden harder to feel. You had to WORK at it to feel relaxed. You had to WORK at it to be able to enjoy what you were doing. You had to WORK at it to laugh a lot during the day.

You…….Grew……..up.

And some dummy indicated that you couldn’t have good feelings very often as an adult the way you did as a child. You’re older, so you’re no longer allowed to feel that good; your primary purpose is to ensure that your own kids will get to feel that good. And, if you have time, maybe help others and save the planet or whatever…………..

But, what if this song was number one?

True-it would be hard to maintain a functioning society if we all agreed together to WORK less, but it sounds reeeeeaaalll nice as I finish up my Nasty Jack’s 5-packs tonight. OMG it reminds me of a mixture between a laffy taffy and a sucker, these things are DELIGHTFUL. I can’t wait to try the wake and bakes tomorrow morning…