Welcome to Day 76!

I love St Patrick’s day!  In fact, Irish people have a great sense of humour.  Yes, I’m generalising based on the people I’ve met who are from Ireland. Perhaps it’s just the accent that makes me smile.  There’s something about the lilt.  

When it comes to matters Irish, I become an ultracrepidarian. Thank you, Susie Dent, for another wonderful word of the day.  The meaning of ultracrepidarian, Ms Dent describes it as being a 19th century word that “describes someone who loves holding forth on matters they know absolutely nothing about”.  It was fun to read the Twitter feed beneath the post as well.  Whenever, a word is posted, there’s a bunch of responses pointing out the extreme examples of those fitting the description of the word of the day.

One of the things I discover midway through an ultracrepidarian moment is how much I don’t actually know on the subject.  In the past, this is where information got creative.  Why? What was I afraid of?   Not knowing something?  A quote from Coco Chanel, stumbled across on the daily flip calendar, pops into my head, “teach your tongue to say I don’t know”.  

It puts me in mind of those times when accusing or complaining about someone else’s actions and realising I’m doing exactly the same thing.  For example, during an argument with my sister, when we were in our teens, we often accused each other of being “selfish”.  (Pst. Not just teens, just sounds better if I put some distance between me and some of my not-so-proud moments).  When we were accusing each other of being selfish we were actually each being selfish.  We each wanted our own way.  

If we didn’t mind, why were we having the discussion and trying to score points with the accusation?   Even knowing this is what we were doing, we failed to learn from using the word as a point scorer or barb in arguments.  Sometimes, it even worked 🙀. 

This interaction and irony had me take a closer look at words I used challenging situations.  It had me watching for moments when I was accusing others of something to see if I was being guilty of it myself.   It became easier to spot, in moments when irritated by someone or something.  On reflection, I began to see what innumerable wise sources have said, the world is us reflected to ourselves.   It’s the whole, “physician heal thyself” or “charity begins at home” thing.  This self-assessment stuff is obviously a work in progress, but a LOT of tests keep confirming those sources.

What do you do when you discover you don’t like the aspect of yourself that irritates you?  You can try to deny it, ignore it, reinvent it, control it, suppress it, accept it but best of all you can “compassion it”.  Showing kindness to that aspect of yourself allows you to better accept it in others as well as yourself.  

For me exercising compassion on an irritation worked.  This happened to me when I was sitting in a meeting where everyone was vying for their right to be heard.  In this environment, what I wanted to say wasn’t going to get a look in.  Irritated, I sat back to think on an approach to get my point across.  At this moment mindfulness kicked in.  Suddenly I realised me, and the participants were all doing the same thing.  We were like kids wearing grown up clothes, which were too big for us, mimicking what adults do in a meeting. 

We were still fundamentally stamping our feet trying to “out tantrum” each other. At that moment, I got an image of everyone in the room being four years trying to each manage their insecurities but not very successfully – if you were looking.  Following that moment came a wave of compassion for everyone in the room.  How could you be irritated by four-year-olds trying to be brave? Figuratively speaking, of course.

That’s not to say that I saw them as four-years old – I did but didn’t.  Probably to use some New Age terminology or perhaps it’s from the psyche fields, I saw the inner children motivating the adult.  The irritation I had felt disappeared and became a wave of compassion and love for everyone in the room.   What I had to say didn’t matter, my idea would get out there, even if I didn’t get the credit.   

There was a quote which embedded itself into my psyche that went something like, “you can accomplish a great many things, if you don’t mind who gets the credit”.  It’s not that it doesn’t occasionally irritate me when something of mine is adopted by someone else.  At these moments, there’s another quote by Goethe: “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; …”.   Who knows where the idea came from to get to me in the first place? There’ll be others.

This post took a weird turn, it started with me wanting to write something that in the end probably would have shown me to be truly ultracrepidarian.  Maybe it did just that. The post ended showing how for some areas I’ve learnt compassion for my own foibles. 

Let’s see what the cards say!