Fumbling

A friend of mine teased me the other day. She was explaining how she enjoyed our conversations, how she likes tossing questions at me just to see how I’ll respond. She appreciates my collection of skills and perspectives and loves to see what combination I’ll use to approach any particular issue.

To be honest, I love that sort of thinking and conversation too. I love when she asks something about human nature, or her experience or whatever, that seems to come from nowhere. I love tossing it around with her, looking at it this way and that. I could do it all day. I enjoy it, but am at a loss to appreciate what she sees as my skills – it’s just what I do. I even enjoyed the thought-provoking tease: “...unless of-course you're dealing with your Self and then we all become the same...fumbling.” Yes, fumbling is such a perfect word to describe how we try to understand ourselves. I can have many wonderful tools for exploring the other, but it’s ever so hard to get a good look at oneself. How can you possibly get enough distance, enough perspective on yourself?
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. Such an intriguing problem. I think that one way to get perspective on oneself is to step aside from ego, from self-consciousness, and see with the eyes of another. What I mean is, if you can actually listen to and hear someone talk about you, how they see you, without denying or diminishing or arguing, and let that sink in, you just might find a way to incorporate some of that perspective.

In fact that’s what I had done when she responded with a thoughtful, loving perspective of me, and included that keen insight that I have called a tease. I had asked for her to explain an earlier comment that embarrassed me in some ways as she was admiring skills of mine that I couldn’t see.

We are simply too close to ourselves to truly appreciate our own skills and marvelous traits. They’re too easy for us, so we don’t value them. This same friend doodles the most amazing doodles. Beautiful works of art in simple pen on paper. The photo above is a piece of one of these doodles that I asked to keep. To her, it’s nothing. To me, it’s magic. Because it comes so easily to her she dismisses it’s value.

We are all like that. But when we listen and honor the words of others, allow them to sink in, allow ourselves to hear the truth from others, we find ourselves both humbled and grateful. And we find ourselves fumbling a little less.