From Where I Stand

Tag: forgiveness

  • Parasite x Brain.

    Parasite x Brain.

    The parasitic flatworm Dicrocoelium dendriticum aka Liver fluke, aka “zombie ant fungus,” infects the brain of ants resulting in the ant crawling to the tallest point of a plant preparing to get eaten for the highest possibility of fertilization.

    Imagine it.

    The parasite drives the ant up the stem to be crushed in the grinding maxilla and mandible of livestock, ingesting the parasite to flourish in a new home. Then, if it gets too cold, if the ant isn’t consumed, it retreats to try again tomorrow.

    Mindless-drones doing as the parasitic infection demands, with no other objective than to spread. Now, that is scary, good thing we don’t have such a thing in humans.

    Facebook

    Instagram

    Twitter

    TikTok

    CNN

    MSNBC

    FoxNews

    NPR

    CNBC

    Us humans, we like to think we make good choices. We want to be good, we want to do what is best. No one goes forward with full intention of making the wrong choice. Unlike the ignorant ant, humans have intentionality and we loooove to use our smarts to justify our choices.

    Maybe the ants think we are the crazy ones for being influenced by entertainment sources to tell us how to live. The fact that we allow the fictional narrative of social media to alter how we view ourselves might be reason enough for the ants to prefer their colony over a cell phone.

    What if…just what if…the narrative you hold about yourself, the inner assessment of how well you’re doing in life and what you believe is important, was built on false teachings?

    Though we aren’t being manipulated to crawl up any trees, sacrificing ourselves to the further pollination of disease, we are choosing to go to the top of whatever proverbial grass blade, (social outlet) there is and sacrifice our true selves to the influence of misinformation for capital gain or continued social acclimation.

    Ask yourself, why do I do what I do and what really matters to me the most? Take a reflective look at your life and see the truth of where you have invested your time.

    Our entire life is a receipt of where we spent our most precious gift. If you did what you thought you should do, or did something because you wanted to fit in, or did something because you felt some sort of emotional response that you needed to satisfy, then it’s not too late to make a change and start living as yourself and what matters.

    Some brains are too far gone. The infection has spread and lingered for too long and delusion has sunk in. The once-malleable brain now plagued with a barrage of persuasion has the ability to rewrite history to support the slow crawl completely motivated by the influence of the parasitic ideas hellbent on the host’s destruction.

    If life is spent on anything less than the most meaningful thing, it’s a waste.

  • We all have a little Trump inside of us.

    We all have a little Trump inside of us.

    If I were you and you were me, what would you see?

    What would you experience if you were me writing this?

    You can’t possibly know what I am going through. You can’t because I am me. I have lived as me my entire life. Being me entails having my personality, my perspective, my experiences and how people experience me and me them.

    So, how can you possibly walk in my shoes if my entire life experience led me to seeing things the way I do and producing the reactions I have.

    You can’t “get” someone. You can relate to them from your own life experience, but “getting it,” shouldn’t be the goal.

    Here’s my sales pitch for peace:

    Empathy is the bridge to forgiveness.

    To be empathetic is the willingness to see the other person’s perspective. When you are hurt, scared, angry, sad, escalated in some way, the choice to empathize and relate to people seems impossible.

    Why would we choose to distance or judge someone? Judgment, justice, disgust, fear, anger, all of the above.

    I guess the real question is, why should we empathize with people who we deem to be “bad” or “wrong?”

    For your own peace.

    Empathy and forgiveness leads to a peace for the one who practices it. If you want peace, in your relationships, at work, watching the news, dealing with difficult customers, then you need to allow yourself to relate to the person you are dealing with.

    Typical argument against empathy:

    “But what if the person is a sociopath and doesn’t care about people, why should I relate to them?”

    Answer: One of the criteria for anti-social personality disorder aka sociopath is lack of empathy. So, if you choose to categorize people into a box that is “unrelatable,” then you just did what they do.

    If you want to be right, enact justice, judge and distance from someone, remember they are people too.

    The way humans are designed-they have parents, and those parents had parents, and so on. All the ancestry that came before us led to the “us” here today and leading to the “them” that is standing before you now. Both nature and nurture play into who we are today and why we chose what we chose. Not to mention, the choices available to as at the location and time in history we were born.

    Judge if you dare

    So, if you want to judge and enact judgment on people because of your god-like view of what should be, remember: people only know what they know and don’t know what they don’t. People learn by way of association and do what they do based on what was experienced, internalized, and believed to be true.

    People do the best they can with what they’ve got. People don’t do your best or a general best, but their own best. Even one who murders, chose to do so based on what they thought was the best choice. There isn’t a person who has walked this earth who hasn’t done the best they could with what they’ve got. Also, with the exception of Jesus, there isn’t a person who hasn’t done something they later revisit and think things could have been done differently today.

    If you can allow yourself to see that you’ve once misjudged, acted out of anger, chose based on limited information, then you can understand that someone else may be doing the same thing. Sure, they may have chosen differently than you would have, but their available choices, their normalized decisions, observed behaviors from family and friends, and many many other factors in their experience have led to them choosing to act as they did.

    You get angry and you yell.

    Someone else gets angry and they drink.

    Another person gets angry and fights.

    All are angry and neither can judge the other from their limited perspective.

    Finding yourself relating to others, and allowing yourself to be in their shoes, is much more than, “getting it.” Empathy will provide the ideal life of peace you want. If you want the peace that is.

    If you want to judge, then so be it, but you’re doing exactly what they are doing. The exact same thing you are judging is the same thing you can’t forgive or accept about yourself.

  • Bad Choices?

    Bad Choices?

    When I was 19 I got my first tattoo. I was told that it meant “forgive” in, “Chinese.” I apologize to any pacific islander by overly assuming that all symbol language is simply, Chinese.

    At 23, I took 18 credit hours, including both a microbiology course and a biochem class (both had labs).

    At 32 I tried to mix greek yogurt and hot coffee for a protein coffee drink (We were out of protein powder).

    At 37 I ran outside for two hours when it was -10 degrees, plus the windchill factor it was more like -17.

    Let’s just say that I have made some questionable choices in my life, that at the time (and is publicaly stated), were “bad”.

    I never intended to make a “bad” choice when I made the choice however. At the moment I tried to make my coffee drink I thought of yogurt being a dairy product. We put dairy in our coffees all the time. I thought, “well, based on experience, this should work.” When the sour yogurt and the hot bitter coffee combined, the cottage-cheese formed substance partially cooked and I ended up with a cheesy-sorta-coagulated crust atop the still hot and still bitter coffee. Again, no step leading up to this mess was necessarily “bad” but was the best I had at the time.

    That’s the kicker though isn’t it? We all make choices in the moment with the information we have at the time. Anyone can look back on any point in life and judge from the now-perspective and information and say that a choice was bad.

    Nothing is “bad” to our mind at the time, but simply the best we had.

    Sure, there is always a context in every decision. For example, the tattoo was during a time when I had lost contact with a good friend. I decided it was not only cool to get my first tattoo, but noble I would put “forgive” on my back. Also, to put forgive in a symbol of another culture just seemed so open-minded. I really thought this was the absolute best idea. I really put my best foot forward and still, 20-years later have this obscure tattoo which I still haven’t looked up to what it really means.

    What the tattoo, cottage cheese coffee, the almost-frost-bitten run taught me was invaluable wisdom. I have the experience, not just the knowledge or concept, the actual experience to say, “you should probably Google search that before you do it.”

    But, more importantly, I have empathy when someone makes a mistake or wrongs me because of these and other experiences.

    If you’ve ever gotten upset and did anything irrational, then you can relate to the next guy who wrongs you. If you have ever wanted something and didn’t have the money and considered the thought to just take it, you can connect with a robber in jail or the next Billionaire who is arrested for corrupt practices.

    From where I stand, forgiveness should be as common in life as our own experience has taught us. No, I have never been high on meth, up for seven days, and then thought I could build a time machine. However, I have had times where I was up all night and the next day thought that I could sleep at work with just one-eye closed and then switch eyes to sneak in some naps. Neither of our choices make logical sense, if not scientific impossibilities, so why should I, rationally speaking of course, judge someone else, or dissaociate from them because of something they did that I can relate to.

    To judge is to distance yourself from associating with someone else. When you let your judgement down and sit with the fact that you can relate, if you choose to, then you can find forgiveness. Don’t forgive someone to be the better person, the bigger man, the humble one. Forgive someone because you know that you are forgiven for your wrongs, and that is what we can do for others, if we choose to.