I've been sitting back and wading through the recent threads and doing a lot of pondering. Recently, I went to a workshop that gave me further food for thought...about conditioning, about acceptance, about how we limit ourselves by putting ourselves in boxes and about how we can fail to get what we need when we don't dig deep enough to understand what really motivates us.
What follows is my attempt to pull some of my thought threads into some nicely coiled rope, because...well, rope is just so much more useful than threads.
Change and evolution are inevitable, in associations and in individuals. If we deny that, if we try to maintain the status quo or worse yet, if we hearken back to the 'good ole days', then we do a disservice to our own potential, to what we might become if we are willing to allow for the possibility that we have not yet 'arrived'.
Surely, we have not fought our way to this place, some of us battle-scarred and weary, to be told that now we must conform to yet another set of expectations in order to gain acceptance and get a validation stamp. We have much in common with one another, but we have much more which is not common. Surely it is the things which make us different from one another which are vastly more interesting than the things which make us the same. Staring in a mirror is just not that interesting. Looking out a window at a completely different landscape, now that is interesting.
Having said that, there is a comfort in familiarity. It is both tiring and tiresome to constantly be trying to communicate in a language which seemingly isn't spoken by anyone around you and so I think it's natural that those of us who speak the same language have a tendency to gravitate to one another, much like the villages of Toronto ... Little India, Chinatown, the Gay Village. It is not intrinsically evil to associate oneself with likeminded people. But, we shortchange ourselves if we forget that other villages can be interesting places to visit, even if we don't want to live there. And trying to convert all the village folk to some sort of homogenous mass only gets us boring suburbs.
Understand what motivates you, accept what motivates you, make your world and the worlds of others richer by being unashamedly who you are, but remember to leave the windows and doors open ... a little fresh air never hurt anyone.
abi
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