What is my Inner Center… She Asked

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“At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.”
― Lao Tzu

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How do you find your inner center?

Can it be found by you or does it find you?

Is it something or somewhere? Is it a part of a someone? A someone who is you?

What is it?

And is it center or centre? Does it matter? Does spelling make a difference? Do you really lose your ability to understand someone else when they spell something in a way that you don’t spell it? Surely you are intelligent enough to know what they mean, or are you mean enough to want to misunderstand and accuse them of being too stupid to communicate with you?

If you can’t meet others in the middle, where do you plan to meet them? Do they have to leave not just their center but their known universe and enter yours, where you are the center of it and they are a satellite of you? Are you seeking to be alone? A lonely planet, a singular Sun…

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“People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.”

― Kent M. Keith

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Don’t let typos be the thing which isolates you, there are plenty of other things doing that as it is…

I once moved from one school to another which caused me to also have to move from one way of spelling things to another, and I became so hopelessly confused that I lost all feeling of having a center or centre and drifted along a strange periphery.

I wandered lonely as a cloud, shifting shape, never quite finding the right shape to be… not for others and not for me… it wa an intriguing experience.

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“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

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 Finding my inner center in those days, was not something I thought about. That came later…

What was vivid at that time was how far away I always seemed to be from the centre of things. I was the classic outsider wherever I went, whatever I did, said, thought or felt. In some way being on the outside became my center. But it never felt central to anything.

And it wasn’t an inner center… or was it?

How do you find such a thing as an inner center?

I suppose you could apply a mathematical formula to it… but can you really do that with a person?

Perhaps if that person isn’t you… you could do it. We sometimes treat others as objects, objects of our attention and affection, and mathematics is easily applied to objects. An object can be measured, and those measurements allow us to figure out its center, as well as draw conclusions, paste on labels, put it into a box and tie it all up with a bow.

However it’s not the sort of thing which like when it is done to us… so why do we do it to others when we dislike others doing it to us?

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“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

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And this center which we find using mathematics… is it really the inner center or just some outer circumference?

Is this center static? Or does it move? What does it look like? Does it have a look? What about feeling? Does it have feeling?

Is it colourful or black and white?

Is it a sensory experience which only we can sense with a special super sensitivity?

Is it something which can be shared or is it for us alone? A solitary moment and seed cocooned from the world… that refuge where we curl up in fetal position waiting for the apocalypse outside to be over and done with so we can emerge and start life anew…

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“…they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”
― Neil Gaiman

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Life rippling out from us as a starting point…

Perhaps if we follow our outward ripples backwards, back to their source, we can find the inner center from which everything begins…

Our adult self is maybe just the ripples of our inner child… but who is this inner child and what is their centering point?

For me…

I used to love to hang upside down as a child. Not sure why this was so wonderful, it just was… I tried this many years later as an adult and… fell on my head.

I used to love to grab a weighted object and dive underwater… and just sit, waiting for my breath to run out, hoping that some primal ability would kick in and allow me to stay there… maybe… my adult self is reluctant to repeat this as you can’t really do this sort of thing in a public pool without causing a kerfuffle.

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“On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man”
― Jules Verne

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The world outside of us is always intruding on our inner center… pushing against it, pulling at it, trying to get in or trying to draw us out.

Again… like finding our inner center or centre… the outside wants in and the inside wants out.

But what are we doing while this is being done…?

Are we one of them too… doing to others what others do to us, perhaps because it is done to us and so we do it too, or perhaps because what others do is something we all feel compelled to do…

All the while not liking it when it is done to us, yet still doing it to others…

And not liking it when others refuse to have it done to them, as we don’t like it when it is done to us…

But things are different when we’re the ones doing it…

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I am shy. This is considered a bad thing by many, including shy people. But is it?

Opinions, perspectives, views, and such… circling the core. Chisels chipping away… sometimes complimenting and sometimes criticising, both still trying to find the inner centre of that of which we are made… to find that of which they are made.

If others can find our center or centre, perhaps they’ll find their own… and maybe we will find ours by finding that of others… or something like that.

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“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
― Albert Einstein

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Why am I shy?

Was I born this way or did I become this way?

A bit of one and t’other…?

Does shyness protect the core or is it the core?

Is the inner center being shy… because… some things need to be that way.

Private…

…for us and us alone.

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“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness.”
― David Levithan

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Perhaps our inner center is a place where no one else can visit…

A thing no one else can touch…

And maybe we can’t visit it or touch it in a way that can be shared with others…

To stop us from sharing it… we too must find it hard to find…

It finds us when we need it…

We know it when we’re there… when everything else crumbles and it’s all that is left.

For us.

For us… alone.

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