Waiting to be Recognised

Have you ever had the feeling that you were waiting for something,

but didn’t know what that something which you were waiting for was…

and therefore…

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you aren’t sure how to get what you’re waiting for or how to meet it halfway if it is waiting for you at the halfway point (wondering why you’re taking so long to get there)…

all you sort of know is that it hasn’t arrived because if it had you’d know it, you wouldn’t still be waiting for it… or would you?

Life is full of weird puzzles which seem to be made just for us personally… and yet if you do a search online for your particular and personal puzzle you’ll find others who share it (and also share the feeling that this puzzle is theirs and theirs alone).

Take thinking, for instance…

there are hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe thousands of hundreds of thousands, or humdreds of thousands of of hundred of thousands (that’s enough maths for today and for the rest of my life…) of people who think that the way that they think is peculiar only to them and no one else thinks like they do (which may be true and exact…)…

and yet lots of people think that no one else thinks like they do, thinks that no one else understands them or what they’re going through by being so unusual of thought, and these lots of people often find each other online (or if not find each other they cross paths, leaving comment traces…)on articles about introverts, deep thinkers, deep feelers, and other ‘rare’ people who by the sheer numbers which agree they’re one of those ‘rare’ people don’t seem to be all that ‘rare’ at all… and yet they still feel rare, alone, misunderstood and without others like them to connect with and to be understood by.

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excerpt from Linkedin: Deep Thinking is not the same as Over Thinking by Lori Taylor-Schulte

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I was doing a search this morning for information on the differences between deep and shallow thought…

I can’t recall why I started doing this search (my morning searches tend to be catapulted out of a murky mind haze), but what I can recall is that I didn’t care where I ended up, I was on a going with the flow internet surf (according to one article I read ‘going with the flow’ is considered a component of shallow thought)…

which is probably how the search started in the first place… although it could have also started where these things often do – with me getting annoyed at something like a contradiction, either someone else’s or one of my own (or both, with one triggering awareness of the other)…

such as the contradictions caused by thinking that we’re ‘rare’ and yet also being a member of a group of ‘rare’ people (which means we’re not really ‘rare’… or does it?)

The moment we think we’re rare… we often end up creating the very thing we think, and may go out of our way to prove it to ourselves, alienating ourselves from others (more than the alienation we originally felt which made us think we’re rare) by rejecting and arguing against any attempt to make us part of what we now consider to be the world we don’t belong in or to. Once you think you’re rare if anyone tries to diminish that (even if they’re trying to make you feel better and less alone) you feel under attack by someone who just doesn’t understand rare people.

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While browsing some of the results which came up in my search…

my mind was filled with the perspectives of others both through the articles they wrote and through those who commented on those articles, and their personal reasons for having those perspectives (which tie our words together like threads in a tapestry), and all the tangents which flow from there…

some views I agreed with, some I disagreed with… with both agreement and disagreement shining a light on the workings of my own thinking, showing my own personal reasons threaded through my search, the results I chose to view and those I chose to ignore… and so on…

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excerpt via Quora: How will I know if I’m talking with a critical thinker?

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One of the things which struck me while roaming through the thoughts of others (and my own thoughts inspired by exploring theirs) was…

oops, while focusing on writing the previous sentence I’ve forgotten what I was going to say (structure can be counter-productive to communicating ideas)…

wait for it…

it’s probably just wandered off, it’ll be back…

maybe it’ll bring a new friend it’s made when it does…

thoughts can be like fishing rods, you never know what they’ll catch when their line is launched into the blue…

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excerpt from Psychology Today: Gutsy Third Person Self-Talk Utilizes Your Vagus Nerve by Christopher Bergland

one of the things I noticed about this intriguing article was how much first person talking about self (which was rather repetitive) there was in it…

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Actually there were several thoughts which struck me while roaming around the internet perusing this deep versus shallow thought concept…

one is that some of the people who write articles on this subject seem to be repeating what they’ve read in other articles about the subject and don’t appear to add much of their own take of it to their posts… as though they’re afraid of sharing their own thoughts (perhaps because they think that their thoughts are too outside of the box and to belong, be liked and be ‘followed’ they must stay within the lines of the box)… or maybe it’s just filler (perhaps they feel pressured to write a post regularly and their own mind isn’t as disciplined as they would like for it to be)… or other reasons which are not included…

and yet when people do share their own personal take on a subject… it’s so much more interesting! It adds to what is already known and out there… it adds the ‘rare’ part of an individual to the collective.

Ah! That was my thought (which probably isn’t mine at all… like a burr picked up while rolling through a hedge backwards or strolling through the tall grass…)…

What if we’re all ‘rare’ and our particular ‘rare’ is waiting for us to recognise it and then share it in our own unique manner… add it to the mix or everyone else’s ‘rare’ bits…

but we keep waiting to have others recognise our rare quality for us because we’re not sure what it is…

yet what others see as being ‘rare’ about us is ordinary, mundane to us… well, it can’t be THAT!!! because that is, has always been, and will always be a part of us, it comes naturally and therefore… we don’t recognise its value and when others point it out to us we shrug and shake our head, feel misunderstood, unseen, unnoticed…

and what is rare in us feels misunderstood, unseen, unnoticed by us once again…

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excerpt via Psychology Today: Stop the Search: An Interview With Gangaji by Mark Matousek

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One of the best ways to figure out what is ‘rare’ about you is to look at what others borrow, copy, imitate about you…

narcissists and very narcissistic people are particularly good for this method – a potentially negative trait of theirs can flipped into a ‘positive’ service they provide, as they’ll ‘steal’ what they admire about you (which is often your natural spark – what is rare about you)…

and if it’s really good, a treasure in their eyes, a special something they want to own themselves…

they’ll credit themselves for being the owner of it (and probably copyright it up the wazoo – whenever someone is overly paranoid about people stealing their stuff, especially online – the internet was created for free sharing of information and is a nightmare for anyone who doesn’t want to share freely, I always wonder about why they’re really so paranoid as if you’re the source of something you’ll never stop being the source of that something, it’ll keep growing and flowing from you, even if others ‘borrow’ from you… is it perhaps because they did to someone else what they don’t want someone else to do to them… but unlike their source they aren’t the source of their work and thus they don’t have a continuous supply within which keep flowing and growing to share freely),

they may even credit others (usually those they feel they can control, who are part of their clique, who aren’t a ‘threat’, or whose attention they want to garner) for it but those others they credit will not be the original ‘source’ of it for them because they don’t want anyone else finding the real source – that they will keep hidden even if they have to bury it to do so (sometimes using a ‘smear’ campaign to hide their special secret recipe for ‘their success’).

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Another way of finding out what your rare quality is… look in your trash bin.

Look at those things which you think are ‘rubbish’ about you, which don’t fit anywhere, which you want to ‘get rid of’, which make you ‘awkward’, weird, odd, different but not the kind of different which is ‘trendy’ and feels ‘cool’ (real ‘cool’ is owning the ‘not cool’ and making it your unique trend)…

what is truly rare about us individually is often the last thing we want to be rare about us… and we wander everywhere trying to adopt a rarity which we prefer… something someone else has made trendy, cool, desireable (which wasn’t that way until they just shared who they were as they were and made it so…)… while our own rare thing waits for us to recognise it and know ourselves as we are (it’s very patient and will keep waiting for us…).

So… what are you waiting for?