anupturnedsoul

The Human Maze

Have you ever done one of these…

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I chose to use this particular maze image because the end and the beginning are on the same side… and you’ve got to wonder why you would bother doing the maze at all since you’re where you need to get already – life is sometimes exactly like that!

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I have a vague memory of being introduced to mazes as a child (most likely as part of my mother’s program to turn me into a genius… sorry, mother, but all you managed to do was turn me into a crazy, if it’s any consolation crazy is supposed to be closely linked to genius, but you were never one to appreciate consolation prizes) and thinking they were the coolest game ever…

until…

my mind got bored of doing them because no matter how different they were, regardless of the seemingly different patterns of the maze, the pattern was still the same.

For some reason I found doing them backwards easier than doing them forwards – in other words I’d start at the end and end at the start. It was pretty much the same process but somehow it felt simpler to do it that way – and I have consistently found doing things backwards to be more natural for me.

Probably the most famous maze (if you’re into mythology) is the Labyrinth…

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excerpt via – Ancient History Encyclopedia: Labyrinth by Joshua J. Mark

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And probably the most famous labyrinth (if you’re into science) is the human brain… which can only be studied by the human brain – that doesn’t pose any paradoxical puzzles at all!

So, why am I talking about mazes and where am I going with this?

Well, the short answer (I’m not particularly good at giving those kinds of answers, my efforts to do so usually end up so laconic that they’re as difficult to understand as my loquacious ones) is…

The last couple of days I’ve noticed that WordPress keeps prompting me, with a message highlighted in red, to solve an issue in the settings of my blog. The first time I saw this message I followed the instructions and ‘fixed’ the issue – ‘fixed’ is in quotation marks because the issue should not have been an issue at all, and there should have been nothing to fix. And my ‘fix’ didn’t fix anything.

However… I noticed about a month or so ago that WordPress was tweaking the software (the beginning of Autumn always seems to come with online platforms getting tweaked – some of these have resulted in me slowly, softly, abandoning use of a platform because I can’t be bothered to navigate the changes added to the maze), and when they apply their tweaks… glitches often ensue – what once worked well as it was suddenly doesn’t work anymore or still works but has a limp.

In the past I used to try to solve the problem – often by searching the WordPress Support forum. But the Support forum is a maze with no end which keeps spitting you out where you started. I have learned over time to ignore the problem (unless it won’t let me ignore it) and just wait for things to sort themselves out… as the WP team’s ‘Happiness Engineers’ keep making tweaks and eventually a new tweak gets rid of the glitch (while most likely creating new glitches, or resuscitating old glitches – like the one which sporadically unfollows blogs you’re following).

This issue is one I can ignore… which is what I did, but I decided to do a casual search online about it anyway to see if anyone else was having it too and if there was something I could do on my end to sort it out…

The results of my search answered my casual query…

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for the rest of this thread click here

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and informed me that someone else was indeed having the same issue and… that there was nothing they nor I could do about it… even if the WP ‘Happiness Engineer’ insisted that the problem was ours and not WP’s.

As I perused the conversation…

it got me thinking about things other than blogging issues…

it’s a rather good example of the maze you enter when trying to solve a problem…

of how the labyrinth inside of you interacts with the labyrinth inside of others creating a social interaction labyrinth…

and how easy it is to get lost inside the twisting paths which all seem to end up leading to dead ends.

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CYA = cover your ass (I had to look that up)

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Notice how the person with the same issue as me on their blog said – “Am I doing something wrong (most likely) or is there some kind of bug?” – in their query.

That stood out for me because it’s just the sort of thing I might have said…

firstly because I was trained to think that all problems were my fault – I have adjusted this formative programming by adding some patches, but those, like bandaids, fall off when you want them to stick (and are impossible to remove when you want to take them off)…

and secondly because whenever I need to talk to someone about an issue which I think they’re most likely responsible for, I usually add an ego soothing self-deprecating dollop of creamy sugar for their ego to nibble on so that we can move beyond the ruffled ego phase of problem solving (which can become a whole new problem, much harder to solve, of its own that can eclipse the original issue… with the original issue never getting solved due to the new issue) and get to the solution more rapidly and smoothly…

(and it could be me who is making the mistake, so there’s that too…)

experience has taught me that phrasing things this way (also known as the tactful and diplomatic approach) helps solve certain human communication problems, but it also causes problems…

the problems it causes are those outlined in the WP support forum thread…

basically by saying – ‘is it something I’m doing wrong’ – the querent gave the Happiness Engineer the deflection solution WP needed – to blame the browser, the browser’s add-ons, the user, and anything, everything, and anyone but WP…

the Happiness Engineer even ventured into the ‘deny the problem exists’ (and indirectly call the person with the problem delusional…) territory with their – “I’ve never heard of this particular error”…

oh, the things you can intimate without saying them (and maybe without even meaning to do so)…

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the subtleties, the undercurrents, and undertones…

the thunder of Minotaur hooves in the distance, echoing through cavernous corridors, reminding you that you’re not alone in the labyrinth, someone or something is chasing you, hunting you, and that a wrong turn even if it’s in the right direction can be…

fatal error…

luckily things seemed to have sorted themselves out… the red alert message isn’t showing today, and even that issue with the new log-in page which I’ve been quietly grumbling about has been resolved (perhaps the two things were linked and just needed ‘Happiness Engineer’s to do another little twerk… I mean tweak).

Engineered happiness has been restored in WP blogland…

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and…

considering all those other things happening on a daily basis on Earth…

especially those which have devastated lives recently, which have caused chaos, inspired fear, loathing, confusion, uncertainty…

a small technical glitch is…

a distraction which the human maze sometimes appreciates as focusing on a problem which is mild may help to alleviate the overwhelming, crushing sense of powerlessness in the face of huge issues that are labyrinthian…

So…

over to you…

What small problems have you faced and explored recently which have revealed to you something about your human maze or the maze of other humans?

 

 

 

13 comments

  1. Mmm i just have a small problem.. understanding life aka myself. How your perspective can change after trauma. What decides what happens to you. Do you manifest/co create or your unconsiousness.. emoticons.. how does of fit the puzzel?
    Or are we the puzzle and others a piece to make the world a bigger place?

    My brain doing over hours here..
    Into forensic astrology.. so do we actually have a hand or is of all decided.. let sit back, let your movie play till you croak. Like a veggie.. (vegetable) because we are slaves arent we? Of our passions, addictions, relations, emotions, curiosity, nutritions, work, government, etc. The whole human package.

    Ive always been burdened with big life questions..

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      • Thank you for sharing 🙂

        Haha! Yes, autocorrect is often incorrect! It’s a bit like having a conversation with someone who keeps finishing your sentences but getting what you were going to say all wrong. Sometimes it is funny, but other times it can be problematic.

        I can relate to feeling burdened by life’s big questions, on the flip side those questions make living life more interesting because it adds layers and depth to even the most seemingly shallow and superficial.

        Looking at it from an astrological angle it seems that those who ask big life questions tend to have the Outer Planets amplified in their natal chart. For instance I have Pluto, Uranus and Neptune all located in the first quadrant of my chart, in the personal houses, aspecting personal planets, which makes for an all-or-nothing approach to personal development and existence.

        These days I tend to view the question of fate versus free will as not being an either/or scenario but as two halves of a whole (or two segments of a whole with other things making up the rest), thus we are co-creators but the way we’re co-creators may not be how the human mind perceives it as being. Perhaps our fate is a free will choice we have made, and by flowing along the course of our fate, which includes experiencing addiction, emotion, trauma, etc, we learn… gather data… that gathering of data which each of us does combines somewhere, somehow to evolve life, lifeforms – why?

        Perhaps we’re all cells within an organism, and that organism thinks it is a single being on a planet somewhere living a life…

        the mystery is perhaps there to remind us that what we don’t know is as important as what we do know… or something like that. 😉

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  2. I have a problem that being a technophobe, I have panic attacks holding a calculator, I am still using an antique calculator and haven’t quite got around to backing up my 1000s of documents. So I have a friend who luckily patches up this one which he did again for me last week when it died. Merc shadow phase… so anyway being a bit obsessive, and liking the blogs on WordPress which does not like my old computer, I have ingeniously worked out a back door, backwards running a maze operation, involving starting off opening up other programs first which finally allows me to access WordPress!
    Any day now, I am planning on grabbing that Minotaur by the horns, vaulting over its back and actually sitting down and sorting out my techno fears and solve the problem once and for all. I actually have another updated computer set to go, but stubbornly stick with this one.
    When I was a kid I really enjoyed reading the Mary Renault series of books on the Cretans and the Bull Runners.

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    • Thank you for sharing 🙂

      You just reminded me that I still have my Casio calculator which I bought when I went to high school. It has a feature which plays musical notes for each number – back in the days of yore that was amazing technology 😀 It’s probably the oldest object I own (and somehow it managed to survive all my sheddings of possessions to travel lighter), other than my winter coat which just had its 20 yr birthday recently (and which has me saying that thing old people say – they don’t make things to last the way they used to).

      I am sort of a technophobe, but I live with a technophile – he’s the reason I ventured into social media, he gave me a couple of online accounts one X-mas. My niece got me into blogging. I was going through the Uranus opp. Uranus midlife transit at the time, and natal Merc was in an Uranus sandwich. I love the online world, the ability to travel anywhere, to access huge amounts of information at a click, to interact with people from across the globe through this medium is perfect for a hermit… but there are certain things I prefer to do hands on, to touch something, to see someone in person, to hear and feel the real (even if it’s all made of vibrations of atoms, waves, etc) is grounding. Planting a tree in Minecraft is very different from actually planting a tree.

      One of the things I love about mythology is it’s never out of date… there are moments when it seems way ahead of our times. 😉

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      • Yes I forced myself to grapple with the technology of learning about computers as I have always loved learning about my pet subjects. It just occured to me that being on the web and connecting with others is the ultimate mind maze!
        Ha my Uranus opposition was a horror!
        I was also highly electrical zapping myself and others constantly. It got to the stage others were nervous to touch my hands!
        Don’t you sometimes feel as though you are starring in your own Myth?
        Robert Holdstock wrote some fabulous gut stirring novels around this. English guy I think.

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        • That’s a great question! I might borrow it for a post, if that’s okay with you.

          I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt as though I was starring in my own myth, I’m still not certain I’m the lead in my own life although that feeling isn’t as strong as it used to be, but I have definitely felt as though I was given a role in the myths of others – that’s pretty much my childhood summed up. I never felt really real when it came to my parents, I was a shapeshifting something or other, a symbol whose meaning kept morphing of a whatnot for them. I feel it less these days, perhaps because I’m not looking for meaning in the way that I used to so I don’t slot in so readily into other people’s stories, but sometimes with the blogging as I’m just words on a screen and those words can be interpreted any which way. It’s not always a bad thing to be a part of someone else’s myth.

          I didn’t have anything too unusual happen during my Uranus opp Uranus, other than me suddenly being more extroverted than I’d ever been my entire life (and my father, who claimed he was immortal, dying – but I’d have to check the dates as that might have happened post-exact-aspect). There were moments during that transit when I watched myself and wondered wtf I was on (and kind of hoped it would never stop… but I’m sort of relieved most of it stopped now). That electrical zapping thing sounds like something you may already have natally which was intensified during the transit. When it comes to electrics, the ones I have most issue with tend to also have water (not the ideal combo unless you’re into electrocution) and the water part is the issue (it usually means I’ve been neglecting my emotions and they’re spilling over where they’ll get my attention).

          Every time I chat with you I realise just how much I haven’t read!!! Which is kind of awesome 😀 Most of my mythology passion comes from reading mythology encyclopedias (getting hopelessly confused between Greek and Roman) and watching schlocky Italian TV/films.

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          • Yes I have a strong electrical ratbag Uranus who has caused me much strife over the years until I learnt to try and manage him.
            My mother made no secret of her opinion that children should neither be seen nor heard especially if they were girls.
            Reading your brilliant reports makes me realise how much I actually don’t self analyse and it is always interesting to read your take on life.
            I have had these disassociation moments since I was a child of being able to observe the situation from a distance like looking in from outside the bubble.
            Learning more about some dramatic problematic planetary and asteroid placements in my natal chart, I often think sometimes it seems like a Greek drama and I wonder why I did that when I am an introvert who hates drama. I experienced it on a daily basis growing up and can’t stand theatre.
            I have read pretty much all the mythologies but am totally useless in remembering who is who and who did what.
            I do find the multi dimensionality of life fascinating though and love experiencing it, It’s such a buzz!

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            • There’s a great old film about life and the parallels to Greek drama – Never On Sunday (1960) – what I remember the most about it is a bit where the female lead points out that at the end of a tragedy all those who died get up and go to the local tavern with everyone else (including the people who killed them) to celebrate, so everything always ends happily ever after no matter what happens in life (or something like that). It was just such a brilliant idea!

              I also experienced drama on a daily basis as a child (my parents loved the stuff, and could conjure drama out of a melon seed) and it made me shy away from it. When I was older I had an almost allergic reaction to drama, removing myself from the irritant whenever possible. I recall once a friend took me to visit a guy whose family had just imploded (the story was something along the lines of – the father who was a rabbi had been having an affair with a ‘goy’, and he had decided to get a divorce to be with his lover. Up until then the family had been one of those ‘perfect’ pillar of the community families, with the father at its head as a beacon of the righteous, ethical and moral way of living and being. The wife and children were blind-sided by the revelation and their reality was blown to smithereens – without their father to guide them and set the standard, none of them knew what to think, feel, or be) and he greeted us at the door, didn’t invite us in, but stood on the threshold shouting furiously about the hell he was going through. I walked away, I didn’t know him, he wasn’t my friend, I didn’t have any reason to stand there in the whirlwind of his vocal and emotional dramatics. I waited in the distance for my friend (who also had one hell of a family – her mother had been drugging her with sleeping pills and such since she was a baby to keep her quiet and placid, and her father spent all his time reading and talking about the Holocaust) to finish her visit, when she joined me she told me that the guy had asked her why I had walked away – apparently my not wanting to stand there taking the brunt of his storm which had nothing to do with me perplexed him. When we’re caught up in the drama game it doesn’t occur to us that it’s not as exciting to others as it is for us. My parents frigging loved the dramas they created, and so did those it attracted. Drama is fascinating and addictive… it’s also boring, draining, repetitive… like being stuck in a washing machine on spin cycle (no wonder clothes are so cheerful when they finally get taken out!)

              Self-analysing is kind of overrated, what’s far more valuable is to just chat with yourself as though with a close friend, sharing life’s quirks, and figuring things out together 😉

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    • Ha! Whenever that happens to me I tend to conclude that it’s for the best, time to take a break and then rethink my approach. Last week when I was replying to comments on the blog, on one particular comment my internet kept cutting out just as I pressed ‘reply’… I rewrote my reply about five times before it finally let it go through.

      Sometimes what we write to others is for our eyes only and the universe is perhaps protecting us from sharing something we’re not ready or meant to share (or which the other person isn’t ready or meant to hear?), or maybe it’s giving us time to hone a thought so we can express better, or it’s Pan playing a prank to see how we handle it 😉

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