Everything Nac

“Sitting in the fire” is an expression used to describe the process of being tolerant of being in an uncomfortable situation. This can happen in so many ways and circumstances that its use is ongoing and ever-expanding. I hope to introduce it to you in such a way that you will think about it as a way of muttering to yourself whenever things get tense and overwhelming, and it will be the mantra you use to help yourself get from point A to point Z, moving through tough moments and odd feelings.
In the area of work related circumstances, we often have not only differences of opinion but sometimes downright animosity coming from those around us who are seeking to show that they have some power in the world. Sometimes we meet these people as bosses. How is it that people who have little or no real people skills end up being in these power positions? It seems that the horrible boss syndrome is so cliché that they can even make a movie about it, and it does not phase them. They will look right at the logic of it, presented to them on film, and they will think that the employees deserve to be treated in subservient ways; after all, the boss is in charge, and whatever he says goes, and he can talk to others any way he wants, right? These people do not get it, and if they did, they would act differently wouldn’t they? You would think so, but probably not! They may even glory in the fact that they are tough as nails and half as compassionate. What can we do with people like this??
We run across these people on the roadway, these super-angry-road-raging-maniacs, right? Who died and left them God? All of us have had moments where we are forced for whatever reason to make unsafe or seemingly derelict moves on the roadway, and these road-ragers collect those moments like personal affronts and may even chase you down and throw you the peace sign and scream obscenities at you. And then you will see them somewhere else out of that context and think about how smug they seem now that they are not yelling and misbehaving. What is it that might really be going through these people’s minds? Why are they so unutterably offended by others? How can they take so personally something that someone does whom they will probably never see again?
This is where the healing begins. “Sitting in the fire” means taking a few more minutes or even seconds to think through the situation. Maybe we can bide our time and let it pass that we ourselves are so upset by their misbehaving. In the old days, we were taught to count to 10, or 50, or 100. Let’s make use of that time and try to analyze what it is that is really going on. Chances are a person who is a bad egg, who acts out, who panics and throws a fit, who is giving us hell, is in fact a very self-worrisome person. He is miserable from the inside out. We might not think anything about why that is important to us until we are the ones who are fuming over his having confronted us. Then we are all upset, and we rationalize our feeling upset; after all, he was unfair to US!
These people are in fact those who are here to teach us to not only sit in the fire but to walk in it, bath in it, languish and play in it. A person who can keep his calm under extremely difficult circumstances is highly revered. We think of him as a prince among men. I would love to be able to say that nothing ever gets to me, but I would be the biggest liar ever. Some people get so far under my skin it seems like they are in bed with me at night and tapping me on the shoulder, “Wake up, you moron!” Oh, I am all about, “When he said this, I should have said that.”

We can see how people got that way; they started out like us, rational and sane, and then they got fed up with crazy fools trying to push them around, and then the next thing they knew they were going off the chain crazy and losing it on the freeway of life. It is a rational insanity. People owe you respect or dignity or position or money or respect or trust or something because you are entitled, right?
After all, there needs to be fairness in the world. I know, because I saw some fairness one time in a dream. I heard about it in a book, or was it on the web? I know that there must be some fairness where if you work hard and always do right and never rip anyone off you will never have a flat tire, run out of gas, and no one will ever take advantage of you, right? Now, this is not a license to act like a monster, but it does really clarify the situation we are in. People are in pain, and they are hurting and they rationalize their behaviors, and they act out and then the act like horrible bosses, poor mates, angry kids, road raging maniacs, evil street thugs, or self-righteous pontificating fools. And those people are sometimes us. And this is why we need to learn to “sit in the fire.”
runningturtle87

I’ve talked about social media several times this last few years, and so it will be no big surprise that I am willing to spend time exploring it again. For those who need an outlet but are maybe too undone by the complexity of creating and owning a full website, social media is a good choice, in blogging or responding to friends, family, and the increasingly smaller world at our finger tips. I want to propose one recourse that is powerful and easy to set up: TUMBLR.

I run a FITSPO site, concerning health and fitness, and one of the things that I find intriguing is the interaction between the community members, the other TUMBLRS. Gaming is very much like this in some ways because you can strike up conversations on the side several different ways, depending on how you set up your site. Did I mention, it’s free?

But, don’t let me get ahead of myself. Tumbr is a place where you can explore literally everything; it’s the encyclopedia of images and all you have to do is name any word and a TUMBLR (no “e”) site will pop up with images about that arena of thought. And, if you know how to pay attention, there will be, at the bottom of the image, the names and locations of all those who liked this, reblogged this, or even originally posted this image, and you can follow its history all the way back to its origin. I find that intriguing.

If nothing else, it is the breadth of TUMBLR that is so amazing. It is anonymous if you want it to be, and signing up is easy. You can, as I said, talk and blog and message your friends and strangers. And you can add pictures and information for a variety of resources like YOU TUBE or other video mediums, text, photos from your camera, or even write your own poetry or travel log. It’s easy as pie.

If you go to a TUMBLR site and you want to see all of it all at once, you can simply type in the word “archive” at the end of the addy, and everything that person has ever posted will pop up on your computer screen from their TUMBLR. So, if you want to explore this, simply Google Tumblr and any word, pull up a TUMBLR page, add a back slash and the word “archive” and the entire history of that page will pop up. Okay, so why is this so fascinating to me?

Here is something that social media does: It documents change over time. If you looked back over your past, there would be a bread crumb trail from where you began until how you got where you are. This is more apparent when we look at the actions of others. We can see their transformation over time much more clearly, and our own changes seem more organic and easily translucent to us. Others, however, seem to present stark moments where things had been going this way and then some traumatic moment hit where things went different. Or maybe over time we shifted from “X” to “Y.” Or maybe we shifted from “Y” to “Y-not.”

In any case, whether your focus is religion or drugs or hate or love or unicorns, whatever your point of fascination, the trajectory of TUMBLR will show the ever drifting phases of consciousness, however unconscious, and it reveals them graphically. The choices we make are vivid and revealing. I think that all relationships should have TUMBLR sites so that partners can tell each other things in pictorial fashion. Parents and kids could post things that showed mood changes or changes in direction, a sort of thermometer of the day for how things are going. Kids would reveal an ever-increasing distaste for the strings attached to the ever-increasing sum of money that they are seeking to extract from their parents. Parents could reveal the ever-increasing concern they have with the money their kids are extracting and the ever-increasing silence and secrecy they displace it with. Intriguing.

The government could reveal how they covertly use our taxes for the benefit of some. Corporations could show their own shifts. Personally, a TUMBLR by terrorist groups would seem helpful. Here is what we are working on or planning. Nice, eh?

So, if you have not checked out TUMBLR, Google it, put in ANY WORD you want to know more about, and up will pop a bunch of things. As always, it’s the Internet, so travel at your own risk. 6 degrees of separation on the web will get you to its opposite in only few clicks.

I sent out this search: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/quantum%20psychology
and sure enough, there it was…a pile of stuff to sift through….I am telling you, everything TUMBLRs out eventually.