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| Who am I, Where am I, What is this Place? Out Spring 2014 |
A good example, at my expense of course, would be the implant miscommunication of earlier this week. I had been to the dentist to have the moulds taken so that my new crowns could be manufactured and finally the December eek and February gunk would result in two shiny new crowns and the ability to chew my food properly for the first time in 20 years!
My dentist, being incredibly thorough and precise, has to take a photograph of your jaw where the implants are to go so that the dental technician making the crowns has as much information to go on as possible in order to get them perfect - James Main (dentist) doesn't work with okay or even right, only perfect. James took 4 photographs of my jaw and luckily I repaired to the bathroom to relieve myself of 2 hours in a dentist's chair before I left for home, because he'd forgotten to put the SD card in the camera!
When I came home I thought it would be a good idea to give everyone a giggle so I put a post on my page to the effect of "what kind of dentist forgets to put the SD card in his camera when he photographs your implants?" Well I have a few wags on my friends list and of course one of them thought implants rather than metal screws in the jaw and just had to ask why my dentist was photographing those implants. He was worried afterwards that he offended me and I told him he didn't but not that I choked on my drink when I realised what I'd said. What a giggle!
Sadly though miscommunication isn't always a giggle and getting the right words to convey the right meaning can be very difficult, particularly on social networking sites.
As a life coach and inspirational author and speaker words are my business, and I have to say that over the years of my life and through the hurt people I have tried to help I have concluded that the pen might be mightier than the sword but words are far more cutting than any murderous implement could ever be. One can slice off limbs and pierce your gizzards and that usually ends in death, whereas unkind words harshly spoken can pierce you to the depths of your heart and soul and although you will live you may never ever make a recovery, not only that, everyone who knows you will spend the rest of their life suffering from your sensitivity towards certain subjects. Not unexpect, not unfair in many circumstances, but still hard for everyone concerned. I know many a new love who's spent the first couple of years of the new relationship healing the wounds of the previous ones.
I don't need to tell you that of course because we're all victims of the past and we've all been hurt. However, it is something that needs not just a lot of discussion but a great deal of thought and soul searching. Because as much as we are all victims of the past, we are also the perpetrators who have affected the present that creates the hurt past of other people. I doubt if there is one truly innocent human being alive (who can communicate) who hasn't at one time of another spoken their mind when they should have cut their tongue out. Unfortunately the tongue is the sword of the mind which is the verabliser of the hurt feelings that result in permanent injury by an object that would be better used counting teeth and checking fillings!
Of course the most common cause of miscommunication is disagreement over a point of view. We hear all the time that "I am entitled to my opinion" and yet there are wounded feelings and buckets of tearful consternation when someone else disagrees. Note that the term we tend to use is disagreeing rather than "verbalising their own opinion to which they have the same right as anyone else". You see the conundrum with which we are faced. Entitlement versus disagreement, right versus wrong.
All this is the result of differing attitudes and viewpoints that result in hurt feelings because A does not have B's belief therefore A has made B wrong, and most human beings find it very hard to be wrong in the eyes of another. You can't trust that B can you!
The trouble is that no matter how hard we all try to communicate at the moment there are still upsets. One reason for this is that we are only now emerging from the Age of Pisces, the Age of Conflict, and it could take humanity another decade or seventy (thousand) to lose our defensiveness and move to a place where we don't need to be entitled to our opinion because the global opinion is kindness and respect for other living beings manifested by 'what can I do to help and support you?'
I always believe that a blog such as this, which points out a problem, should end with positive ideas for a resolution of that problem, but I will admit that I'm beaten.
I try very hard to communicate clearly and kindly but still somehow have misunderstandings. I bite my tongue as hard as I can when I see unkindness, assumptions or prejudice of any kind, but find it hard to remain silent when I know beyond a shadow of doubt that humanity needs to change and that people have to start feeling that truth and every moment that we don't someone else gets hurt.
I started a page on Facebook called The Campaign for Kindness (DebHKindnessSpace) where I try to promote as much kindness and understanding as I can, for the simple reason that it is the only way forwards that I can see. If our only creed, religion, nationality or belief was kindness then hurting each other would have to stop and stop now.
It won't happen in my lifetime of that I'm sure, but I sincerely believe that if we don't start trying to change things now then the end result will move further and further away. When you consider how long amazing and kind people such as Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and so on have been trying to change things and how relatively stuck we all still are, you will realise that urgent action is required now to turn this into a world that we want our children to live in.
I wish I could offer a solution but I can't. I can only suggest two things:
- That we bring kindness to the forefront of our minds and do our utmost to be kind as often as we can.
- That we do our utmost to lose the fear of being wrong.
We won't succeed because we're the forerunners of the New World Age, the Age of Aquarius, the Age of the Higher Mind, but as forerunners we can get started and try to make this world a better place for future generations.
How many more people have to die in wars or have their feelings shattered for life before we realise that we don't need to be right we only need to be fearlessly kind?
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