Another Message From Tom Robbins

“How can one person be more real than any other? Well some people do hide, and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan Pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won’t talk to rednecks, or if they are rednecks won’t talk to intellectuals, people who’re afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar’s Hell. Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking when it’s mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren’t afraid to look, and won’t turn tail should they find it-and if they never do, they’ll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earths sweet gas.”

Tom Robbins - Still Life With Woodpecker

When I read that last night, it resonated in my soul. I had to share it with you, because I truly believe it. I believe that some people are seekers, and some people are hiders. Some people need to think for themselves, and some want others to do their thinking for them.

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One of the many things we can be thankful for in this life is the fact that most states are only temporary. As we face economic hardship, loss of jobs and financial security it is a good thing to remember. Nothing lasts forever, not even this.

Having suffered from severe bouts of depression for most of my life, that depression only lifted when I was able to accept this as fact. We are faced with bad days, bad months, bad years, but they always pass. If we can just wait it out brighter days will return again.

We are always in a process of growth and change, while much of our growth and personality development occurs during childhood, we never stop growing. Thank goodness for that. We never seem to want to hear that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, not while we are in the process.

It is only after the hard times have passed that we can look back and appreciate how much growth took place, how many lessons we learned along the way. It seems hindsight gives us a perspective we were unable to achieve otherwise.

Like most lessons in life, I learned this one the hard way. It isn’t easy to find something good about bad things in our past but it really is there. Sometimes it is a simple as knowing that we would not be the person we are today without the events of yesterday.

A huge contributor to my own depression was the feeling of being trapped in a situation with no way out, of having no choice in the matter. It wasn’t until I began keeping a regular journal and re-reading it a few times a year that I finally saw those patterns, and was able to accept them.

Bad times come, and sometimes it feels like things have always been that bad, which lead me to the conclusion that they would always remain that way. Who wouldn’t be depressed when they look at their life as a series of bad events, with a few good things in between.

It not only leads to depression, but eventually bitterness sets in as well. Wallowing in bitterness is a horrible way to spend a life. Even the good times are spent waiting for the next bad thing to happen. It is an absolute waste of the life when you look at the big picture.

Everything in life is temporary, even life itself. So why spend your today worrying about what will happen tomorrow? If it never happens you have wasted valuable time worrying needlessly, if it does you have to turn around and worry twice.

live for today, but never make the mistake of believing that today's circumstances are permanent, as Miss Scarlett O’Hara noted... Tomorrow is another day.

It is amazing how many factors go into communication, not just the words spoken, or even how they are spoken, but the lenses we each view those words through. Some of us are sensitive to certain words or concepts, but other people don’t even give those words a second thought.

Communication is difficult at best. My husband and I are both native English speakers, we speak no other languages, so we should be able to understand each other fairly well. Yet most of our disagreements stem from a simple miscommunication of ideas.

It is usually something as simple as how we each define a word. We come from different families, in different states, with different religious backgrounds. He comes from a family of males, I come from a family of females. What I consider important, he considers irrelevant, and the other way around.

Some of my online friends are fluent in English, some are just learning and many lie in between. Even native English speakers sometimes have difficulty understanding me because my use of the language tends to be flowery. I use words in unorthodox ways, and that can make it very difficult to communicate with a non-native English speaker.

I love words, and I love to use them but I don’t always realize that not everyone shares my fascination with the English language, or my habits of weaving words together in new ways. It does make me difficult to understand at times.

There are always cultural differences to consider as well. For instance in my background it is considered rude not to look at someone when they are speaking. Yet I spent part of my life just off of the Navajo reservation. To the Navajo, looking at a person while they are speaking is often considered rude, a sign of mistrust. Both parties believing the other to be rude could lead to some very awkward conversations indeed.

So many individual factors come into play, how you feel about another person or how they feel about you can taint attempts at communication from the start. If you feel defensive, it is easy to find something to defend against. If you regard them highly, is is easier to accept their words as fact without a need for evidence.

The funny thing is, communication seems so simple. Even animals can do it, a two year old child has the capabilities, but as adults we struggle with it. Perhaps we figure we have been communicating for so long that it is now just instinct.

Yet how often do we find ourselves explaining what we really meant when we said... ???

Communication is an exchange, it requires that two or more people be willing to observe the rules of positive communication, to be willing to understand and accept the differences between the parties involved and how those differences might affect the message being exchanged.

To communicate effectively you must take all of these things into account, and be clear about your goal. If it is just getting your message across to others, then it is not communication. You can do that by yourself.

It also involves being alert to the possibilities of misunderstandings and a willingness to work toward correcting them on both parts.

Communication is a relationship and relationships worth having always take work.