🕊️ The end of hostility
Language gives you the ability to think and it shapes the way you think. (Oliver Sacks explains this in Seeing Voices.) In a very significant way, your vocabulary determines your thoughts.
I’ve been noticing for a few years that English is stuffed with metaphors of violence. I’m convinced that these metaphors are counterproductive when it comes to personal growth. We combat our cognitive biases. We smash our goals. We drag ourselves out of bed. We whip ourselves into shape.
These are the words and ideas that our culture gives us. Going to war against ourselves is one of the dominant mental frameworks for growth.
Violence doesn’t work in healthy relationships, in raising kids, in working with animals. Why should it work to help my own growth?
I don’t want to be at war with myself. I want to be a whole, integrated person – all of me working together to be the best me I can. I have declared an end of hostilities within me. I’m no longer at war with myself. I have gotten rid of the violent metaphors for my growth. I’m working on replacing them with more useful ways of thinking.
Today’s song is not the music you’ve come to expect from me. Jordan shared it in a comment yesterday and I thought it was too good to not pass it on.
Grow slowly
Jeff
I think, therefore I am. I am learning not to think when unnecessary. I began the discipline 4 years ago while rving. Today, I chose not to think at a meeting I was in. The realtor left to copy a page. I could have spent time thinking about the topics we discussed. But I seized the opportunity to pause, breathe in, blow out, let energy calm down. In those 2 minutes, I was rested. Thinking or resting? You get to choose!
Maybe you reshared this one in a treepeat so forgive me if I’m saying this again but Steven Pressfield got me out of a creative funk… until he didn’t…When the war ethos stopped working. (Thankfully Liz Gilbert was there to catch me.) Anyway, I love that Jordan commented with her tune, such a perfect set of lyrics to listen to this morning after coming home from an art show weekend.