Put on those contacts!
Contact lenses – high, high on the list of the modern wonders of technology for which I am most grateful for! 💕
I am shortsighted. I discovered it when I was 9 or so. I did get glasses, but would I wear them? No. I couldn’t stand the feeling of something heavy pressing down on my nose (this was the olden days, when lenses were only made of glass). I hated how they would always slip down and my face muscles would then tense up and work hard all day just to keep them in place. They lived on a shelf at home a lot more than in front of my eyes.
Fast-forward ten years, and my shortsight was so bad that I often found myself unconsciously just watching the pavement while I walked, as looking up around me had already become really uncomfortable because of how blurry everything was. While walking on the street, I also had the irrational fear that any moment I’ll go past someone I knew but fail to recognize and greet them, and thus offend them and lose their friendship forever. At school, I always sat in the first row, but even so could hardly make out the writing on the blackboard.
When I was 19, I got my official translator’s certificate. With the money I earned for translating my first book, I bought contact lenses!! 🎉✨ It was the olden days, and contacts and cleansing fluid cost a fortune in 90’s Romania. But, money well spent.
Oh, what a difference!! I will never forget the feeling of wearing them for the first time, and being able to see the individual leaves on the trees! It was amazing!!! 😃
I’m a grateful contact lens wearer at present too. They are wonderful. But I think you know that I’m telling you this story because I want to share with you another metaphor you can add to your arsenal to help you in the daily struggle to live out your Identity rather than let yourself be blocked or pushed around by expectations.
A big part of it is the quasi-constant battle being fought in our hearts and minds between these two: “what I want” vs. “what I really want”.
By “what I want” I mean the impulse and inclination I’m experiencing at the moment. What I feel like doing just now. (Most often, for me, what I feel like doing at any given moment is nothing.)
By “what I really want” I mean: my big picture, my Vision, my Desires. What I want my life to be all about. What I hope my existence will bring into being on this Earth, for my own and everyone’s benefit and enjoyment.
The fight between those two most probably feels different for people of different Tendencies, and maybe in the future we’ll take a closer look at the other three, but for an example just now here’s how I think it usually goes for Rebels – people who instinctively resist all expectations:
As Rebels, we are the most idealistic of the Tendencies, the most likely to have an artistic temperament, and the most likely to be Visionaries and Disruptors. We go Big. We are not satisfied with anything less than perfect Freedom and Beauty. And we couldn’t care less about the fences we need to break down to reach them. Thus, “what we really want”, what we yearn for, is usually lofty indeed.
However, like the Questioners, we are very unlikely to be moved by lacklustre, workaday, run of the mill, constricting and stifling type of stuff, such as conventions, rules and regulations, external expectations, artificial and arbitrary structures.
Like the Obligers, we are not only resentful of external impositions, but also (maybe for slightly different reasons) of the internal impositions. We often resent the stringency of our own bodily needs – such as for sleep, food, cleanliness and order.
We also, in unique Rebel style, resist our own expectations of making a success of ourselves, because subconsciously we are very much aware that being a success automatically brings with it the universal expectation of continuing to be a success! And rather than having that kind of expectation like a millstone round my neck I’d rather continue to fail. And then at least no-one will be expecting anything of me anymore – not even I. Yay, freedom! (Ermm… yeah. It’s a horrible freedom.)
Not to mention our very human, very understandable love of comfort. Yes. That’s a big one.
Ergo, the tug of war between our ideals and our sluggishness.
But why does sluggishness too often win?! What makes ‘what I want’ more attractive than ‘what I really want’?
I believe the answer is the fact that most of the time we are very aware of what we want, but cannot see clearly, or at all, what we really want.
We often are very shortsighted. We suffer from Rebel myopia. The other Tendencies have their own.
What we all need is contact lenses – to grab the far away, washed-out, confused blur of our ideals and Desires and bring them into sharp, crystal clear, gorgeous Technicolour focus!
Our Values are those contact lenses.
Do you know what your values are? If you are not sure yet, there are lists of words online if you need inspiration, to sift through and identify your own.
These questions might help:
What matters most to me?
What trait or quality would I like to see more of in the world, in other people, in myself?
What do I hope people will remember about me?
What makes my heart sing?
There are lots of other ideas and exercises out there about how to identify your values. All the time you spend thinking about this is time well spent.
Having our little list of most cherished Values at the forefront of our mind acts like a beautiful lens which brings into focus everything that ‘we really, really want’. It's a most needed counterweight to our propensity for continuing to sit in our myopic lukewarm comfort zone.
We tend to go for what we know and for what is in front of our noses. Like me with my uncorrected shortsight, we tend to miss out on the big life by keeping to the safe path, with our eyes fixed on the pavement. But our Values are the lenses that open up the horizon! They give us access to see hitherto unperceived avenues and heights, thus spurring on our desire to go, to explore, to reach places we didn’t even know existed, because we couldn’t see them before.
I warmly encourage you then to take the time to think and identify your Values. Maybe you’ll find three, maybe you’ll find ten, but do your best and keep the list on the short side, because it will be useful to you only inasmuch as it’s very easy to remember and bring back to your mind as often as possible.
Think often about the things that are most dear to you, search and research to understand them, know everything you can about them, make them big and rich and beautiful and luminous and present in your mind. They need to be able to utterly outshine and obliterate the cozy glow of the safe and comfortable puddle of ‘I don’t feel like doing that right now’. Nobody ever achieved anything worth us remembering and celebrating it by staying in their comfort zone. So let’s put on our contacts, get up from the puddle, and run towards that Beauty we can now clearly see.
