"Jesus > Religion" Spoken Word

found on An Aspiring Yogi in the West, thanks again my one-sided friend.

Imogen Heap, Filmed in Hangzhou

noticed on An Aspiring Yogi in the West's blog. A blog I have a one-sided friendship with.

counting blessings

my gosh, it has been so long since I've written, that I accidentally read a bit.

It is inspiring, to some extent, to think of all the things that I have now, and all the ways that I have come, however normal or expected they may be,

because there was a time when I did not have even them.

I had forgotten what I'd come through.

merge the looking-glass

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

There was a time when I felt established in my concept of the world and of God, even if other aspects of my life were trying.
My concept of God was not unlike as a parent, encouraging me to grow and become spiritually mature and responsible, to stand on my own and no longer need parenting.
This concept began to erode and eventually decentralize, showering every aspect of the universe in a dazzling brilliance, as if to illustrate the riddle: Godisnowhere.
I described it to a friend once as though a long-time pen pal had written one final letter saying that I would no longer be receiving letters from them this way, and that they were not who I thought they were. I didn't know where to look after that.

This corresponded with series of other life-events that wrought general shattering of plane of my life. When I stand on one shard, I feel I have access to the life and memories connected to that shard, but not to memories or self from the other. It feels like it began the morning I was pushed through the ice into cold water and awoke, submerged in my lower bunk, disoriented, homesick for the first time in my life, and trapped, unable to go home. My room was an echo-chamber into which rocks were daily thrown. I first swam, then crawled out and learned to walk again over a period of years. I told myself that I could stay with things because if it ever became /that bad/, I was young. I could restart my life, and still live a relatively long time. In some ways I hadn't considered though, I had already started over, and shouldn't be too hard on myself for only being 5 years old. In the times I could not walk, I learned by being suspended from the mirror of the sky.

I still sensed within me an understanding and desire to know God's will and do it, and a trust that it would be the best way to live, but also a fear that God would call on me to give too much. But, in my difficult times, had not there been provision? Had it really been too much? ...it still feels difficult to volunteer for, although volunteering still seems like the correct choice. I feel conflicted, and I sometimes fear the voice in the sky, though I know that my pain is not from God, and instead, there was provision.

I am reminded the example of a child staying with a kind aunt while his mother is in the hospital giving birth to a baby brother. The aunt is kind, but the child cannot help but link her to the absence of his mother and may resent it.

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

I perceived myself two selves - one contained within me, and the other without. One, the concave reflection beneath the mirror of the sky, and the other spread broad and convex. One side of me, internal. The other side, more external. I perceived that my interior me feared the other, which also feared. A fear of harming, a fear of pain; a fear of abandonment, a fear of insufficiency, and both reflections retreating sadly from one another.

I perceived that these two aspects of me were interchangeable. And both feared. They might as well be one another. I perceived that they did not desire to fear, and that they should be friends. And they were. Reunited, I felt capable and confident in myself and in approaching others.

They were comfortable with one another for several days, until there was a test. I did not succeed, and instead caved and emptied myself like a ship trying to stay afloat, and failed to hold my sense of person, sense of limits of responsibility, and regard my sense of appeasement. I emerged from the scenario, but not with anything of value. I failed to keep from abandoning myself, and I do not know how to ask the reflections to trust again, especially when I am not capable of assuring their safety. They desire to trust me to manage, but I give them no evidence.

Trust-building exercise: Impossible Questions

I was recently reading the following from an old article on Joel on Software about interviewing software engineers, when I came to his typical interviewing process:


Introduction
Question about recent project candidate worked on
Impossible Question
C Function
Are you satisfied?
Design Question
The Challenge
Do you have any questions?


I noted the 'Impossible Question' nested there in the middle and immediately thought that perhaps he was giving an example of a bad interviewing process. But no, it was his own method (...at the time. He now has an updated post on interviewing: GuerrillaInterviewing3)

Here is his description of the way he (at that time) approached the 'Impossible Question':


*****
OK, the third thing on that list is the impossible question. This is fun. The idea is to ask a question that they have no possible way of answering, just to see how they handle it. "How many optometrists are there in Seattle?" "How many tons does the Washington Monument weigh?" "How many gas stations are in Los Angeles?" "How many piano tuners are there in New York?"

Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap into trying to figure out some back-of-the-envelope answer.
*****


I stopped after reading this to analyze the mingling feelings of dread, numbness, and envy that I was feeling, surprised since this was an informative article by a knowledgeable person. Why should I be anything other than interested and happy to learn from it?

I realized that I felt a bit put-off by the section: "Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap..."

I feel that I am a smart person, but would not have responded to the Impossible Question that way at all. I think that perhaps a better adjective than 'Smart' would be 'Confident', 'Experienced-with-interviews', or even better:'Trusting' ... because my first emotional response upon imagining being asked the examples of 'Impossible Questions' was not a leap into an enthusiastic challenge (that contained too much variability to have any hope of being accurate in), but to think to myself, You don't really want to hire me, do you?

It occurred to me that my past ... 5? 8? Years of significant human interaction since leaving home has carried strong elements of feeling that if I am not careful, people will set me up, take advantage of my goodwill or whatever else they want from me for their own sake, and discard me for not fulfilling impossible (usually unspoken) demands if they have the chance. At least being asked an 'Impossible Question' gives me a chance to realize what game is being played and exit by accepting the better situation of being discarded sooner than later. If I really want something out of a situation, and can play the game long enough, then it can work. If there's not something I want so much, then Ok, we both know what's going on. I'll be going now.

It occurs to me that in good situations, this sets me up to feel always on edge, always needing to cross my t's and dot my i's and use exactly correct punctuation. It has kept the monsters from leaping out of the shadows and devouring me so far, so I keep doing it. Even when it doesn't work, I keep doing it because it seems like the best way to keep the monsters down. Every now and then, I don't see everything through to the last iota, partly because I may want to assert the ability to assess that it's not always worth it, and perhaps also to give someone a chance to discard me for not being perfect, although, in a situation where I don't have to feel like I should have been expected to be perfect.

This kind of response may be preventing me from reaching for speculative challenges. How many piano tuners are there in Seattle? I think it would be completely absurd to try to actually estimate that with any kind of confidence. However, thinking about it might be interesting in that the attempt to come up with the most reasonably possible estimate might produce some interesting thoughts or connections as side-effects. It can be fun to wonder about something together as long as no one is tricked into thinking they are actually right.

It was good of this article to show me this conflict in ways that I am vs. ways that I can be, and would like to be. I've been needing things like this.