Filters, Circumstances & Reality

Your brain doesn’t “know” when mental-emotional habits, your 'reality filters' that once served a useful purpose have outlived their usefulness. That is for you, as a conscious being, to figure out. The filter of being silent and 'invisible' to avoid an angry parent is a great survival pattern when you’re three but it is an awful thing to still have that pattern controlling the way you relate to a boss or other authority figure. Keep repeating the childhood pattern and there goes your recognition, promotion and well deserved raises.

The ability to be an excellent “reader” of our parent's and teachers mental and emotional state is a good survival filter. The ability to notice and react to subtle behavioral cues may make you a great negotiator steer you away from con artists, and land you an excellent job in sales and marketing, but may also lead you to overreact and be overly suspicious in all of your relationships. It may prevent you from finding a mate or even keeping a long term job.

Less destructive filters can still be bothersome and limiting. Your filters may cause you to ignore constructive criticism, leaving you vulnerable to insincere flattery, and giving you a sense of superiority that will eventually lead to failure - think of all those contestants on American Idol who can't carry a tune in a bucket. Conversely, you may dismiss compliments and seek out criticism, causing you to choose partners who pick on your every mistake – just like your father did.

Your wiring, how your brain takes in and processes information, is the primary source of your thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Let me say that again.
Far more than your current circumstances, your brain’s wiring is responsible for your interpretation of events and your reactions.
Instead of wasting time and energy trying to change your circumstances, your time and effort are better spent learning how to amend the associations and beliefs that have become your filters. By doing this you will find yourself in new circumstances, with much greater speed and ease.

You may turn yourself inside out desperately trying to find the “right” job or the “right” mate or to put away enough money to “feel secure.” Yet all the while, what you say, the people you associate with, and what you do consistently produces results you don’t want. You get angry or confused, blaming fate, circumstance and other people rather than looking at the real source of your misery. To an objective observer the fact that you are the one hitting yourself in the head with a brick is obvious. The person responsible for your circumstances is - YOU.

The Heart of the Matter

He had worked at UPS for 14 years by the time he needed the heart transplant. Not just words, these. I want you to stop and take a breath and think about this for a few minutes as you read. Think of your own heart and give it your thanks. Now consider what it might be like to have your chest sliced open, each rib cut through, and to be peeled open, to actually die as your heart is removed and a different heart, one that came from another person, placed inside you.

Think about that moment when, like a modern day Frankenstein’s monster, electricity jolts that heart to life, resurrecting you. Talking with a new rhythm to every single cell of your body. It’s alive!

When he recovered, Kevin didn’t want to go back to UPS. He had an urge to go to culinary school and so he made it happen. As I type these words, Kevin is being featured on Bobby Flay’s famous grilling chow on the food channel. Only two sentences were used to tell his story as he was introduced, but there is was. After the transplant, after the career change he found out that the donor heart he’s received was the heart of a chef.

Bobby and Kevin started grilling fish as if having one’s life reinvented by the desires in a dead man’s heart happens every day, and I came in here, tears stinging my eyes, marveling at the magnificent mysteries of life and death.

What wonders are right here in our daily lives and offhand experiences that we overlook...words that we've heard a thousand times that we never stop to consider the experience those words represent?

I hope that at least for today, after you read this post, you may be insopired to slow down, contemplate the mysteries before you...the falling leaves, glittering starts and the heart within each of us.