Tackle Tuesday – September 29, 2014

Tackle Tuesday is a weekly post dedicated to “The Song of the 18-ity’s” as compiled by Sri Sivananda.  I’ve just discovered that I’ve missed two as today another was published, so I will write for all three “ity’s” I missed.

The first was veracity:

 

Veracity painting by Robert Ginder 2007

 

 

Swami Sivananda speaks here of veracity:  “about reliability and credibility. Don’t overreact. Don’t turn the facts. Say the truth, don’t talk un-truth. Stay true to yourself. How credible are you, if you say this and do something else?”  Here is Chèvrefeuille’s haiku example:

keeping promises
after the long cold winter
spring will come again

© Chèvrefeuille

 

For this “ity” I could only come up with a negative senryu.  In fact often instead of finding a way of being true to myself and saying no when in fact I don’t want to do something, I find I say yes.  The end result is that I’m unhappy and do the task unwillingly feeling sorry for myself.  So the best thing to learn is saying what I really feel, nicely but firmly.

tired and depressed
too often saying – yes
for peace and quiet

© G.s.k. ’14

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The second “ity” is equanimity:

“Be calm. Bear insult patiently. Bear injury, suffering, failures and disrespect calmly. Do not be elated by praise, pleasure, success and honor. Look upon both with equal vision. Behave alike towards friends and foes. Never let anything disturb your inner peace.”

It can often happen that someone becomes insulting or impatient … or just be what we call a jerk.  It’s not always easy to keep that inner harmony and peace in the face of attack.  I admit that I’m often very patient and many people compliment on this which of course is wonderful … but on the other hand, sometimes that patience in the long run can have a price, especially if I don’t make room for my self esteem … and so anger bubbles and I let loose with the anger.  In order to learn how to respect myself I first had to learn anger … and how to cope with my anger.

There’s another aspect.  I am the eldest child (seems funny to say that at 63) in my family.  I was often given responsiblity for my siblings and my parents often praised my school work, art work etc. I was an overachiever at a young age.  The consequences of this was also that I often felt terrible if I wasn’t able to reach a goal, get that A or just generally excel and alas, receive those lovely compliments that success brought me.  When I didn’t achieve success, I felt like my whole world was going to cave in, like I was totally worthless.  I had no inner harmony or peace. So, I had to learn humility and limits but most of all humor.  The capacity of laughing at myself and learning to do things because I enjoyed them, not for the compliments.

painting a cat
capturing shadows and light
ah – painting a flower

© G.s.k. ’14

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The third “ity” is fixity :

“fixity” means: “Taking little structured steps to reach your goal!”

One of the things I always wanted to do was to write and paint.  Write stories, poetry, children’s books and maybe illustrating them myself.  In school I studied creative writing and I studied art.  Then I got married, had children, travelled the world broke-up with my first husband – remarried formed a second family and finally settled down in Trentino.  In all those years I wrote very little and figured that I probably never would do more than leave my notebooks to my son, who might like to read them.

Then the era of the computer came.  I learnt to use the computer in many ways and then write and save my written work on hard disk,  I entered a woman’s writing competitions and finally began to blog.  This blog has been growing over the last year and a half.  It’s here where I finally began to work towards that vague childhood goal of becoming a writer.  Each day and experience and book, film or job I’ve done has made me the person I am right here and now. Each was a step … maybe not always structured though 🙂

a step at a time
living life to the fullest
creating me

© G.s.k. ’14

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Written for Carpe Diem Tackle Tuesday (September 16, 23 and 29)