How The Outside World Can Help Us Understand Our Inside One
Our minds can be scary places, and that is OK. It is human nature for people to seek out control because of the relationship that control has with survival. Our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are phenomenal tools in helping us understand and gain control of the world around us, however they don’t provide much guidance on their own in our personal quests to understand our thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings are not tangible, and this adds the element of uncertainty into our lives. The internal struggle of trying to make certain of the uncertain is so real and so common, and in this piece I want to share how leaning in on the cues from the world around us can prove to be a tremendous lens into our own inner selves.
Weather is something that I like to link to the way we feel because it gives us the ability to make the intangible tangible. What we think and the way we feel is transient. In other words, it is ever changing and it always passes. Our sky is like that too. Rainstorms come and go, sunsets and sunrises have their moments of glory, and then on comes whatever is next. Speaking for myself, I really enjoy looking at the sky and observing what is up there throughout the day and night. On the other hand, I despised turning inward and acknowledging my thoughts and feelings because it reminded me how I had no control over them. Once I started comparing the sky with the way I feel, I stumbled upon an idea that forever changed the way I thought about my inner workings.
I realized I liked the sky so much because I was only observing it, nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t really do that when it came to my feelings . Instead, I would become them entirely. Think of it as instead of watching a rainstorm from the comfort of your own bed, as choosing to be stuck in one without an umbrella and no cover in sight. It is this idea of observation that allowed me to start understanding and appreciating my inner world like I did the outer one. We often do this thing to ourselves where when something unpleasant or traumatic happens, in our quest to control it, we create negative thought loops involving it that in turn allow it to stick around for longer than it should. This idea of “watching” the way you feel and what you think will give way to you gathering an understanding of yourself you didn’t once have. In short, being a meteorologist of the self is key to understanding and accepting the parts of us we never gave much thought to.
The argument “That is easier said than done” is a completely valid one; we usually know what we need to do but it is the “how” that entangles us. In trying to embody this way of thinking, think about what weather has brought upon us and think about what has happened following it. For an extreme instance, Hurricane Katrina was an absolutely catastrophic event that rocked the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Having done mission work in New Orleans, I can speak firsthand on how that storm forever changed New Orleans and the entire state of Louisiana. In all reality though, the actual hurricane lasted only six hours. Six hours was all it took for it to come and go. After the storm had passed and the flooding had subsided, the folks of New Orleans didn’t lament the situation they were in nor did they allow it to become their story. They started back from the ground up and rebuilt their city with love compassion for it and those within it. I could feel it as soon as I touched down at Louis Armstrong International Airport. You can feel the love in their music, their food, and their conversations with one another. They could have fallen victim to their circumstances and turned into a cold shell of what once was, but they didn’t. They had surrendered their control to the elements and shifted their focus onto what was within their power. This is the power of observation. Through observation comes understanding, through understanding comes acceptance, and through acceptance comes love. If you ever have to experience something like Hurricane Katrina in your personal life, learn from the people of New Orleans and apply the self-love that you so need and deserve.
As I come to a close, I urge readers to start associating the sky with how they feel and think. It may be uncomfortable at first, and it may not even make sense. Stick with it though and I am sure that at the other end lies a better understanding of the self and how it operates in the world it inhabits.
p.a. loo