Are You Willing To Mindfully Embrace Your Peculiarities?
I called my Mum the other day and I asked her if she ever tired of her own idiosyncrasies (that is, her own mode of behavior or her perculiarities). You know those funny little quirks and components of your personality that are so uniquely yours… that make you who you are but can also drive you nuts about yourself.
That’s when I knew it had all come together. I had learnt to acknowledge and accept my peculiarities. It was such a relief.
It’s taken a lot of work for me to be able to have a conversation like the one I did with my Mum. It required that I was willing to get far enough out of myself to really acknowledge that I too am a human being with all of my own peculiar parts. This is important, because with the busyness of the world that we are living in, it’s easy to get caught in momentum, rarely taking the time to pause and reflect. Unless we stop, we simply keep doing what we are doing… unaware of the patterns, habits or reasons as to why things are occurring & then reoccurring.
There are lots of moments in life where you can wonder ‘why does this keep happening?’
If we aren’t willing to look at our own contribution to the situations and circumstances we are in… well, guess, what? These situations and circumstances are going to keep happening.
The world isn’t going to give you a break per say.
It’s self-created time that gives us the opportunity to pause and take account of what’s happened, what’s happening and what we would like to have occur. This takes work. It takes patience and it takes a willingness to begin to embrace the fact that yes, you are human.
Because the issue is, as we start this process of beginning to acknowledge our own idiosyncrasies you can start to notice that there are things that you may not really like. That you have a few patterns (things you repeatedly do), reoccurring thoughts or beliefs that are creating behaviours that you’re not particularly fond of. Tricky, because as humans I think our initial reaction to this discovery is to react. Like touching a hot burner, you want to jerk your hand away and scream out in pain and frustration. Scoff at the burner later on and filled with a bit of resentment you wander about the rest of your day. The issue is, wandering around with a series of hot burners inside your own body and building resentment and frustration towards yourself most certainly is not going to help you in this process of embracing your humanness.
So taking a few moments to acknowledge that as humans we all have our chipped, broken and beautifully put back together parts.
Our strength and fragility so intimately tied together. We take time to recognize that our humanness – maybe you have to have the toilet paper a particular way, maybe you struggle to get the laundry done, you have to buy a particular kind of milk, you have doubt over who you are, you have a short temper, you find yourself to be bored, to be too busy…. the list goes on…
The thing is, if we aren’t willing to acknowledge your peculiarities, we have to understand that things are going to keep happening the same way they always have been… whether you’re okay with it or not.
If you’re willing to embrace your peculiarities though…
…this is where you have the opportunity to begin to work with yourself, versus working against yourself.
If you can see them, acknowledge them and recognize the role that they’ve had in your life – you can also begin to work alongside and manage them. You will be able to see that, although frustrating, they are also what makes you able to connect, relate and unify with the people around you… because we all have our oddities.
That’s why I was able to call up my Mum.
Without getting too attached to either one of our personality quirks we can begin to see them and acknowledge them as part of what makes up the whole. If we don’t like some of the things that we see – that’s okay (as I said, I called up my Mum to talk to her about how some of mine were driving me nuts), but instead of getting frustrated, upset and resentful – to work with them. I’m happy to announce that I’m human and within my humanness I am filled with many of my own unique personality traits that make me who I am. Just as I hope that you can start to see that you too are a human – you don’t need to be filtered or perfect to be accepted or loved… Instead to be embraced for all of your broken chipped and uniquely put together parts.
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