When my son was two, he was hit in the face by a beach swing in Thailand and lifted clean off the ground, resulting in a deep (though thankfully small) cut just underneath his right eye. Armed with steri-strips, cleansing alcohol and Arnica, I cleaned him up, stuck him back together and smothered him with kisses, cuddles and boob!
Even with all my loving care he still looked like he’d been 10 rounds in a MMA ring and of course garnered lots of sympathy and questions from all sorts of strangers.
One Thai man came up super close to me, whilst I was carrying my son, touched his face and said something along the lines of: ‘You are very lucky, he could be blind, you need to be more careful, so close to his eye, he could have lost his eye….’ Well, you can imagine!
This was nearly five years ago and yet what that man said came to me just last week in a moment of clarity and understanding. I replayed it in my head and a monumental epiphany smacked me hard in the solar plexus.
This man was MY other voice.
The tsunami of ‘other’ voices swiftly followed; memories, reactions, hurtful & potent words or comments. All those people I have met so far along my path, whose words felt tough to integrate (good & bad), they were all just different parts of my consciousness being expressed to me loud and clear.
When that Thai man spoke to me that day, my reaction was defence. I smiled, nodded and moved quickly away; I didn’t want to hear and more importantly I didn’t want to consider that possibility that we just so nearly missed. But he was expressing my deepest fears, he was mirroring back to me the heart-stopping moment when I saw my son’s injury and all that could have been. By rejecting it, it has slept silently in the recesses of my mind to pop up now and again in moments of anxiety or fretfulness.
Now I can look at it from another angle; I can embrace it, acknowledge it, own it.
And with that comes the potential to own all of what triggers me in another’s reaction to me. When I rail against, I am only fighting myself. We are all one consciousness; one global thought with layers upon layers of truths and lies and hopes and fears.
With that solar plexus punch I realised how deeply we are all truly connected. ‘We Are One’ is not trite patter but rich and nuanced and soulful.
Imagine if each and every time we felt that defence or trigger in hearing another perspective, we reached inside and owned it as a part of us. We do not have to live it, act it or be it, but simply acknowledge that within us all we hold the infinite potentials, the full spectrum of human nature. Within us is the possibility of our worst and best selves, by embodying that we get to choose which ones to be.