good advice

.
so, i am one of those people who has a bit of a hard time with good advice, it makes me defensive. there is a reason the universe keeps hitting me with cars after all.

anyway you know how sometimes you hear something on tv or someone says something to you or you read something and immediately you're like "oh that's ridiculous, that's the silliest thing i've ever heard" and then you forget about it.

look at me saying 'you' when i'm talking about myself again.

often after i dismiss that kind of advice it comes back to haunt me in the days and weeks that follow but sometimes? sometimes it can take years. i know this because it recently happened.

way back when princess valium and i were watching 'joan of arcadia' together. i'm not going to go into a big long rant about all the ways that that show rocked and how shitty it was for cbs to cancel it because that's not the point of this post. but i could.

anyway if you've never seen the show it's about a teenage girl who starts having encounters with god. since neither PV nor i are religious you should get that this was a freaking excellent show. so.

at one point god and joan are discussing and she's being bitchy about something and makes some sort of nasty crack about whomever they're discussing and god chastises her for it. and she's all 'but i wasn't going to DO anything' and he's all "even our thoughts have power joan" and PV and i were all "whatfuckingever, thinking nasty thoughts doesn't hurt anyone" and on we went with the show.

well i've had cause recently to revisit the discussion.

i don't really know how i started thinking about this kind of stuff i think it was more of a dawning awareness thingy. i started to notice that whenever i ranted at other drivers on the road
"you fucking moron get some eyes"
"move your ass you fucker!"
"good christ who taught you to drive"
"motherfucker!" (hi mom :)
"man some people should be required to go to driving school and learn to take other drivers into consideration before they pull out into eighty kilometer per hour traffic doing TEN!!! in FRONT OF MY BUMPER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
"thanks for cutting me off asswipe"
"GET OFF MY ASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!"
"man some people are too stupid to walk"
"hey look another moron trying to commit suicide with my car!"
that i was the one feeling bad afterward. i'd be all angry and my heart would be racing and i would be upset and snippy for a while afterward.

i used to think that ranting at other drivers allowed me to let off steam and just move on. but i'm starting to think that it's not true.

i'm starting to grok that god's point (it is VERY strange to discuss what god said let me tell you) was not that those thoughts had the power to hurt others but instead that they have the power to hurt ourselves.

that somehow we become less than we could be when we walk around thinking not nice things about other people.

that these thoughts really do have power. just not the power that i thought they meant. it's true that they don't *do* anything to anyone outside of yourself... and it's true that you aren't hurting anyone else when you do it. what i didn't think about was whether or not i was hurting myself.

i mean i've known for years that the nasty gossip circle is a bad bad thing and should be broken or avoided at all costs. i found myself participating in one of those several years ago and afterwards when i thought of the vitriol i had spewed about a woman who wasn't there... when i noticed the encouragement i had given the other gossips in the circle... when i thought of my motto regarding never saying things behind people's backs that i wouldn't say to their face?

i was aghast at my own behaviour.

stunned that i would do to someone else what had been done to me so effectively through my years of schooling. no dudes, stunned.

i was so hurt for so long by the things that people said about me behind my back that to find myself inflicting that sort of thing on someone else? i was fully horrified. and a little baffled in fact. the same kind of baffled i am when i see someone who has fled persecution and landed in canada (you know, one of the heavens on earth) who then turns around and speaks badly of others or persecutes people for their differences.

why? i mean when you're a persecuted person, be it at school or in your life or most especially in some of the super scary places in the world? why on earth would you turn around and inflict that same bullshit on someone else?

you *know* how it feels don't you? you've felt the wounds that fester and don't heal well? the ones you see every time you hear the voices that step on your soul? you know, the voices the shitty people put in your head?

how can you do that to someone else?

i can kind of understand it, when someone shits on me i'm slightly more likely to shit on someone else that day and i'm definetely more likely to be a little cranky. but i fight it as hard as i can. hell i'm nice to people that by all rights i should be cursing from the rooftops.

anyway, external nasty thoughts are easy to understand. everyone gets that it's not nice to say nasty things. that it's not nice to 'get revenge' or spread gossip. [i recognize that there are two kinds of gossip. when you tell your neighbour that your other neighbour just lost their son it's so the other neighbour won't say 'hey how's your son?' the next time he sees said neighbour. there is nothing malicious in that. but when the discussion continues and delves into the bad parenting the kid got and how he was lost for years and everyone was just expecting this and and and? that shit is nasty.]

it's the internal hateful thoughts and their effect on your self that i'm thinking about right now.

do you think the character called god was right? does what you think have power whether you act on it or not? am i just a crazy granola eating hippie chick with weird ideas?

or maybe, just maybe, should we all try a little harder not to think the nasty stuff?
.

ps sorry i didn't blog since last thursday, it's been a crazy few days...