COMPETITION/ EXPECTATIONS.

COMPETITION/ EXPECTATIONS. 13th July 2008.

I am in no place where competition is expected, what I do has nobody competing with me, how lucky, as I do not have to fulfil expectations of any kind outside myself, and as they say you are your own best critic, and that can be hard enough. 

I think most people, due to the educational system coupled with parents upbringing find themselves in constant competition with all and everything. Maybe that is what prompted my Grandfather, John Tempest Harvey to be as he was; and to take an extreme personality from my Mother's side of the family, Aunt Marjorie, both of these people had to make the people around them understand that what they said was right! No give, just stubborn rightness.

Very uncomfortable when nearly every utterance is weighed and calculated for its rightness and probably for that matter, contradicted in order to boost their statements. Where is justice in that? Victorian children, who should be seen and not heard, learnt how their parents dominated all, only too late in life did they realise that their parents were, perhaps in some cases less intelligent than themselves and ignorant of the finer qualities of thought.  

And so the ball rolls on squashing the very small facets of intelligent understanding latent in all of us. Fy! Fy! (strong words in N.) How lovely it would have been to have been asked what we thought, however tiny our knowledge of the world and its vicissitudes, because that would have been the blank page that would have become a rich painting in words, or colours or whatever facet of creative thought the individual had burning inside them, ready to express.

Today we do ask children and listen to what they have to say, but in my father's day there was a strict hierarchy of dominance by the adults. True my Grandfather had the Bible and dictionary at the dinner table, great discussions went on I hear, but who dominated and impressed!? I heard my mother say:"What he said was always right." That gave me a clue as to why my parents had such heated arguments about politics, which went on until we children were blue-in-the-face.

Now I have no children and wonder what they would have turned out to be. I would not have had the mind I have today if I had had them when younger, although I like to think that they would have had much more to say in all that was talked about and enjoyed together. That's assuming they were at all like myself; as I look at other children in their teens today I see that their minds are stronger than their parents - it is perhaps they who dominate, still brought up in a world of intense competition and that is a swing of the scales instead of working together for a better understanding of what is worth.

"Could do better if she tried" my report from school. I didn't want to try for those stuck up teachers who knew it all and reigned over us brats, they were not what I wanted to become - no never. This has made me feel imprisoned in an uninspiring web of grey madness, no wonder I dreamt I could fly (very enjoyable) but I was trying to fly from it all to a freer world of my own expression where I could be inspired to do something wonderful and fulfilling, surprise myself and prove that I had a little something that was of genuine quality to give the world, or the individual friend or just to nature and its direct experience with no conditions - no expectations - no dominating presences other than the great wonder of why we exist at all.

Everyone has done it before me, and probably better than myself, but it is with finding out who one is oneself, that makes one feel a part of the whole and can enjoy communication with others in the qualities which make life worth living.