The Scarecrow
My Outdated Opinions and What I Did With Them
Hello Dear Reader,
Today, I’ve decided to share about a crossroads I came to in my life. There’s many crossroads a human could face in life, and indeed I’ve faced a few, but this one was something I’d never expected to go through. It’s a sort of Ebenezer Scrooge epiphany… just not overnight, and with less ghosts.
So here goes: in my recent years, through a wild series of extremely cathartic and pivotal events (many related to the pressures of the pandemic), I came up against a lot of resistance in myself that was blocking me from living a sovereign and free-feeling lifestyle. When I went looking for the cause of this, what I came to face-to-face with was the fact that many of the opinions I found myself carrying through my adult life, were -let’s just say- outdated, and creating the strife in which I was suffering. Now, whether those opinions were ever ‘in-date’, that can be a conversation for a different day. But sufficed to say, after becoming aware of this, it naturally followed that I found many of my ideas about life were based on these suspect opinions, and all contributing to the debilitating resistance I was experiencing. Fast-forward through a lot of procrastination and months of bullshit justification, this brought me to a choice; I could either ignore this new information or I could do something about it.
Well, I (eventually) chose to do something about it, and went about the tedious, vexing, and completely eviscerating work of personally examining and vetting my held ideas and the opinions they were based upon, and thereafter severing and extricating myself from this expired, dubious junk. As you can imagine, at ~40 years old, what I found when I first began inquiring into my ideas and opinions could be thought of metaphorically as a big, colossal, tangled knot. A massive ball of ostensible impossibility. But as I began to gradually unravel it, I soon came upon thick cables making up the bulk of this thing. Those cables were made of ropes, which were made of cords, which were made of strings, which were made of threads... all winding around each other. What a mess! Yet, after some frustrating, extensive and exhausting effort, I was able to follow a thread back to its origin. It took some doing, but once I’d got one thread loose, I knew it was possible. From there, with a lot of podcast insight, I slowly developed a quasi-technique that worked for me (thank you journal) and pretty soon this knot was unravelling fast. At times, it seemed too fast. My world was changing, coming undone.
Well, to cut to the crossroad, to my surprise (and personal embarrassment), I found that many and most of the opinions that had shaped my thinking were based on such random and seemingly trivial childhood or teenage nonsense. Like, one day, some person in Grade 5 who I so desperately wanted to like me said “XYZ”, and I was like, “Yup, XYZ for life, Bro!”, and that was it. As if the next day, someone else had said “ABC” and I was like, “Ummm no! XYZ dude! You know, I don’t get you ABCers… you ABCers are all the same. I just don’t think I can hang out with you until you give up ABC and come on over and join us XYZers”. Sounds nuts. Is nuts. But it was true. From there, it’s a lot of confirmation bias, echo chambers and forming alliances with anyone who was down with XYZ.
After confronting these facts about myself, I can honestly tell you that is was disconcerting and life-altering, to say the least. I felt like a sham of a human being, and found myself facing this massive, empty and desolate precipice where all my old opinions had once been. As disheartening as that was, what drew my interest was watching how every time I evacuated that vacuum-space of my life’s expired opinions, it was only a matter of hours or days (sometimes minutes) before they would sneak back in and nestle back into their former territories. It makes sense, right? They were the literal thought pathways of my brain, the routes my thoughts knew and wanted to take. They were oddly comfortable.
Well, from there it took an astounding amount of perseverance, discernment and vigilance to keep that space from filling up with all that old junk. But something helpful I discovered in keeping the expired stuff out, was to fill the empty space with new ideas. Now, not only did this work quite well at holding the space off from my former opinions, but it also incepted a fascination with metaphysical space; like some form of energy needs to fill a space, and we need to choose what it will be or it will be filled arbitrarily by other forces. Anyway, before I digress, I’d just like to add a caveat; I found it important to keep the new ideas fluid, otherwise I could stumble into a similar thought-trap. I guess I truly think of my opinions not as expired, but as liquidated.
OK, all that said, I’ll wrap this up by saying that I’m not particularly proud of this discovery, given its implications about how I’d been living my life up to that point. I mean, if that’s how I went about forming my opinions and ideas, who even was I then? What did I stand for? Was there anything I really cared about, truly? Anyway, those questions are indeed a quandary, but something I’ll explore in future posts. For now, I can say that I’m proud of myself for the changes I undertook and for the progress I’ve made getting in touch with, and clear on, who I really am, what I stand for, and what matters to me, without any strings attached. And the resistance that was holding me back in so many areas of my life? Gone! It evaporated somewhere along the way. Transmuted into a healthy sense of worthiness, respect and compassion for my fellow humans, and a sovereign sense of my own place in the world
It seems so obvious that we should always choose our opinions carefully, with consideration and discernment, but that’s just not how it is for all of us, it seems. And it can be so sneaky, pervasive. And happen to intelligent and impressable people alike. I’m proof of that. But I’m glad that when I came face to face with this ugly monster in my closet, that, rather than cozying up with that beast in the darkness, I elected to stare him in the face, and turn toward a new light. What I did was (and is still) one of the hardest things I ever did in my life, and such an arduous process, but the results honestly make my life better everyday.
This past fall, I wrote a poem that was inspired about this earlier experience. I hope you like it, and I’d love to here from you in the comments.
The Scarecrow
Chameleon trees
that shed themselves
with the good help
of the autumn wind
As the last two seasons
flutter off
I hear them
They tell me to let go
To let the leaves of
my own life
fall away
Tell me I may
cast my opinions away
like those leaves,
as I hunker down into
my ancient winter roots
The teacher trees
and their wispy children,
they tell me so
And show me
I love those crispy,
colourful flakes
strewn on the wilting grass
as I should love my opinions
all asunder at my feet
Crows call out
Black wisdom
from black beaks
When I’ve stripped
enough, murders may
alight
on my bare branches
Haunting my vicinity
all on behalf
of my better nature
And I should listen
It’s not those ghosts
that scare me,
but my own
To be possessed
by what fell dead
to the ground
Zombie opinions
clambering and clawing
at my trunk
Brains, brains, brains
My very thoughts
consumed by the dead
You don’t see leaves
scaling their sires
for yet another go
They lay humbly
in the noble grass
waiting for the wind
to blow them on
to other, unknown fates
The leaf and the tree,
they care not
They let what’s dead
move on,
go on
I could be the watcher
and knower
of all this
But instead,
I’m a scarecrow,
hanged from such loyal,
empty branches
Rustling when the
wind blows me
Heavy
with every opinion
I ever shed,
here in my musty,
stuffed body
reeking of the fall,
dangling with the weight
of my old expired seasons
Stretched and burdened
Identifying as leaves
when I was born a tree
Jefferdman
10/27/23
Just like this earth changes season by season, it’s OK for the opinions we hold in life to be shed and blow away, so they may grow fresh and new, and not quite the same. Hopefully even better than before.
It’s our trauma that shapes us, and our maturity to face that trauma that heals us. .. to make us more than the leaves on the trees that are easily blown with the wind. To be grounded and centered, to face the murder of crows and not be shaken.. that my friend, is true victory. 💕❤️😘
Jeff, this is an incredible post. I'm going to try to distill my responses, but I have a feeling in me like I could write volumes about what you've just written. At the very least I feel lucky to have come across you when I did.
1. Baudelaire (well aren't I fancy) said, "Always be a poet, even in prose." Your poethood is very clear in your prose, and in your poetry as well of course.
2. Your description and analysis of the structure of ideas in your own mind, using the recursive threads analogy, is absolutely brilliant.
3. The way you're able to withhold the specific nature of your (prior) opinions, and literally use variables to represent them, is quite interesting. You have a penchant for thinking of ideas and energies in a space outside of 4D spacetime. Perhaps it's an information space of some kind, but I agree that it's a useful way to think about life, and conscious awareness.
4. Above all, your ability and courage to change as a human being is so very admirable. I believe in reincarnation, in the sense that each of us is reborn every moment, never quite the same. To ride with this, rather than fight with it, and to be willing to hold on tight for life's extra intense twists and turns, such as shedding major parts of your opinion-identity...I think you are a rare type, and you have a lot to teach. Thank you for blessing us with your writing.