Day 076 – World as Reflection, me as Ultracrepidarian

Welcome to Day 76!  I love St Patrick’s day! Yes, I’m generalising based on the people I’ve met who are from Ireland.  In fact, Irish people have a great sense of humour. Perhaps it’s just the accent that makes me smile.  There’s something about the lilt. 

When it comes to matters Irish, I become an ultracrepidarian. Thank you, Susie Dent, for another beautiful word of the day.  The meaning of ultracrepidarian, Ms Dent describes it as a 19th-century word that “describes someone who loves holding forth on matters they know absolutely nothing about”.  It was fun to read the Twitter feed beneath the post as well.  Whenever Susie posts a word, there’s a bunch of responses pointing out the extreme examples of those fitting the description of the word of the day.

One of the things I discover midway through an ultracrepidarian moment is how much I don’t know on the subject.  In the past, this is where information got creative.  Why?  What was I afraid of?   Not knowing something?  A quote from, who I thought was Coco Chanel but actually was Maimonides, “teach your tongue to say I don’t know”.  (Added 9 Oct 2021, I’d misquoted.  In the meantime, here is a  Coco Chanel quote, “I only drink Champagne on two occasions, when I am in love and when I am not”.

Anyway, it reminds me of those times when accusing or complaining about someone else’s actions and realising I’m doing the same thing.  For example, during an argument with my sister, we often accused each other of being “selfish” when we were in our teens.  (Pst. Not just teens just sound better if I put some distance between me and some of my not-so-proud moments).  When we were accusing each other of being selfish, we were each being selfish.  We each wanted our way.  

If we didn’t mind, why were we discussing and trying to score points with the accusation?  Even knowing this is what we were doing, we failed to learn from using the word as a point scorer or barb in arguments.  Sometimes, it even worked 🙀.

This interaction and irony had me take a closer look at words I used in challenging situations.  It had me watching for moments when I was accusing others of something to see if I was guilty of it myself.   It became easier to spot in moments when irritated by someone or something.  On reflection, I began to see what innumerable wise sources have said; the world is us reflected ourselves.   It’s the whole “physician heal thyself” or “charity begins at home” thing.  This self-assessment stuff is a work in progress, but a LOT of tests keep confirming those sources.

What do you do when you discover you don’t like the aspect of yourself that irritates you?  You can try to deny it, ignore it, reinvent it, control it, suppress it, accept it, but best of all, you can “compassion it”.  Showing kindness to that aspect of yourself allows you to acknowledge it in others better as well as in yourself. 

For me, exercising compassion on an irritation worked.  Gentle understanding overwhelmed me in a meeting where everyone was vying for the right to be heard.  In this environment, what I wanted to say wasn’t going to get a look in.  Irritated, I sat back to think on an approach to get my point across.  At this moment, mindfulness kicked in.  Suddenly I realised the participants and I was all doing the same thing.  We were like kids wearing grown-up clothes, too big for us, mimicking what adults do in a meeting.

We were still fundamentally stamping our feet, trying to “out tantrum” each other. At that moment, I got an image of everyone in the room being four years trying to manage their insecurities but not very successfully – if you were looking.  Following that moment came a wave of compassion for everyone in the room.  How could you be irritated by four-year-olds trying to be brave? Figuratively speaking, of course.

That’s not to say that I saw them as four years old – I did but didn’t.  Probably to use some New Age terminology, or perhaps it’s from the psyche fields, I saw the inner children motivating the adult.  The irritation I had felt disappeared and became a wave of compassion and love for everyone in the room.   What I had to say didn’t matter; my idea would get out there, even if I didn’t get the credit.  

There was a quote that embedded itself into my psyche that went something like, “you can accomplish a great many things if you don’t mind who gets the credit”.  It’s not that it doesn’t occasionally irritate me when something of mine is adopted by someone else.  Alas, there’s another quote by Goethe: “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; …”.   Who knows where the idea came from to get to me in the first place? There’ll be others.

This post took a weird turn; it started with me wanting to write something that, in the end, probably would have shown me to be genuinely ultracrepidarian.  Maybe it did just that. The post ended by showing how for some areas, I’ve learnt compassion for my foibles.

Let’s see what the cards say!