Thursday, 24 June 2021
Finishing Context
Liz’s comment on finishing things hits too close to home and triggers reflection asking whether I’ve moved on from similar past incidents.
Sometimes, you gotta ask yourself, “Have I changed?” And on Day 175, I chat with a lady at work, Liz, who said that Leo’s don’t often end up finishing things. Liz’s comment was in response to my lament over not keeping pace with the posts and how previously something similar had happened.
My excuse for not finishing the previous attempt was at that time, I’d met my husband, and you know, getting entangled with a new love can be time-consuming 💗. So when I started the experiment the time before, I reasoned myself out of finishing it since it was an experiment for me, and no one else would care if I completed it.
I can’t speak for other Leos, but for me, at least, there’s a string of unfinished projects in my past. But my husband, sister, mother, and friends also have a list of outstanding tasks. Their star signs are Pisces, Taurus, Aries, Taureans, Virgos, Water and Air signs.
That doesn’t mean I don’t finish things. But I get it. It’s the constant generation of ideas and inventions that lead me from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, and as soon as it gets hard, it’s “honey, I’ve got an idea”. Honey makes an inaudible sigh as he gets ready to firefight the next potentially bad idea.
Finishing Things
At work, I finalise processes, which I’m the only one who bothers to complete. So moving away from the tail end and moving onto the next thing is easy. Take project management; for example, it requires a complete document or a document to articulate the state of the final project handover. This completion document is difficult to write, especially when the next shiny project is being run-up backed by the authority of the CEO. However, if there’s no one pushing for the document, it doesn’t get done, myself included.
At the end of a workshop writing the post-workshop review can help future seminars. It’s something I’m particularly passionate about because it has helped me many times. A group of facilitators can add to the central repository for post-event reviews, but only three have done so in the last four years.
Liz is intuitive and picked up I needed a kick in the pants rather than looking for an excuse to shut down the experiment – yet again. However, I feel bad that she found it necessary to drag all Leos into the generic bag to convey the message. Shutting it down would only mean letting myself down and adding to more things to beat me up over.
It’s like when you’re trying to tell a specific person something, but to avoid singling them out, you take the opportunity to educate everyone. It might have been something like that.
Justification for not Finishing Things
This talk of completing things right after saying I have a list of uncompleted tasks at home is simply me trying to be fair in my assessment of the statement used to judge all Leos and myself. I’m not a fan of being boxed into the Leo box (or any star sign box) in this way, except the information wasn’t limiting. The statement found a home; that’s why I’m justifying it, but its level worked without causing my hackles to go up.
There’s a friend in my past, Maddy, who I’d briefly reconnected with at a funeral. Maddy was still as beautiful as before, but she’d somehow grown into her elegance. Her poise and posture spoke to me at the funeral before recognising her. Never one to be fat, but my memory of her was that she had been more hourglass-like instead of tall and slender – not anymore! It turns out her love of yoga seemed to have changed her body shape.
At the funeral, my exercise included yoga, running and gym, and she replied, “you were always into that”. Although not said in a nasty or bitchy way, I felt the judgement was like a stereotype of my past from which I hadn’t grown. I automatically bristled because somehow, it made me feel like she was my mother and I was a naïve kid.
Then, shocked at me for bristling at a well-meaning comment, at the end of the day, made me mad at myself. It’s the same trigger response Maddy had always managed to elicit in the 90s and again so many years later. Maybe the comment showed just how much things hadn’t changed. I felt terrible about my response. We probably drifted apart because of the limiting statement, my answer to them, and my response.
General Statements that Make Me Arc Up
Now I’m not sure why the comment Liz made didn’t cause me to arc as much as Maddy’s remark had, but I’m hoping I’ve grown since Maddy and I caught up. Following my advice in the FAQs, “what you hear is for you to hear; how you deal with what you hear is up to you”. In this case, it reminds me everyone is different and different isn’t wrong; this statement applies to me and others. By the way, to “arc up” or “arc” are Australian slang terms referring to how a cat arches its back when it’s had a fright.
General statements or stereotyping based on whatever mechanism, whether it be star signs, eye colour, shoe size, blood type, or a researched questionnaire, need to be interpreted with flexibility when it comes to people. While a four-category bucket may seem incredibly limiting, it can also provide a lot more freedom – or can it? That’s something to ponder another day.
Today's Cards
The Cards - Analysis
Carryover Cards
Two cards carried over from yesterday; Politics moved from Now to Recent Past, and Abundance moved from Feelings to Outcome.
Cross
Travelling is in the Now influenced by Ice-olation. The Goal card has Innocence, and Past Lives is, appropriately, in the Distant Past. Politics flowed nicely from yesterday’s Now to today’s Recent Past. So today, I’m able to advise that Politics was me trying to be diplomatic when I heard Liz’s comment.
I saw myself arc up but, while not fully taking some of the heat out of my response, I managed to siphon off some of the heat while logic caught up. The comment has encouraged Turning In in Future Energy to assess the remark’s validity.
Base
The Consciousness card in the Feelings position verifies the awareness of the time of the comment.
Interestingly, Others’ Views – in this case, Liz’s – indicates I could pull off the awareness and take some of the heat out of my response because Harmony appeared. Phew! See, this position is helpful to see if what you intended to happen was indeed interpreted that way.
The Fool trusts regardless of the fall; I fear that I’m fooling myself with the interpretation of the Harmony card, but without another barometer, I hope and trust, like The Fool, that everything is as it seems.
Finally, Abundance is in the Outcome position. Abundance in this spot seems to indicate things are going to get moving again. Indeed, here I am writing more freely, and I’ve finished for the day. 😉
References
- Osho, Osho Zen Tarot – The Transcendental Game of Zen, St Martin’s Press, ISBN 0-312-11733-7
