On Not Being the Center of the Universe

I remember an old, old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching Lucy and another girl from afar. He approaches them: “You girls were talking about me, weren’t you!” he says accusingly. “No we weren’t,” the girls say with a smug expression. Charlie Brown reverts to his earlier distant position, and waits a bit, only to return once again and ask: “How come you girls never talk about me?”

A basic human presumption seems to be that we are, each of us, the Center of the Universe…. The Chinese call their land The Middle Kingdom. World maps in the U.S. have, guess which country, at the center? Not the same country as maps sold in, say, France.

Years ago I read a study of students and professors. The study asked students how much time they spent thinking about the professors (not much), and how much time they thought the professors spent thinking about them (a lot, the students figured). The professors, asked the same questions, said they didn’t in fact spend much time thinking about the students, but they were sure that the students, of course, spent lots of time thinking about them. Wrong again. Center of the Universe all over the place.

On a more cosmic scale, it was only recently in history that we could as a species countenance the idea that the universe might not revolve around planet Earth…. Some of us—some a bit more than others—escape from the tyranny of self, but only just a little bit. We get angry, resentful and afraid—basically because people don’t behave the way we would like them to. After all, aren’t we the center of the universe?

Of course, we most assuredly are not. All those would-be subjects of ours aren’t paying us homage—basically they’re just not that into us…. But there are two great causes for optimism in this observation. First, since most of humanity doesn’t really concern itself with us, we are quite free of the bondage of others’ opinions. Our slavery is of our own creation. We hold our own keys to freedom.

Second, once we see that others have the same uni-centric disease that we do, we can lighten up a bit and reach out over the 50-50 line for a touch of human contact. Yul Bryner once said, “We come into this world alone, and we leave it alone; and if someone offers you kindness along the way, you don’t spit on it.” Bryner’s is the minimalist version. The maximalist version is that if you touch someone, you help to free them from their own self-obsessed bondage. By reaching outside yourself, you initially delight them; but quickly that turns to teaching by example. You show that it can be done, and you role-model the benefits of doing so.

If you live in the space that says you’re the center of the universe, people’s orbits tend to fly away from you. But if you reject that belief, then people are attracted to you; oddly, you become (directionally) the center of much more. They trust you….

You are not the center of the universe. What a blessing. Go pay attention to someone else.

~Charles H. Green
Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. This piece is excerpted from the Trust Matters blog found here.

changes

it's been about two months since graduation. i literally went into some kind of a hibernation mode where i slept for three weeks straight. that was definitely a first for me (not something i would like to do again), but i think my body was screaming for some kind of a rest.

thoughts post-graduation

now that I have graduated, there are endeavors, hobbies and "projects" that i've been indefinitely putting off (e.g. reading good books, journalling, creative writing, enjoying the outdoors and spending time or hanging out with friends) which i now have time for. but there are also things like paying bills and going through the stack of mail on my desk, getting a haircut, finding a sublet for the summer, applying for jobs and writing thank you notes that scream for my attention. only if there were three or four of me!

"Tonight I Can Write"
By Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; 5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

~ Walt Whitman

an interesting article - would be interested in hearing the readers' thoughts!

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Tis 2009...

Gustav Klimt



"The Kiss (c. 1907)"



"Silhouette II"



"Musique"



"The Mother and Child Detail from the Three Ages of Woman (c. 1905)"



"The Tree of Life Frieze (c. 1909)"