Misconnections

It's been a day of intensity and mismatched understandings and agendas today.
1) An evangelistic friend-of-a-friend tried to convert another friend in the park while we all really just wanted to chill and watch our children enjoying splashing around in the wading pool and 2) I made the dim-mistake of forwarding a friend's emails to other friends without asking first so that the first friend had reason to perhaps feel misrepresented, misunderstood, or misappropriated!

I forwarded without checking first because I got excited about what she'd said and thought for sure it would be valuable to others. Likewise, I expect the-minister-of-The-Truth got excited about what he had to say and didn't concern himself about whether the moment was auspicious for communication.

…Irregardless of whether either of us may have been right or not, we forced information into the world without testing whether it was right for all involved to do so. In both cases we really meant well and in our own worlds felt certain what we had to share was good stuff. At the bottom of it all, I presume that we wanted mostly to connect with those we were in relation to. But in both instances we were in phenomenally different places than those we were in relation to. We were dead wrong about how we were "sharing" and both messages were at least in part lost. We both alienated another by our intensity and overzealousness and negated our intent of connecting on something we really felt good about.

… It's a wonderment that we ever connect as humans, each and every one of us has such different motivations, different needs, different perspectives, and different concerns—how do we ever get it right, at the right time, in the right way? ...And yet we do engage each other constantly.

In today's instances, clearly, both uncomfortable situations could have been mitigated if we had been more aware and sensitive to the people involved, if we had checked in with all involved about what we wanted to share—whether it was welcome/on target, whether it was ours to share, whether it could be received in the way we hoped to share it.

Acht, there's nothing for me to do now about my own miscommunication but be grateful for the human capacity for forgiveness. And to know that though I get excited, it's truly quite easy most of the time for me to check in with others as to their wishes. I know I'll do so more sensitively for quite some time again cause it's not worth this feeling of having dissed someone I really wanted to embrace.

…I'm wondering though when the fundamentalist-minister-of-g-d's-own-message will get clarity that others aren't on the same page as he and are at peace in with their own stance. Is his message so very meaningful that he doesn't care who he puts off? or does he just not understand that what he has to share won't be received if it isn't already being looked for? Or is he just so concerned with himself that he doesn't give a shit about others at all? Or does he interpret our disinterest in what he values as reinforcement of why we are all damned to hell. Whatever it is, he's definitely in a space I have trouble accessing.

Note to Nameless Daughter:
We are each here with different needs, impressions, perspectives, tasks and gifts. We can never fully understand, speak for, speak directly to, or even really be entirely one-with others. To honor our uniquenesses while enjoying our connections we are called upon to make room to each walk our own paths, voice our own voices and interpret our own meanings in our own way and our own turn, knowing that we are only sharing corners of the same experiences. We must gently and lovingly resist overwhelming each other with our own being, while gently and lovingly holding to the points of connection that are clearly evident (yet still open to re-interpretation).

It is enough to be with. It is foul to presume to be the same.