Flight Chronicles of the Hummingbird - Day 32 – 5-8-2021 - Understanding and Grief

Understanding and Grief

How do I learn to understand others? I’ve been in a space of allowing my own fears, hurts, anxieties to overtake my understandings of others and feel compassion for them.

It’s been an interesting morning. This journey is always bringing up some kind of grief to walk through. It came to me this morning that in my trying to make sure the other person understood where I’ve been coming from, I totally missed understanding where they are and where they are coming from.

“Their” behaviors always made me so angry that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. The reason that this happens is that when “they” behave in certain ways, it triggers something inside of me that doesn’t feel accepted, good enough (there it is again), important, or whatever feeling comes up for me in the moment.

I become so focused on how I’m feeling that I don’t recognize how they are feeling. This isn’t easy and it’s infuriating to the victim I have been throughout my life.

Sometimes the other person doesn’t know how: how to have compassion for others, understand others, or hear others. ”They” don’t have an understanding of a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they are a “bad” person. It just means they don’t know how and they may not ever know.

Here is where, I am learning, to grieve those real feelings I have about how that person is “treating” me and to let go and surrender the fact that we all feel this way at times. I don’t think anyone really understands each other. Our society is proof of that. I mean really, we can’t even understand ourselves sometimes as I think this blog input is sharing.

So, the grief flows for the little girl who couldn’t understand herself, her surroundings or her experiences. No matter what anyone may think or how she thinks, it isn’t about who she is. It’s about how she could never see that about herself.

I know that when we are unable to see ourselves or hear ourselves and we don’t connect with ourselves, we certainly can’t do that with anyone else.

This is hard for me. It feels like it goes back to why I have tried to control my surroundings and circumstances.

And so, here is what I get to do today. I get to forgive myself and others for not understanding.

I feel closer to myself in this moment of realization of this than I really think I ever have.

Thank you for walking through this journey with me. I am grateful.