Special & Unique: the Prizes & Pitfuls of Identification

DISCLAIMER: today's post is a bit paradoxical and potentially confusing, so beware and enjoy. After reading it, you may feel like you just left the movie "Inception" but without the dreaming part.
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What kind of thoughts, feelings, and memories come when you see the word “special”?

Positive, negative, both?  Words like food can be used and experienced pleasantly and painfully depending on who cooks them up and how they serve them. 

Examples:
On the wedding day, the bride says, “this is the most special day of my life!”
An adolescent trips & falls down the steps, a student laughs & says, “he’s special!”

Remember, Specialness implies unspecialness.  When we place a label on something such as desirable, then we instantly create it’s opposite by assuming that something else is less desirable.  This dichotomy places us in a game of constantly seeking or wanting one thing over another as if to achieve some ideal experience that we don’t already have.  No wonder we live in a country/world where nothing is ever enough – we’re never satisfied.

Music is one of the most fascinating places to hear society’s thoughts and beliefs about specialness.  I recently heard a song about wanting to “drown in your love.”  Well, if you drown, then your dead and you don’t get to experience the love you wanted so desperately in the first place.  I understand metaphor, but really, our culture glorifies blending, melding, losing oneself’s to another.  Granted we are in “the melting pot” of all countries, but have we taken this melting too far, losing not only our individuality but also our commonality?  By retaining who you are on a Soul level, you are honoring your specific path and purpose in this life.  Also, when you move close to another, you are bringing your gifts to that moment to uplift it and also receiving gifts from the other, IF you both show up as the WHOLE SOULS that you are. 
The trouble comes when we focus all our attention and energy on the similarities or creating them and make that somehow special and unique when in fact, we all have more in common than we think. We ignore both the familiar & the unfamiliar and let our fear and belief in rejection and separation win out.  Since we are already inherently the same, then why not appreciate and encourage the subtle differences between us so that nothing is ever boring or stale – one of the major reasons why people separate, divorce, break-up or “cheat”.  We crave newness and stimulation and change, basically, even when we say we want “stability.”  How can we when we are ALWAYS changing, aging, evolving in the next best thing we are meant to be?  Don’t slow yourself down by attaching to the specialness of this moment – enjoy it then allow the next beautiful thing to flow in.

What would it be like to enjoy the shifting in a relationship and let the intricacies of your lover be what keeps you going back for more versus trying to find a way to pour the cement and make it dry quickly so they won’t leave?

What would it be like to come into a relationship/interaction with someone wearing your most uniquely YOU outfit, with accessories, VERSUS what your friends or your mom think you “should” wear to impress them?

How would your life be different if you were loved more for your devotion and expression of your unique Self versus on how well you could conform to society’s rules?

In some paradoxical way it’s not specialness or uniqueness that’s the problem but how we interpret it or what/how we attach to it.  Somewhere there is a balance but the guiding force in all our actions, ideas, thoughts, & feelings must be our Truth, which involves no one except our Soul and the Universal Soul from which it came, call it God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, etc.  Just don’t forget to call it YOU too!

So next time, notice that nagging feeling in your gut, when you bend your plans to fit theirs even though you really wanted to go to that event, OR if you demand, control or try to manipulate things be on your schedule and it leaves your “other” looking defeated and exhausted? Or whatever it might be. Now give yourself some space to hear the Truth behind the actions or inactions then move towards it, calling for whatever support you might need to take those first steps toward once again connection to “a fragment of Life’s heart.”

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