listening - crybaby (cry,baby!)

crybaby (cry,baby!)

I tear up when something touches a little vat of tenderness that I carry with me all the time. Sometimes I am a little embarrassed at the what some (including me) might consider the dreck that touches it, but hell I am a mostly a lowbrow girl. Goofy, saccharine commercials on TV? Check. Hallmark Channel quality movies that I don’t especially like? Check. Thinking about the sadness and struggle that is just part of life? Oh yes. Gratitude for my life at this moment? Hold on, let me get a tissue.

I remember my mother crying at the drop of a hat while I was growing up (she still does). Looking to “see if Mom was crying yet” was part of the family time watching movies. Not so funny now that the shoe is on the other foot!

We share this bond of readily accessible tenderness and it pleases me. My mother is a formidable badass that I so want to be like when I grow up (her sense of decorum and propriety would hate that I called her that - that sense we don’t especially share) Mom is actually a soft touch underneath her toughness. It is what made her a beloved (if sometimes feared) teacher and principal in her career in education as well as in life in general.

I have gotten to a point where I wear my tenderness proudly - my tears feel more like proud warpaint than something I have to hide. I have figured out that my tenderness informs my strength if I can find a way to use it and not let it overwhelm me. I am consciously trying to use my teariness and I am learning to embrace it.

I know, another Pema Chodron quote. Predictable, aren’t I?

In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish—you name it—means to not run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one’s whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one can open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.