Speechless

I was face to face with my own message last week. 
Away in Arizona on a 4-day intensive High Performance Self-Mastery seminar diving deep into psychology, productivity, physiology, and more, I was pumped up in social-emotional application and meaning. Major intentions floated in my brain, stumbling over each other fighting for space and urgency.

And then the creeping feeling and clues over those days there, that something was wrong with my brother on another continent, was confirmed on the last day. My brother had a stroke, and it had targeted his speech center.

Here I was, going into overdrive to create deeper understanding and communicate it through language, and here is he suddenly struggling to create and understand basic language.

My self-mastery tumbled. My focus got blurry, my productivity went in circles leading nowhere. Meanwhile, my brother is now in need of applying intense focus and make steps towards self-mastery on a whole different level to regain his ability to speak, read, and write.

A point taken from the seminar was the importance of social sharing to our well-being, growth, and happiness. My mind goes numb when I think of my brother’s sudden stolen access to social sharing. 

I am forced to reflect on the life he has lived in chosen isolation, now magnified by an un-chosen isolation. But then, is there a silver lining? Many people talk about strokes and other unfortunate illnesses and accidents representing turning points in their lives for the better. My brother is isolated inside, but no longer alone. A social sharing that was not there before is now forced as he needs to be involved intensely with people and learn to talk again. We cling to the possible lights in the dark. It is human nature.

And who am I to say that isolation is good or bad, right or wrong? And who am I to say that maybe there is light in the darkness as if I understood one little bit where he is now?

As I try to absorb these last few days, the extremes and the changes that may come to our lives, I wonder about how I mused in my last email broadcast (the ultimate social sharing), on the neurological diverse people, what we might learn from each other, and the imagining of social-emotional life skills as factory installed. Because - what happens when what we take for granted disappears and changes everything, and our only focus becomes to re-learn a basic skill? Is the ability to focus, the resilience to keep at it, the acceptance of the new status of things naturally there when faced with the necessity to apply it? 

Some life skills seem nearly factory installed for some: some people are naturally happy or resilient, emotionally intelligent or able to focus, where others need to choose to learn, practice, and master those same skills. Perhaps we all have some and lack others from the get-go. Perhaps it wasn’t as an outlandish thought as intended when I worked myself into it in the last post. Maybe we all come better equipped than we think.

Either way, while such an event is always a wake-up call, I found a new level of understanding of the life skills I am committed to highlight and share.

Whether factory installed or not, they are not just nice to have and master, they are not just important social skills, they are not just tools to better lives, better careers, better relationships, and a chance to contribute to others. In fact, they are also necessary survival skills when things out of the predictable happen.

My brother will be accessing skills not greatly needed in his daily life until a few days ago such as resilience, focus, and dealing with change, to name a few. I will need to up my mastery of intuition, patience, curiosity, laughter, empathy, and non-judgment, to name a few. I will be learning along with my brother different levels and ways of applying these skills.

Today I saw his face on Whatsapp. I haven’t seen his face for many years.
Clearly, we will be seeing each other much more now.

Together we will discover firsthand the Japanese wabi-sabi principle (see post of May 9, 2017), that the crack in the vase is what makes the vase beautiful.