eThoughts : Our Yes and Our No, Part II

And then there’s the issue of affirmation, saying and hearing yes. As you might have guessed, there might be some potholes in this road as well.

While we can spend a lot of time closing in on ourselves and others by saying no, saying yes on the other hand can be seen as an expansion, the creation of an opening. However, saying yes doesn’t have to mean activating the “lemming effect” and running willy-nilly, albeit in tandem, off a cliff with everyone else. Like any opening, yes can be seen as “sure, let’s see what goes here.” That’s kind of a yes with options. Of course there is a caution sign there, as in one cannot make decisions ad infinitum and keep their options open. After all, there is the yes, as in spiritual/emotional surrender, when one gives up options. Here only the astute may tread with any confidence, and likely only after much banging their head into the wall of options, the joy of which is inherently short-lived, replaced by head bunions if those options are handled as though they can be sustained forever.

And there is also hearing yes: Yes to the wonders of the wind blowing by instead of the no of our hair blown asunder. Yes to the joy of rain instead of the no—well, our hair has gone asunder. Yes to traveling outside of our circle, to learn about what we think we don’t want to learn, to understanding another who seems so unrealistic, to feel a plant, an animal, a child, a tree, a mountain, instead of the no we don’t have the time, that stuff is not on our agenda.

And of course, there is hearing the yes of others speaking about the yes in us: How we look good, how smart we are, how gifted, how well we do one thing or another, how much we contribute, how much we are loved. These are yeses that can open the channels in us, that enable joy, that give us a boatload of wrinkles from such deep smiling. Sometimes, when we have heard so many nos, especially when we are young and so open in the first place, hearing yes just doesn’t resonate—our ears are deaf to such sound. It takes a lot of nurturing to grow those ears back, to allow the yes in us to hear the yes in others.

And saying yes to others, as in affirming their humanity, opens the space for both them and us, to grow, to interact playfully, to understand that yes may bring up limits, but properly handled, it never gives up freedom.

The bottom line in this little exploration is that saying and hearing yes and no are not strictly bound to the definitions we might normally attribute to yes and no. When we sit on our laurels our attention can stagnate and our lives follow. Let’s practice opening up a little, which isn’t just about yes or no, it’s about playing with our attention. And if we practice consideration to ourselves and to others, our attention won’t be at risk and we exhausted, our attention will be enlivened and we connected and nurtured. And then we might have the exact opposite of a 1968 or so many other tumultuous years. In fact, why don’t we go for a year in which so many nurturing things happen, we can hardly believe that—a very nice change in not hardly believing what has transpired.