Chapter 49: Label or Learn?
It is time once again to Stew on this! I have noticed that when I label, I stop learning. Furthermore, if I truly want to learn, I must stop labeling.
In case you’re wondering where I get ideas to speak and write about every week, this chapter’s theme emerged from the fact that at least 3 times in the past few days, I noticed Hillary’s shirt label sticking out and stuck it back down for her. So, this week I am writing about labels.
As you can see, I generally don’t have any idea where the ideas might come from. But here we go:
Like you, I have the power to assign meaning to every experience, event or situation. Indeed, I believe I give things the only real meaning they have. Further, I react more to the meaning I give things than I do to the actual things.
This is both good and bad news. It is good because it allows me the opportunity to choose the high watch and to give things a meaning that serves me, others and the world.
On the other hand, it also allows me to assign a much schmootzier meaning to things.
Once I have assigned a certain meaning, schmootzy or not, I tend to “see” other things in the same way. The meaning becomes the lens through which I see things, including people, and then I tend to gather evidence to support that meaning.
Eventually the meaning becomes so assigned in my mind that, especially with negative ones concerning people, it becomes a label.
I have noticed that when I label, I stop learning. Furthermore, if I truly want to learn, I must stop labeling.
As essayist John Morley wrote, “Labels are devices for saving talkative persons the trouble of thinking.”
Once I have labeled people as “other” or “wrong” or “less than,” it becomes much harder for me remember oneness; much harder to remember “just like me” through my fixed ideas. I see only the tip of the iceberg that person represents, and I am not the least bit interested in learning more.
But when I open up and connect with these people as individuals, willingly or not, they always shatter my labels. I rediscover that they are just people, and indeed just like me.
For example, in the past I held a rigid vision around my label of “homeless.” Then I spent a winter volunteering in our local Warm Room, where folks could get out of the snow and have a warm place to sleep. I found out how insanely narrow and negating my label was.
The exact thing happened on my first travel adventure during Covid, when my label about “maskers” got torn to shreds.
Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
It also cannot be acquired when I vegetate in the old labels I have created.
Connecting with people as individuals is also fatal to violence, because once I have labeled someone it is a mighty short step to thinking I know what they deserve.
As Kierkegaard said, “Once you label me, you negate me.”
This all, of course, includes me. When I hold to negative labels about myself, I find it impossible to be my own greatest ally, which is one of my deepest intentions.
I am continually in the process of rooting out the limiting labels I have tagged on myself. The ones that I strive so hard to live up to and gather evidence to support. The ones that limit my possibilities and make it hard for me to see my own wholeness and beauty.
I have been at this for a long time. The process often begins with me coming up with a new and improved label, one that is empowering and more congruent with who I am.
Instead of “people pleaser”, for instance, I upgraded to “a kind person who is learning to not be so nice.” I used to call myself “lazy.” Now I am “one who appreciates the value of rest and relaxation and has still accomplished (and is still accomplishing) A LOT!”
That is another problem with limiting self-labels: they are not even true anymore and they blind me to the progress and growth I have achieved.
My ultimate intention is to only label myself as a magnificent, unique expression of Innate Intelligence. A child of the Divine.
The truth is that my self-labels become how I see myself. If see myself as abundant, I experience more abundance, If I see myself as loving and joyful, I experience more love and joy.
And so on…
When I run into some of those deeply cherished labels that I am not quite ready to release, I label myself as “willing.”
As I said, my labels limit my possibilities, and I only learn about myself when I am willing to venture into possibilities.
Like you, I tend to see what I am looking for. So, I am willing to look for bigger possibilities in myself rather than hiding behind the walls of my old labels.
I see the fact that I label things and people as just another inevitable outcome of living under brain. This is why mindfulness is the greatest ally I have in transforming them and taking better care of our human.
Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein defines mindfulness as, “meeting the moment fully and as a friend.” As I get better at that, I will continue to make different choices about what I make things, people, and I, mean.
I can stuff all those labels back into my shirt and instead facilitate my own learning and evolution.
Stew on that, and I will see you next time.
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