My brain is an interesting place for sure. I've been considering what it is to either react or respond and what within my brain chooses one or the other of those two choices.
It was very enlightening when I first read somewhere that if I speak to another person such that I illicit a response the conversation will be different than if I speak in such a way that I illicit a reaction.
That knowledge right there gave me wonderful freedom in knowing how to effectively promote a useful conversation.
For example, someone could say to me; "Why did you plant that bizarre, twisty shaped
shrub in your garden?" Or they could say; "Hmm, that is certainly an interesting choice of bush to put in front of your house."
In my brain the first comment heads me right to a reaction. "What do you mean "bizarre?" Why are you picking on me? You obviously have bad taste if you don't see this choice of shrub as being a good choice." And on and on it would go. My ego is activated and I defend and react and attack in return.
With the second comment I am invited into a conversation. I don't have to tamp down and restrain my injured ego, I can just explain what and how I was thinking when I choose that shrub and that spot.
This has a lot to do with the human brain's gift of fight or flight. How do you think that is so? And why?
"Once you label me you negate me."
Søren Kierkegaard
Exactly. I just become a semiotic device in your thinking. All that I am becomes merely a sign within your thinking. In your interaction with me actually you will not be interacting with me, you will be interacting not with the full me but the symbol that I now am for you.
This is exactly why Peter Rollins, the author of How (Not) to Speak of God, talks about adopting atheism for lent. To allow for the sign that God may have become in my mind to be replaced by the living and active presence of God.
Signs certainly have many purposes but you can never have a dynamic relationship with a sign. It merely points to something.
Anytime a human or a being becomes a sign for me, at that point the life is drained out of them and they have become a marker for what they represent in my mind.
Which needless to say minimizes or shuts down any the beauty of the interaction with a human being because the interaction is with a semiotic device in my brain.
What signs might you become in my mind? Old human, young human, smart human, crazy human, black human, white human, male human, female, intellectual, uneducated, pretty, engineer, day laborer,... you get the point.
Love means I care enough to notice when I am assigning (good word here ;~) a place holder or sign in place of the living and dynamic reality that is you.
We all do it, it's the way the brain functions. Our brains always seem to want to assign meaning to what we see and conceptualize "what it is."
Signs and labels kills the person and closes the latches on a small box with a rounded top and gilded hinges.
Love creates an opening of an unknown size where the other person can become fully alive in the relationship and actually according to Carl Rodgers the aliveness enabled can show up in every part of the person's life.
