YeKengalé

Two factors that will turn Jamaica right side up if applied – Attention and Affection.

Attention. I have used this skill to disrupt the dysfunction in so many lives. The human spirit thrives on attention. If you doubt me, ask Donald Trump. Most every personality disorder is an inverted request for attention and evidence of being ignored at some crucial past moment of potential development.

I know immediately many will try to use my own sound argument against me. “Not only narcissists like Trump, but a great many people deserve to be ignored” the dismissive are likely to quip. But ignoring people, especially narcissists and apparent fools is a mistake. Again, ask Trump (and any other overunderestimated president). Ignorance of the simple (or apparently simple) is often a fatal mistake.

That’s why the two go together. True affection allows one to direct one’s attention constructively towards others, without being drawn into their drama. Seeing people for who they are – the imago deo, and not just the negative way they may have learned to project their personality to protect or deflect from their woundedness. This allows one to attend to people constructively, speaking truth from a genuinely affectionate heart – a spirit that empathizes rather than scorns at human weakness. Love is power…. it is fear that is weak, although it projects the most ferocious face.

I mentioned in The power of candor how we created a culture at the school I directed in the 90s, of attention giving and attention getting. Life is reciprocal. We often are simply distracted from recognizing how reciprocity works. One does not immediately reap what one has sown. And it is possible to reap where others have sown. The pattern of sowing and reaping however is indelibly built into life and all its processes – biologically, psychologically, cosmologically …. in whatever dimension.

I remember being repudiated by the sight of a principal taking morning devotions at her school and talking over the heads of about 80% of the students. Students were chatting…distracted, it was pandemonium. I remember thinking, “This woman has no respect for herself”. The very first day I entered the classroom to teach, I stood in perfect silence at the blackboard staring holes into the eyes of the class until it came to perfect order. Only when I had full attention of every student did I speak. I respect myself too highly to be ignored.

I can and will ignore a lot of things….but people are not numbered among them. I may deliberately ignore what people say and do when it does not meet my approval; but I have paid attention in every detail, even if I never mention it or let on to what I have observed. The God in whose image and likeness I have been made is a watcher. He has called us to awareness.

He has also called us to affection – to loving and caring and helping. Love does not pass the wounded on the other side. Love does not know limitation. Love is abundance of supply.

I listen deeply, so that I will be listened to deeply. Not every seed I sow will germinate where I have cast it. But my habits will seek me and pursue me till I am satiated by whatever it is I have chosen to consistently be and do.

We pay fullest attention. We show fullest affection. We expect to reap a world of knowing and loving. To know me is to love me is always true, even when it appears to be the most counterintuitive assessment of the situation. Life may appear confusing and confounding, but every element of reality starts with a seed.