Anne Lise’s Blog

What if?

This short question might only consist of six letters (seven, if you include the punctuation), yet it holds a key we can shape to many locks, or it can bar the doors completely. It can be a precursor to curiosity, imagination, exploration, and discovery, or it can stop us from fully achieving our potential in life. In some instances, both can be true at the same time… I guess that’s the essence of the quantum realm. I digress.

So why do I bring this up? Well, one of my earlier quests started with, “What if all the answers are out there, and we’re just not asking the right questions?” These days, I might rephrase it to, “What if all the answers are within us, and we’re just taught to disregard the questions?”

Within us… mmm. What is within us? At least 4.5 billion years’ worth of evolution, for starters.

I am now a mere 61 years into my existence on this Earth, but the building blocks of which I am composed are cosmic aeons older. My early childhood memories are of wonder and interconnection—the awareness that the world around me was fizzing, singing, spinning, sparkling, and beautiful. I was with everything and vice versa. I had no idea that others didn’t experience their world in that way. Then school and social concepts gradually filtered in, and I was taught I was apart, separate, superior even, to everything around me. It didn’t sit easily with me. I was told not to be so sensitive. I had to toughen up. I was too honest (like that’s a bad thing?). The world wasn’t fair. As a girl, I had to know my place in subservience. None of that sat easily with me either!

I tried it all on for size, though. I became a secretary, as that was a respectable job for a young woman. I hated the office life—the strobing of the fluorescent lighting, the harshness of the décor, the overwhelming stench of sweat and synthetic perfume, the noise, the sexual harassment, the politicking, and social pecking orders. I thought everyone just dealt with it better than I; that the fault lay within me.

What if, though? No, that’s not the kind of “what if” I mean. It’s rarely worth “what if?”-ing your past; that’s an exercise in futility, as it will never change anything. “What if” is at its best as the present nudging the future. Much like a tendril of mycelia experiments with direction before it decides which way to go. Nature is full of “what ifs” like this, and by extension, so are we.

For this blog, I was asked to give a brief account of my journey in a “what brought you to where you are now?” kind of way. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, given what I’ve written so far, along with a lack of brevity. But let’s keep going and see what we may find.

When my niece was little, she was once asked, “What are you doing?” and she replied, “I’m going up and down in circles!” Although it was lovingly disregarded as nonsense at the time and we laughed at her cuteness, I have more recently reflected that what her unfiltered little consciousness might have been describing was a spiral (or a helix?). This is my way of bringing us back and around to the point of this blog!

It might help for you to know that I was diagnosed as autistic when I was in my late 40s. Actually, back then, they were still using the terms “Asperger’s Syndrome” and “high-functioning” under the umbrella of “Autistic Spectrum Disorders”. There is so much wrong with the whole labelling system… don’t get me started on that one. Anyway, amongst other things, what it meant was I could at last “come out” as highly sensitive… and I had a piece of paper to prove it! Ugh. Is it a disability, though? Not so much disabled as dis-enabled, perhaps? What if it’s simply a difference of neurological wiring, a difference that is fundamental to our evolution as a species? Our modern, fast-paced, toxin-laden, techno-crazed, anti-socially networked world isn’t what I’m built for. No one really is. But the more sensitive among us do feel it more, even if we have learnt to mask it to avoid the derision, abuse, and bullying or turned to numbing everything, one way or another. I think of the young ones today and the seeming “epidemic” of diagnoses of one labelled “disorder” or another… But that might have to wait for what is clearly going to be the next in the series of blogs! What if you’d like to join me as we go up and down in circles together?

Anne-Lise’s listening circles start in September…