Coloured people lights and human Christmas gifts

OK, so I have one more. This was sitting there as a draft from the other week.

I have found Don Miller’s blog curious reading lately. And I appreciated this simple post, about how the world might be different if you believed people actually wanted to talk to you. If you will allow me a little online therapy (every now and then it seeps out), once upon a time I went to see a psychologist, without even especially knowing why, and he said to me, ‘if you imagine that everyone has either a red light or a green light on their forehead, you see red lights everywhere’. And it was true. My default was not ‘people like me until proven otherwise’, it was ‘people don’t like me until proven otherwise’. It seems some of us are constituted that way, or maybe brought up that way.

(And I think this is altogether different to “self esteem”, but won’t try to explain that here.)

That psychologist told me many things, but the red light/green light idea is one that stuck, and I have since tried to be aware of that, and push past it. (I might have even overdone it in one or two cases, and worked too hard to see a green light, when it was well and truly red, and stopping, rather than crashing into a red light pole, would have been a good idea.)

As with most things psychological, sometimes the reason you see red lights is you, and sometimes it’s the other person. The curious thing is, I do think I am reasonably perceptive about people, and sometimes I think I understand why others are wearing red lights, yet still I find it difficult not to see that red light beaming. Sometimes people are inadvertently flashing red lights, maybe because their self-protection is ten miles thick, or maybe because they’re also seeing red lights and so are stand-offish, and one person just needs to see green and run it. Sometimes people are still recovering from a significant green light that went red. Sometimes people are just cranky with the world in general, and can't much be bothered being green to anybody, you included.

So, it’s good to be reminded that you can “be a gift” to others, just in time for Christmas.

That is all.