Shine and help others shine

I always have believed that there’s lots of opportunity to shine for all of us. It’s not some scarce commodity. When we shine the spotlight of grace on someone else and let them have their moment, a little bit spills back on us. It’s fun.

(I only seem to have two moods these days: sad or frivolous.)

Once again, life has made an intervention in my “can’t get out of bed in the mornings” state and poked me. I don’t quite even know how and why, but I have been invited via fb to a Beginning (feminist/queer) Burlesque class that takes place every weekend until April.

The program reads, succintly: Bras & Panties. Stockings/chairs. Boas. Small fans. Gloves. Canes.

I’ve never forgotten the feminist burlesque troupe I saw last February in Bohemia. They were fun and strong and playful and happy and sexy and amazing. If only I can still get in the class, this so is a thing I want to do.

goal is very naively wrong. Forgive me; I’ve been on a road trip, and the shining, it seems to me now, is a quality of the world as a whole, not of a limited, egoistic self – I’m not religious but I believe in Gerard Manley Hopkins with all my heart when he writes:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil [...]

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The world… it shines. I just mostly forget, can’t, daren’t to see it.

_Phew.

if I’ve been confusing ‘shining’ and the faint film of sweat that’s been covering me ever since I arrived at this tropical summer paradise called ‘Midwest’. Oh well – one must take what one can, as a dear friend of mine tends to remind me.

::glows, emitting a faintly talcum powdery scent::

and looking at myself, behatted, in the mirror, thought: That is one darned attractive woman.

I think I see the shining back at last.

_{I also bought the hat.}

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

goal a lot in the last few weeks. So much energy was released about a year ago, after I finally got my PhD, and now I feel like that again, with the worst of this academic year over – I can’t prevent myself from thinking about my life and what I would want it to be.

I’m thinking about writing a ‘mission statement’ for myself, and when I do it, I think this would be the first sentence: I want to shine and help others shine. I’m still thinking about what all this means, but I know it’s connected to many of what I think are the key things for me.

First: excellence. I want to pursue excellence in what I do for a living: in writing, thinking, teaching and co-operating with others in the academia. I want to shine within a win-win paradigm: your excellence will help my excellence and vice versa, and there’s really no other way to create true goodness.
Second: helping others. Part of what I already do is being a midwife of thought for others, helping them to give birth to ideas and to make the ideas they already have shine brighter. But I’d like to do this more widely: to the best of my abilities, I’d want to help my friends, students and people I work with to shine, to flourish, to be happy and joyful and brilliant both at work and outside it.
Third: love. I would like to be in a relation in which I and my partner would make each other shine in a way we could never do alone. I’d love to be together with someone I bring out the best in and who brings out the best in me, someone who inspires me to become constantly better as a person and as a partner. Shining is not just about reflecting someone else’s light, it’s about being a light and creating more light – shared and co-created brilliance. Love is partly, I think, about wanting your loved ones to shine to the best of their abilities and beyond. I’d like to walk into the room and see my beloved light up, not the opposite. A good spiral, not a vicious circle.

my Be incandescently happy goal and to what BeeQueen wrote about shining recently.