Tenderness – Where is the Tenderness?

About once a year, I seem to latch onto one of my favourite eighties or nineties songs. They suddenly show up with a deep new meaning and a message for me, right at the time I need to hear it. In my youth these songs just brought pleasure and escape, at least at a conscious level. I remember driving down the highway on a warm summer night in Toronto blasting music and singing along to them with friends. Man, I feel so free and light just thinking about those experiences now. But as I get older, I am recognizing there are unconscious hooks to the words in all the songs that I would play on repeat in my youth. I would play them over and over again and never tire of them. It is almost as if my deeper consciousness projected them onto the quantum field to send a message back to myself. Because that is what these songs often feel like in the moment now. A message that I needed to receive but wouldn’t truly hear until I was ready. It is a strange feeling. Like a shadow I can see under the crack of the door that I am not sure if I really see.

Maybe it is just a song. And maybe I just like the words. But I find this way of seeing the world as a quantum messaging system a lot more entertaining, so I am going to allow myself to stay on this ride for now.

Forever Jung!!

Now I might have you leaning in, looking for something profound from Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Unfortunately, I am not that sophisticated, and the messages I need to hear are usually pretty damn simple. I seem to have mastered complexity and forgotten simple. That is probably true for all of us now that I think about it. In any event I bet the blog title gave it away.

“I don’t now where to start or when to stop, oh-ho

My luck’s like a button, I can’t stop pushing it

My head feels light, but I’m still in the dark

Seems like without tenderness, there’s something missing.

I don’t know where I am, but I know I don’t like it

I open my mouth and out pops something spiteful

Words are cheap, but they can turn out expensive

Words like conviction, can turn into a sentence

Tenderness

Where is the tenderness?

Where is it?”  - General Public

“Where is my tenderness?” is absolutely what I need to ask myself more often. This lands hard with me in the moment. I have become far more empathetic, compassionate and kind over the past few years, but as the song says, “it seems like without tenderness, there’s something missing”.  If I am honest, I think that I bring a bit of a cold and hard approach to empathy, compassion and kindness that makes it miss the mark at times. I believe I can do better and I want to.

Part of my lack of tenderness is of course my own shadow – my own unhealed parts that I need to work through. And I am grateful that I can see it clearly now, and I get to work on it. But I also know that I am but a microcosm of our society at large and wow do I see it clearly now. Our Western culture lacks tenderness and it desperately needs it.

The gestalt of our culture and society today appears to be one where empathy, compassion and kindness are virtues of the highest order. We collectively value those attributes, and most virtue signalling (all parts of the political spectrum) falls in line with that. But what gets exercised lacks tenderness. In fact, it appears to be devoid of tenderness. Empathy, compassion and kindness often come with words that can feel angry, hateful, judgemental and diminishing.

And it doesn’t work – it divides and polarizes. It leads to conflict and violence.

I have a wish for our culture to be more tender. But if I want to change the world then it must start with me – everything is an inside job (forever Krishnamurti!). So, I choose to be more tender. I choose tenderness as a way of Being. That’s the only power I have to effect change outside of myself – so I will start there and maybe you will follow my lead and join me on the road of happy destiny.

The Way