Coping With Breakup By Becoming Less Rigid

My girlfriend told me that the reason for my trouble coping with breakup is that I had become too rigid, too set in my ways. So she split and I was left wondering what I could do to get my ex-girlfriend back. I was looking for a way to overcome her objections, to overcome the notion that I am set in my ways, that I have a restricted point of view on everything. I decided she was right, so I began looking around for a systematic way of freeing up my mind. In short, I was looking for a way of coping with breakup that would lead to getting my ex-girlfriend back.

Enter the Poet As a Way Of Coping With Breakup

A poet friend of mine told me about a mountain that was far, far away and that on the top of this mountain, there lived four tribes. Each tribe had a definite way of seeing reality. It was said that if you visited and studied the philosophy of each tribe it would open you to new ways of thinking. This sounded like just what I was looking for so I set out to climb the mountain. To my amazement, the four tribes were on the mountaintop and they each held a particular view of the world.

The first tribe I visited was the Old Ones. The Old Ones thought that the way to know the world and the things in it was simply to find out what a thing is. One did this by comparing things. Some things were similar and some dissimilar. One knew the poisonous plants by the design of their leave and they knew the stars by the patterns they made in the night sky.

Tribal Wisdom Teaches Me Coping With Breakup

The second tribe was the hammerheads. They came down from the Nordic Mountains, carrying with them instruments for measuring things. They measured the shape and weight of rocks and trees and the distances between them. They set about recording the cause and effect of all things. This sometimes took the form of stimulus response, particularly where poetry was concerned. They also used cause and effect to analyze the motivation of characters.

The third tribe was the surfers. They loved surfing over the ocean in search of new landscapes, new reflections of sun and moon, new languages and new ways of conducting business. When they viewed art, they were relativist. Anyway, this tribe valued conflict because they thought it could lead to further investigation. This tribe valued change and recognition that there were different points of view on any subject or problem.

The fourth tribe was the webbed ones. They believed that all things were connected, like the connections in a great web, and complete like a circle. It was silly to look for one cause as the hammerheads had done. There were many relationships to discover. When you discovered those then you would have knowledge. This tribe believed in integration, connections, and the fitting together of the parts and the whole.

Learning Coping With Breakup From the Masters

I stayed on this mountain top and listened to the wise sayings of their philosophers, scientists and artists and when I was ready I came down from the mountain top and re-entered my old word. And immediately I could see my limitation. I had restricted myself to a single vision. Now I could see things from the vantage point of each tribe. I loved moving from one tribe to another and challenging each tribe to reinterpret the world again and again.

Later, I discovered that a great philosopher writing in the forties had systematized these world views. He wrote books on heavy duty subjects like epistemology (ways of knowing), metaphysics (describing reality) aesthetics (defining art) and rhetoric (ways of organizing communication) He said that four lamps were better to light the world than one. But I began thinking: if there could be four distinct ways of describing reality, why could there not be more?

The first thing I did was to find my ex-girlfriend. After all, she was the one who first made me aware that I was operating from a single point of view. When we met, she was amazed at how I had changed and she wanted to take a trip to the mountain top. We would go together. And so we did. We immersed ourselves in the four world views and set about exploring the mountain top. And so this became a way of coping with breakup as I try to get my ex-girlfriend back.