The Voice

Good morning everyone. It's Monday.

My routine has been somewhat bizarre recently because my son has been home with a weird stomach thing. Consequently, I don't do anything at the time I normally do and I am interrupted a lot. This experience leaves me feeling like a flag flapping in the wind, a great symbol but not really useful.

I was reading the current blog by Tamara Lee from the Canadian Writers' Collective and it is true that women are more timid about putting themselves out there into the writing world. I am sure there are many different reasons depending on the person and so on but I can think of one that might be universal. Women play the role of peace keepers in families. We help things work better and things run more smoothly and we don't fight for our positions we negotiate.

Men play a lot more organized sports than women. Men fight physically a lot more than women. Men are naturally more aggressive as a gender. I think most men feel they will have to compete and fight and strive for whatever position they want in the world (never mind the fact that they compete for women all the time). So if a man yelled out from the crowd during a reading and said 'You suck!' the guy reading would fight back whereas the woman would wonder where the comment was coming from.

That's what makes men and women so wonderfully different (and why I think this world would be a MUCH more peaceful place if women and men EQUALLY decided on the political decisions in every country).

Women reflect and wonder and then act (most of the time), men do those things too but later. First men react and that's likely why being out in the world is easier for them to just do. I don't believe that women should become more like men. What would be the purpose of that? Women are unique and see things differently for a reason. Men do too.

Thinking that women and men are competitors is really the wrong way to look at things. It's really a yin-yang idea. We complement each other as long as we are allowed to be ourselves whichever gender we are.

It's unfortunate in our world that differences are either ridiculed or feared, at least initially.

The decision by the Catholic Church to not let women become priests is an example of the division, artificially created, between the sexes. Male priests would lose 'control' if women were 'allowed' to be their equals. Ironically male Catholic priests would gain so much more if they could only embrace the other half of the world's population.

Whenever you are faced with a person or group that thrives on separation and division you know it is the ego at work.