Examine Your Zipper!
When I was a kid, people used to say “XYZ” to alert someone when their pants zipper was undone. “XYZ” stands for “eXamine Your Zipper.” I guess that sounds a little less embarrassing than hearing “Hey! Your fly is open!”
The victim of the open zipper needed to be nudged because he wasn’t aware of his zipper problem. He needed an outsider who could see the situation before he did and alert him.
Emotional issues that we encounter in life are often like that zipper. We aren’t aware of our issues but others looking at our situation can see clearly what our emotional issues are. It’s helpful if we have someone willing to be kind who can point out what they observe, causing us only slight embarrassment rather than having the whole world see our cluelessness.
But what if you don’t have kind people in your life to point out the obvious? Or, perhaps, you do have kind people but don’t want to put them (or you) in an awkward position? In other words, what if you want to be aware that your fly is open before anyone else sees it?
One solution would be to keep checking your zipper frequently. If you do this frequently enough, your fly will never be open without you being the first to see it. The emotional analog is to examine your emotions, your beliefs, and your mental habits so you identify problems before they become something that the rest of the world can see.
This is possibly the ideal way to handle our mental and emotional lives, but there are some downsides. For one thing, this takes a lot of time. If we’re busy with kids, career, and just getting through the day, we may not have time to examine our internal world as much as would be prudent.
Second, we may not be adept at this type of exploration yet. When I started out on my own self-discovery journey, I found it very difficult to accept what I viewed as my “faults.” Seeing the dark side of myself was painful and my mind would do just about anything to prevent me from seeing the truth.
After I built up my observation muscles a bit, I rather by accident found that there was another way to view my own issues that felt more compassionate. I began to observe others’ stumbles in life and I started asking myself “Do I do the same thing that I’m observing this person doing?” Sometimes the answer was “no” but sometimes it was a stunning “yes!”.
For me, at least, being an outside observer to others’ challenges was a more gentle way to approach my own. One of the many areas where someone else’s behavior reflected my own was when I noticed people who seemed to be unappreciative for their jobs.
When I saw how unappealing the behavior looked when someone else did it, I was shaken to action. I didn’t want to appear similarly, so I buckled down and dealt with the root of the issue that I was observing.
When you begin to observe others’ emotional reactions to life (aka their “open zippers”), you’ll notice that certain emotions will cause a reaction in you. Sometimes the reaction will be very strong and may even take you off guard. Those are exactly the situations you need to observe more closely to see whether what is within you is similar. We won’t be “triggered” by things that have no relevancy to us, so those things that do trigger us have a message for us.
When you see others’ open zippers, allow it to be a reminder to you that they can also see YOUR open zipper. Just because you can’t see your own unappealing your behaviors, that doesn’t mean no one else can, either. If you continue to walk through life with that open zipper, you could wake up and realize that the whole world saw what you refused to see and it could be quite embarrassing.
Better to see your own open zipper and close it before the rest of the world sees it! :)
