Just once in my lifetime

Just once, just one single time in my life I would love to experience a relaxed day before I fly somewhere, and a good night sleep. But my sad reality is, for the last two decades at least, that the last day I need to do so many urgent and important things (that I failed to do a couple of days earlier, to be honest) and so the last evenings are always frantic with finishing articles, doing administrative things, meeting deadlines, taking care of the projects that are supposed to start while I am gone… Packing bags starts about half an hour before departure. The record was about six years back when I have managed to sleep only 20 minutes during the night before I left for the desert dance experience in Morrocco. After changing a couple of flights and a painful drive across the Atlas mountains, I have entered the Sahara in deeply psychedelic state.

Anyway, it is never the excitement that causes the chaos, it is just pure work that needs to be done. Crazy.

So, there is yet another night of sleep deprivation and chaos ahead of me and tomorrow early morning we are leaving for Spain, this is to say me and Marjeta. Attending some trainings, a big congress of interculturalists and some fun and relaxation too. It will be Granada and the Andaluzia region mostly.

So, hold on, dear friends. I’ll be back. In two weeks, if I don’t get really inspired somewhere in Sevilla along the way.

Ubuntu – nobody is ever outside

My wife, an interculturalist, introduced me to the Ubuntu concept after she got home, entirely inspired and enthusiastic, from an international training that was led by two African interculturalists. I remember that immediately when hearing about the Ubuntu, I sensed an utter greatness in it and felt an immense respect and admiration for it.

But, on the other hand, I also felt rather distanced from it, almost completely unable to connect to it or to relate to it in any other way but rational, intellectual. I did not know why I felt this remoteness, but did not think about the matter all that much until I, a couple of days back, was awarded with the Ubuntu badge.

On the one hand I felt really honoured and happy about this award, but my confusion in regards to my perception of the Ubuntu concept came out again and got me thinking and observing. What is it that distances me, in my body and in my feelings, from this concept despite I admire it so much. Why am I having difficulties to connect with it, what is this gap made of?

I noticed that my respect for the Ubuntu spirit was mixed with feelings about my westernised mind being just too dirty and spoiled with the intoxicating ideas of the omnipotence of the individual identity, the importance of personal growth and development, all this individualistic discourses, that the abyss between me and the otherness was just too wide for me to feel the fundamental connectedness of us all. I felt I was so far away from even understanding the Ubuntu, let alone living it.

But I was still exploring this area within me and while watching Mandela’s short explanation of what the Ubuntu in life is (or used to be in the old times, at least), it finally dawned on me.

It was the deserve oriented language that made the gap, the canyon between the spirit of Ubuntu and my little self. This discourse of always operating with the idea that I have to deserve to be accepted, appreciated, loved, respected…, this cultural context of there being some universal rules I need to (and will always fail to) follow in order to deserve my needs to be met within a group of people, this paradigm was dominating the society and all my socializations throughout all my life. And I internalized it into the very fundaments of my own being and my beingness. Do I deserve to be accepted? Do I deserve to be a part of this beauty? Have I complied with all the requirement to be let in? Am I good enough? Will they find out that I am in fact not?

I see this deserve oriented language of conditioning as one of the most fundamental failures of the humanity. Resulting in being conditioned and conditioning others. If you do this and that then you may qualify to deserve my love. If you comply with this and that, then you may deserve to be let in. Distinctions. Hierarchy. Levels of importance. Inner and outer circles. Social climbing. Competing. Building up as much power over others as possible…

What I am trying to say here is that I feel, somewhere very deep and barely tangible within me, that the Ubuntu starts within us, with our perception of ourselves, our own worth and our own needs. And with the realization that it is not at all about deserving or not deserving. This language and these notions are completely irrelevant and meaningless.

Ubuntu, as I see it, is a complete absence of evaluation and deserve oriented perception of self and others. We do not have to deserve to be accepted, to be part of it all, to be taken care of. And the same is true for everybody else. Because we can not actually be separated, be not-connected. We are connected, ultimately and universally. We can not be if others are not. We are because others are. We are because we all are.

The only choice we have is to choose to continue denying it all or to choose to cease denying the obvious and fundamental. And to step in, fully.

the enemy within

Some time ago my laptop computer started to behave a bit weird. The fan was zooming on maximum speed all the time, laptop started to generate suspicious amounts of heat and it seemed to me as if it was just about to explode right there, on my desk. So I called up the guy who takes care of the hardware in our house to take away the damned machine and to do something with it. After a couple of hours he called and said: “I have opened it up and I am sending you a photo, you have got to see it, it is so funny, ha ha ha, ho ho ho…” I was really eager to see what stimulated all this happiness within him.

Then the photo came.

You see, the red arrow points to the place where the hot air is supposed to be getting out of the computer, blown out by the fan, in order to keep the hot processor from starting up a romantic little fire. Now, nothing was able to get out because the opening was completely blocked up.

With our cat’s hair!

The thing is that we have this terrible bossy cat in our house. Or, to be more precise, there is a cat living in this house and we are her humble servants. She is always on the wrong side of the door, demanding us to let her to the other side. And back. And again. And again. She is always hungry. And always angry. Never satisfied. Waking up kids in the morning, demanding food. Now! Right away!

And now she is after my computer.

This is a war.

On the other hand, I am completely impotent in this case. My communicational abilities and conflict resolution skills don’t mean a thing in this case. And she does not seem to care a bit about my inner conflicts and dilemmas.

The ultimate acknowledgement

Through my work with groups and individuals I get a lot of acknowledgement and appreciation and I can say that all my needs in regards to this are completely met. Because of this I feel very good, content and grateful to have so much of this sort of feedback in my life.

Yet, an ultimate acknowledgement came about a month or so ago and touched me so deeply that my heart is still warm and my mind still a bit confused.

You see, most of my work is with adults, but I love to work with kids as well, be it with college students or in primary schools. The school project that stirred up so many feelings within me half a year ago, brought me also one of the most beautiful and moving experiences of this year. With the beginning of the new school year children asked their teachers to contact me again and tell me that they, the kids, wish me so much to continue working with them.

I barely survived hearing this. Children, right at the beginning of the school year, after having a two months school vacation, remembered me and invited me to come back and be with them, work with them.

I feel completely honoured, touched, moved to tears. It is a very beautiful thing to get a clear acknowledgement from an adult, of course, but to get it from children in such a pure manner, I mean, I don’t know what to say, I feel like just melting down in all the wonderful feelings I am having.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I meet with them again and continue our work on nonviolent conflict resolution. And I am pretty excited and nervous about that, as you can imagine. And peacefully happy. Yes, very peacefully happy and content.

Thanks, kids, thanks so much.

Sex and the question of uncosciousness

With the house full of teenagers you have issues regarding sex floating around in the air all the time, and so memories tend to arise in us who have been walking this planet for some time already.

I remember that I was extremely interested in sex from my early teenage years on and was getting ready, for many years, for the big occasion of the first time. I had so many fantasies with regard to that, imagining what would be the perfect way to do it. One of my favourite was that my father would, somehow, get this brilliant idea to buy me a high class prostitute for one night, as a birthday gift. Well, he never got this telepathic message, despite my intense transmitting.

And I was, of course, full of dreadful fears too, worrying about all the ways in which things might have gone astray: “Will I know how to do it? Where to put it? Will I find all the things I was supposed to find?” Many dilemmas indeed.

Anyway, putting my desires and fears together, my conclusion was that the perfect sparring partner for my first sexual intercourse would have been a beautiful and unconscious woman. Willingly unconscious, to be precise; I wouldn’t want to do anything violent. But the thing was that I thought that if she was unconscious:

• I would have all the time in the world to explore her body and get familiar with all the crucial parts
• I would be able to try out, in peace, various positions and see if I got everything right, do the test drive in a way
• I would be completely safe from the horrible possibility of being laughed at, ridiculed, coursed, yelled at, blamed… (I had many possible disastrous scenarios in my mind, you see)

So, about 15 years ago I was, in a personal growth workshop, sharing with the group these fears I have had as a young adolescent about the first sexual experience and the idea that, at that time, the best possible partner seemed to be an unconscious woman. Upon hearing me saying that, a woman in the circle started to laugh, saying: “I cannot believe what I am hearing. You know, at that age my wish was to be unconscious while having the first sexual intercourse. We would have been a perfect couple for mutual loss of virginity!”

Yes, being an adolescent is heavy, really heavy.

And, with my first sexual experience, a million years ago, the girl I was with was very experienced and very far from being unconscious.

And I survived. Barely.

Give us back some heavy duty maturity rituals

When I manage to observe my teenagers with empathy, I can see that they have a tough time trying to figure out their position in this world and their identity. Perhaps a tougher time than my generation had.

This new generations, at least in the modern Western societies, have been bombed with information and options to a much higher degree that any generation before. Even adults are having a hard time figuring out how to live their lives surrounded with hundreds of TV channels, thousands of commercials creating and shaping their needs, millions of consumer goods dragging credit cards out of their wallets, all the internet goodies giving them an illusion that there’s absolutely no need to go away from their computers at all… It is so understandable that adolescents fall prey to all these temptations in their teenage years of confusion, fragility and many searches.

When in my teenage years, I used to spend a couple of hours each day roaming with my dog around forests and another couple of hours per day listening to music in darkness just to sort out my daily confusions, thoughts, existential dilemmas and emotions. I can imagine that these modern teenagers have the same dilemmas blurring their beings on the one hand, and many more distractions that keep them from actually facing and digging through them, on the other.

And there’s yet another thing that keeps my mind busy lately, thinking that we parents could help and support them a bit more than what we actually do. I read that some anthropologists claim that puberty is an invention of modern times and that ages back teenagers did not face the same periods of confusion between the childhood and the adulthood as they do now. The crucial point seems to have been the rituals of maturity.

Becoming a fully responsible adult seems to had been a more clear-cut achievement, with people knowing just how long they were children and from which point on the childhood was gone. In some cultures they have sent them to monasteries for a year or so, to go to savannah to kill a lion, or just let them have their 12^th or 14^th or whichever birthday; and from that moment on they were to kiss their childhoods goodbye, leave their warm families, go into the world, build their own house, get their own goats and cows and field and lives; and be fully responsible for themselves.

Our modern kids do not have any of that; what they have is many years of lack of clarity, many years during which the liberties of a child are confused with the responsibilities of a grown-up person, where they want to enjoy the comfort of the family house, but not share the responsibilities of the household. And this long passage is not only killing for us parents, but also for the teenagers, adding tremendous weight to their already not easy search for identity, meaning and a way to live.

I can count myself as somebody who, though not with the best childhood possible, have been fortunate enough to affirm his adulthood and maturity with three initiations in one life. The first one was my suicide attempt at 16 – a clear and fully responsible choice to step out of the painful-but-safe known into the complete unknown. The second was to leave, again, the known and pre-set life and jump into the void of roaming, with no money and maps, in a heavy-duty hippy style, around Middle East and Africa for half a year. No mommy and daddy around to get me out of troubles, only me and the big, uncontrollable world. The third one was the 13 months of obligatory military service in the Yugoslav army – where my needs, wishes, thoughts, feelings, values… did not matter a thing. Yet there I was, finding my way through the day, one after another. Ok, I was not enjoying every bit of these passages, but they were actual thresholds and every single time I came out on the other side more firmly grounded in the reality of this life. And, despite all of that, it still took me another decade or so in order to start acting and living as a fully responsible and mature human being.

So, no matter how irritated sometimes I can get while observing my three teenagers dragging themselves around the house, whining over petty little things that happen to them during the day and resisting to take on even little discomfort or responsibilities, if I look with my heart I can see they are not having a nice time. Sometimes having no problems and facing no boundaries can make you numb and ignorant of everything. Which is painful.

So I am seriously considering creating certain maturity rituals, perhaps encouraging them to take a year off, go pick oranges in Australia or something to make money and afterwards backpack around the world a bit. Or go to a humanitarian mission for a few months somewhere on the other side of the planet. Or go work somewhere for a year and then see if studying is still such a boring and terrible idea. Or… Hm. Do you have any ideas for initiating teenagers, in a humane way, into the adulthood and reality of life?