Tribal wars

Among the many important things I have learned about the nonviolent communication and nonviolent relationships, the issue of requests vs. demands holds a special position. Not only that it is now completely clear to me that I don’t want ever to demand people doing anything at all; simply because I don’t want them to be doing anything out of being forced to do it by my demands, but rather because they would be genuinely interested and honestly motivated to do it – you know, the children-feeding-ducks analogy again. Another thing that I also learned is to distinguish within myself between requests and demands. Namely, sometimes I might be quite convinced that I am only requesting people to do something, but then it turns out that there was a demand hidden underneath this polite request. The way of checking out is pretty easy; I just need to sincerely ask myself: “Will I be completely happy if their answer is NO?” If I will be disappointed, angry, hurt…, then this means I was in fact demanding, expecting the other to behave in a certain way, with plenty of shoulds in my head: “He should this, she shouldn’t that…”

Anyway, lately I have been struggling with another issue in regards to the question of demands and requests. Working with youth or when communicating with my teenagers, I often find it so difficult to get across that I am only inviting them to do something, proposing something, requesting, but not demanding anything. Somehow my communication gets distorted somewhere in the empty space between us. Our dialogue follows this algorithm:

Me: “Would you be willing to do ….?”

Teenagers: “So are you saying we should…?”

Me: “No, I am not saying what you should or should not, I am just asking whether you would be willing to …?

Teenagers: “Yeah, but the thing is that you are expecting us to…?

Me: “No, I am inviting you to… And if my proposal is not working for you, I will be only too happy to sit with you and try to find a way that will work for everybody…”

And sometimes this dialogue continues: me sincerely inviting, them hearing demands, me proposing, them hearing shoulds and shouldn’ts, me honestly requesting, them hearing orders, me wanting to empower them and their power of choice, them hearing restrictions and limitations… Sometimes it takes days, sometimes it takes weeks for them to start hearing my message…

It seems to me that the contextual communication is overriding the direct one. It is not what I am saying and what the energy behind my words is. It is rather who I am. You see, I am an adult and they are teenagers, kids. From their perception I am from the hostile tribe of grown-ups who don’t listen, who don’t hear, who don’t pay attention and who don’t give a damn about kids’ needs, feelings, inner worlds, opinions, perceptions…

I belong to the violent tribe of grown up masters of the world, who have the power over kids and who just demand, order, expect, boss around and manipulate in any way just in order to get their way. I am a member of the aggressive clan that they have learned to be very careful with and fight very hard to emotionally survive.

Actually, understanding the context in which they are hearing my words now makes my attempts a bit easier, a bit more clear. Now I at least know that when I start working with a new group of teenagers, I need to be extremely careful to not invade their world with my adult arrogance and to not try to rape them with my “wisdom”. Because then I will only prove to them that I indeed am from that tribe and the war will start.

What I need to do to is to sit in front of them as simple and open and honest as I can, vulnerable and imperfect, and listen to them with a sincere desire to understand their world, to respect it, to connect with it. And patiently wait for the inspection and evaluation period to be over and to, perhaps eventually, be honoured to be trusted and invited.

And when this contact happens, it is just about the most beautiful feeling of connecting with another over a huge and a deep gap.

In Search of balance

The older I get, the more enjoyable I find stretching out and giving, contributing to the well-being of people of there. It is just plain enjoyable, you know, in terms of feeding ducks, it feels like the best thing I can ever do in my life. To help making somebody’s life more beautiful.

But, on the other hand, with this I also seem to be more prone to forget about my own needs and start losing balance after some time. The difficulty begins with the fact that at the moment of deciding whether I will reach out a bit more, I really feel that I can do it, I feel that I want to do it and that I will enjoy doing it. And when I do it I still enjoy doing it, giving, helping, reaching out. It all seems perfectly OK.

And then I wake up in the morning and I am on the edge, with zero patience, not wanting to see anybody, just wanting to be alone and regenerate, recharge my batteries, nurture myself in complete aloneness. Since I feel totally empty and dry. What I don’t like in this situation is that the people that are closest to me in my life get to bear with the antisocial, grumpy, introvert, frustrated and tired me. Rather often.

This used to be at least a bit clearer some years ago. Then at least I was aware that, when being asked for help of favour, my yes had a hidden no somewhere behind my nervous smile and I knew I just had to learn how to say no when I actually meant no. And I did learn to do that and life was not too difficult in this regard.

Nowadays my yes to reach out and give is a true yes, a sincere yes from my heart. I truly mean it and I am enjoying it while giving, but then I wake up one day, gasping for air, with batteries plain dead.

I guess the next step for me is to learn to foresee that I will be soon needing some space and some time for myself and to provide this for myself before I even start feeling the need for it. Start cooking food well in advance so that it is ready to be eaten when I get hungry. Sounds like some sort of Super Zen, but it also sounds like plain common sense.

Damn, finding and keeping the right balance between contributing to others and contributing to my well-being sometimes seems to me so unbelievably hard, as if I am missing an organ, a sensor to tell me what is going on deep within and give me some hints. A GPS device of some sort. Well…

Well, I will just have to learn this art, I guess, what else is there to do?

Barely surviving, aren’t we?

So here I am, facilitating the conflict resolution part of this two week Talk Together project of bringing together people from Western Sahara conflict zone, from the so-called forgotten conflict, hearing and taking in personal accounts and stories about lives spent in refugee camps in Tindouf, about regular beatings and abuse from authorities in the occupied territory, about the sad and painful lives of hundreds of thousands of people, generation after generation.

And it strucks me every day and every hour that people who share these stories do not use any of the dramatic or complaining language, even while telling us to what little amounts their food and water supply is being limited… They speak with pride, openness, incredible love and inner peace, not even hatred towards the people somewhere in some government palaces, playing their power games at their expense.

Yet, in our privileged Western world with warm houses, streets, water, money, shops, electricity, education, hospitals and all the abundance of luxury…, we tend to use the survivalistic language all the time: “Oh, my life is so hard, I don’t know where my head is, I am barely surviving, I am struggling along, only just managing somehow…” Standing in front of a packed wardrobe, crying: “I have nothing to wear!” Staring in the full refrigerator: “There’s nothing edible in there.” Complaining for not being provided the perfect service by the society, government, family or whoever else, all the time. Feeling that the whole world is against us and we, poor beings, just don’t know what to do.

Sometimes just being aware of our western jaded narcissistic culture makes me feel sick. It all seems to be so egoistic; it is all about our own happiness, it is all about our own fulfilment and if we are not in a constant state of material and physical bliss, we dramatize it so darn much, feeling what great heroes we must be to manage to survive. Doing our best to deny the world out there, pretending it is too far and out of the reach, pretending we have nothing to do with them.

Yeah, our lives are so dramatically tough, aren’t they?

To wise up

About a year ago I was pondering in my post To Do What You’ve Got To Do the reasons that lead us to choose whatever we choose. This question got further triggered by the comment by Sanity Found and has not left me since. What actually prompts us to make a step into the unknown, what is it that inspires us to make a big shift, a crucial leap?

It all reminds me of the Hero’s journey, the mythical pattern described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the monomyth that also beautifully serves as a metaphor for the processes of personal growth, transformational learning, the inner journey of every individual.

In the Hero’s journey the to-be-hero lives an ordinary life and receives a call to the adventure. At first he refuses the call, not willing to step into the unknown, out of fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, a sense of duty…, but after some time he accepts the call fully and crosses the first threshold, fully embarks on a dangerous journey into the unknown.

So, what is it that re-ignites this spark, what inspires us to step from an ordinary life onto the heroic track? Is it that at a certain point we have enough of everything, enough of pain and meaninglessness, or is it that at the certain moment we finally start taking our lives seriously enough not to keep throwing them away? Why then? Why not long before that? Is it that with time we generate enough courage? What is the tipping point? Is it just an arbitrary choice, or is there something more to it, something more fatal?

I mean, it does not really seem to matter in which direction we are making this big step: is it about meeting our own little needs, or about making somebody’s life more beautiful, or about trying to answer the eternal question Do I love well?, or perhaps just about abandoning the superficial orderly and empty life and embark on a road of highest meaning and passion…, it always somehow comes down to the realization of the importance of the question how do we want to spend this precious little time we have, what life do we want to lead, what do we feel we are here for….

Well, no matter how I look at it, it definitely seems to me that the sooner we make a step, the better it will be for our own well-being. Because it really does feel that if we are not living our life fully (and I mean fully) according to the deepermost meanings, if we are not leading our lives in a way that will make us fully content and fulfilled when looking back in our final hours, if we are holding ourselves back and waiting for the perfect moment sometime in the foggy future rather than fully engaging right now, …, well, then, I guess, the emptiness and the void and the frustration will just not go away. With the clock mercilessly ticking somewhere in the background.

Or, as Aimee Mann’s song in Magnolia, one of my favourites movies of all time, says: “It is not going to stop, till you wise up!”