Happily juggling and balancing between connecting and disconnecting

You know, I could easily get used to a life like the one I am having for the past few days, being on my seven-day retreat in solitude on the out-of-the-tourist-season Adriatic coast. With our van, of course. Sunny days, calm sea, nobody around (except for a few cats and two or three little fishing boats slowly passing by each day)… The beauty of it all lies in the possibility to simply follow my needs, from one moment to another. Meaning that I sleep a lot, eat when hungry, sit and stare into the horizon for as long as it feels good, do some stretching on the beach when my body desires so, climb my bicycle when my blood feels like moving a bit faster… Sounds like pure Zen, now that I think of it. The absence of pressures, obligations, responsibilities, should and shouldn’ts is just so liberating.

One big part of me totally enjoys this, yet a small part of me misses being with people that I love and longs for reconnecting with them. And, when I am home or when I work, a big part of me enjoys the contact and the connection with people, yet a small part yearns for solitude.

There seems to be this eternal inner conflict, or rather a discrepancy between the two tensions: the first one is to relate, to connect, to have love and friendship and communion and all of that with other human beings, and the other is to back away from everybody and just be free, spontaneous, autonomous, self-caring. Connection means relationship and it limits freedom. Freedom brings isolation and limits connection.

It does not seem to me that one would need to choose between the two (what a relief, actually ). But it does seem that both clusters of needs are of a crucial importance – perhaps not for everybody, but I dare to say that for many of us.

I am happy to notice that I am really in a somewhat ideal position regarding this matter. Through my wife and kids as well as through the work I do I get all the connection and communion I can ever need or wish for.  No needs unmet there, no frustration whatsoever. On the other hand, when I need to go somewhere away and be alone, I again have all support possible. Kids are totally cool with it, and my wife, my dearest wife, she is so supportive that I am afraid I will never be able to equally reciprocate.

But I do need to be careful while juggling with these needs: be with myself, be with my wife, be with my kids, be with my friends, try to do a meaningful contribution through my work… If I start neglecting one, I soon start feeling entrapped, frustrated… It is really all about balance, isn’t? Juggling and balancing, this is what personal growth seems to be about.

It was me & kids a few weeks ago, now it is me & myself, and we already plan to do a me & my wife weekend off soon… And in between I work a bit, which covers the me & everybody part.

Life’s not that complicated, after all.

Where has my world gone?

I feel pretty much lost in this modern world of virtuality, networks, multitasking… Old communication patterns dying away, new arising and my ability to even understand them, let alone use them, is a joke. The idea of blogging I understood and started to use it. The idea of Facebook I understood, got used to it and got involved. Cannot really say whether I am using it, but let’s say that Facebook is using me and I don’t feel any pain. Yet, this is to say. But Twitter? This one I don’t get – neither the thing, nor the idea behind it.

But things are evolving rapidly. While I thought e-mail was still a hip way of communication, widely in use, young people turn out to not use it much anymore. They say it is too slow. Our kids only open it once a week. So, if I want to send them something, Facebook it the way to do it. Very complicated for me.

And then I write a simple post on this blog. And some people comment here.  But some people send me their comments via e-mail. Other people comment my posts on Facebook. Some comment on BlogCatalog. Perhaps somebody is commenting this on Twitter too – how would I know, I never even saw the damn thing. And yeah, yeah, I know it is not a thing, it is something else, thank you.

So, I am lost. I write here, you answer there, he answers over on the other side, and she answers way down yonder… And everybody seems to be OK with that. While I just stare and try to see the brightness of the future. And all I see is the vanishing light.

This stuff is totally incompatible with my mind. Somebody over there is producing 100 new expressions, abbreviations and technologies per second and there is no way for me to adjust to this world. Suddenly not-knowing is not just as enjoyable as I thought it was.

So, yesterday I have spent two hours to put the RSS button (or whatever this is called) in the right up corner of this blog. Two hours! And I was at least twice on the edge of emotional breakdown during the process. Where has the world, in which it was possible to fix things with a hammer, pliers and a screwdriver, gone? When? How? Why? Give me back my world!

I just want to return to my cave, please.

A sad love story, that’s what it is

Driving back from Rome, with my two teenagers dozing off next to me in our van, the rainy highways got my mind going in a melancholic direction, overwhelming me with emotions.

I became so aware, after having this week with them, that we have such a cosy feeling between us. We know each other so well as we have spent so much time together in our lives. We have been together since their birth and we have gone through quite some things, ups and downs, from peak experiences to the boring day-to-day life. The bond between us in incredible – there’s so much trust and closeness, connection and love.

Yet this bond has started to weaken and it is going to proceed in that direction, I guess.

Their focus is less and less on their relationship with me and on the family, and more and more on their life out there. They love me, but they don’t want to share everything with me, just the same way as I did not feel like sharing things with my parents, when I was a teenager. And even less so afterwards. I am their father, whom they love and care for, but I am not their tribe and the world they are interested in. I am another universe. They have their own universes and I am only occasionally invited to visit and have a look from the outside. I am a dinosaur that you don’t want to invite inside the house because dinosaurs are all clumsy, they break stuff, they cause so much trouble, and, well, because they are dinosaurs.

This is all logical and natural, of course.

Well, actually no, there is one thing about it that does not feel all that natural. If two people love each other, they want to be together and share their worlds, time and lives. But not in the case between parents and their grown-up kids. Because here I have a lot of love and care and closeness, yet this love story is slowly heading toward a separation.

And part of me feels sad, and another part feels happy and proud and content.

Proud not to know

Celebrating myself has always been a hard one for me. Through coping with circumstances in my childhood and teenage years I have developed a very disconnecting way of dialoguing with myself, putting myself down, evaluating, blaming… The diary that I was writing while on my first roaming around India at age 20, for example, is painfully full of my self-blaming, self-evaluating and putting myself down for every imperfect thought or action, for every unspiritual feeling. I was my own best enemy.

After this phase of a rather complete self-denial I went through the phase of starting to enjoy some parts of myself, but then when I was talking about them, sharing, presenting to others with a childish enthusiasm, it sometimes came across as bragging and I immediately felt even worse – I started to blame myself for this unspiritual and narcissistic behaviour.

But, as it happens when you chew things for a longer period of time, gradually the oscillation of the peaks was lessening and nowadays I don’t experience this as a problem or even an issue at all, it is not hindering me in anyway. But, to be honest, I still do notice some second thoughts when about to share a celebration about myself, when about to present to others something about myself that makes me feel joyful and happy. There is this bit of confusion somewhere in the back of my mind.

Anyway, when I was recapitulating the year 2009, I noticed there were many things I was happy about, but perhaps the most important celebration about myself came out of the observation that I am more and more, perhaps almost entirely, of a learner. I am so happy to see that the phase of “a teacher and a preacher wannabe” is long over. I guess that the knower/teacher phase of my life started to form sometime in the teenage years, when I longed to become somebody that knows what life is all about. I was forming – along with the zillions of other teenagers around the planet I guess – my identity around the idea that not only did I know what it was all about, but also that I knew better than the others. And so I was superior, right?  The world failed to recognize this advanced wisdom of mine, but I thought that since messiahs sometimes even got crucified, I was not doing too badly at all.

So, here I am, about to turn 44, and I am so happy to know that I don’t know much. I am so happy to not feel this urge to go out and teach and preach and to make other people change their perceptions and thoughts. Because I sincerely don’t care whether I know more than anybody else. I am so happy to feel humbled in my ignorance, less attached to the idea of knowing. And I am happy to be a curious and an eager learner.

I am actually celebrating that I hear myself saying “I don’t know” much more often than saying “I know”. I am also happy that right now I cannot remember when was the last time I tried to persuade anybody that I was more right than he or she.

Hey, it is such a relief really.

So, here’s to all the world’s happy learners. Whoopee!

My New Year’s Resolutions actualy work!

For many years my New Year’s Resolutions were mostly a joke. Something I kept copy-pasting from the previous Januarys to the present ones – again and again: I want to take care of my body and health, be more proactive, improve this relationship and cancel that one, start this and finish that… And the copy-pasting ritual was actually frustrating, starting my New Years with the thoughts about what a failure I was.

Finally I realized I needed to become more specific with my resolutions and split them up into smaller and achievable steps, something I would be able to do on a weekly or even daily basis. I also realized I wanted to clearly measure and evaluate my progress as I moved, in order to be able to react on time and introduce the adjustments needed. And I also realized I needed electronic reminders as well as human support, coaching, that would keep my intention alive, so that I would not waste even more time falling into the same traps as always: forgetting it all, being just too lazy to climb out of automatisms…

So now I have the system that works for me:

1. At the beginning of the year I go through the last year, celebrate achievements and think about what I want to work on next. I think about my needs that I kept neglecting, I think about my core values that I want my life to be aligned with, I think about what kind of person I want to be and what kind of life do I want to live… I try to see as complete picture as I can, taking my existence as seriously as possible.
2. Then I split it all up according to different realms of my life: physical, spiritual, life inspiration and meaning, relationship with my wife, relationships with our kids, other relationships, my work… In each realm of my life I write down where I want to move and what I want to do in order to be more fulfilled.
3. Then I talk it all over with my wife, we compare our intentions and talk about how we can support each other and how we actually WILL support each other.
4. Then I split all these intentions of mine into monthly, weekly and daily plans. I print it out (for every month, as they come) in the form of a complex table, and post it on the wall right next to my computer in my office so that it bites me in my face non-stop.
5. Afterwards I tell it all to my friend (and he tells me about his plans). He is my free coach and I am his. It’s fun.
6. And then the most important thing begins: with a thick red marker I tick off every thing that I complete, for every day, for every week, for every month. The blank spaces painfully remind me that I have not done what I wanted in order to have a more fulfilled life.
7. At the beginning of every month I send to my friend (and he does the same to me) a report about how I have been doing through the previous months. Since it is rather embarrassing to say I have not done anything, it motivates me to actually do more than I would have otherwise. When we see the other one is not reaching his own goals, we open this up and offer more support in dealing with the issue. Helps keeping focus incredibly.
8. I sit down with my wife very regularly and we talk about whether we are progressing in the ways we would love. Do we live according to our values and needs? Do we progress towards where our passions are…? Do we drive our lives or are we being driven by them?

So it is basically all about stopping often, checking the direction and the pace, observing and measuring and evaluating, refocusing… In a way, it is anything but forgetting it all until the next January.

And it works, it really works and I am very happy to look back over the last year and see that I have moved considerably. Physically I feel better (not every moment of the year was like this), my body is more in shape, more healthy… There’s still work to be done on providing my body with more sleep on the regular basis. An hour more per day would be great. Sounds really a petty thing, but it influences the whole of my life pretty much, my well-being, my relationships…

My relationship with my wife is great, doing better and better actually, especially after some breakthrough moments at the NVC training in Greece in September. There will be more of this in the coming year and I am already looking forward to this.

I am also happy with my relationship with all three of our teenagers – not the easiest thing to deal with, as you can imagine, but there is trust, openness, respect, love, easiness, support and open flow of communication. And relating to them is truly enjoyable and fulfilling most of the time. I managed to have quite some quality time with them this year, at home as well as abroad… And I have a vicious plan for the next year – to drag them into the nature. Will see how this works out.

Inspiration: hey, there’s loads of this nowadays, I have been involved in so many inspiring events, especially in regards to NVC, Zen, Dialogue Process, Intercultural Communication and all the notes from these events will take me a whole week to sort them out and bring them down to Earth. And, hey, we wrote a book and it is going to be published in a few months time.

And, the most important thing for me, the question of meaning; things are definitely moving in this area and I am slowly moving towards doing more ultimately meaningful things…

So, my New Year’s Resolutions are already forming and I am already celebrating the fact that they will improve my life even more.

This sounds weird – I am celebrating today that I will be happier tomorrow. Sounds like the ultimate definition of optimism…

Battlestar Galactica vs. Christianity

Sitting in the Sistine Chapel while on my week off with kids in Rome, looking at all these frescoes of the Christian stories on the ceiling, I could not help myself to start linking them to Battlestar Galactica.

What on Earth is he talking about, I hear you whisper. Bear with me a bit, please.

You see, me and my kids are big fans of the Battlestar Galactica 2004-2009 TV series and were, after ending a day of Rome exploration with a serious dinner, sitting in our camper van and watching episodes. So, where’s the link with the Sistine Chapel?

Well, all these Christian stories – as well as these of other religions – keep opening up philosophical dilemmas of human life; what is the nature and meaning of life, what is the right way of living, how to and how not to, why, who…

Now, if you take Battlestar Galactica, while being a science fiction TV series, it also keeps opening up rather heavy duty themes and dilemmas through its stories: religion vs. science, killing one saving thousands, sacrificing your own son and saving humanity, being faithful to a given promise or to the inner sense of conscience, search for our true identity and the question what difference does it make when you find out and see it is not quite what you hope it would be, about guilt and responsibility, about racism, nationalism, us and them distinction, grief and forgiving, about leading and serving…, and so on and so forth.

But there is one huge difference: in Battlestar Galactica (or Star Wars or whatever else) these stories are presented as stories, perhaps with the hope they will entertain as well as inspire. In Christianity (and other religions), the stories are presented as the truth. Not only a truth, but THE TRUTH, the one and only truth that humans MUST believe in, or…

And, of course, since there are many different religions with their true stories, therefore many true accounts of the God’s way, we have a problem and we need to march into the holy wars. Just imagine a few aliens coming over from the outer space, observing this scene of ours: people making up stories, writing them down in books and then claiming these stories were written by God and finally fighting each other over the question who’s stories are the true God’s stories. They probably would not see us as very intelligent species.

Well, I so much love to hear (it does not happen very often) a spiritual person or a religious leader saying: “Hey guys, I don’t know, I really don’t. I perceive life as such and such, but this perception is no better than other perceptions. So why don’t we just sit down and share our worries and joys and pains, try to understand each other and just simply connect?”

Like when Soto Zen founder Dogen came from long studies and trainings back to Japan and when he was asked what he learned and what he knew was the Truth, he was reported to have said: “Well, the only thing I know for sure is that eyes are horizontal and that nose is vertical!”

Anyway, when somebody comes over and says: “This book was written by the God, the one and only God. Everything in this book is the absolute truth. You must live according to it or you will burn in hell. And you must go around the world and convert everybody else to believing into these stories, with the sword if needed…”, well, I will always choose to turn away and prefer to get entertained and inspired by Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars.