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!”

The die has been cast

I took about a week to see how the idea of ending this blogging episode feels. And it primarily feels good. But it also feels sad.

It feels good because now I suddenly had this extra hour or so per day on average and I managed to use it; not to work more but to enjoy life more – spent more time with my kids, with my wife, out in the nature, resting and sleeping… And I like it. This is how I want to proceed – less computer, less virtuality, more “reality”, more direct interactions, more rest, meditation, nature… So I guess the answer is clear, however difficult it may be to write it down: I am wrapping up this blog. I will still leave it open for some time, as long as visitors keep coming and comments keep appearing.

And it also feels sad, since I really loved creatively expressing what was alive in me and, above all, connecting with all you beautiful people out there. It truly enriched my life. Those of you who often commented here and did let me know where you were from; I will definitely drop you an e-mail in case I come to your part of the world and perhaps we can go for a coffee or so. And give each other a big fat hug. Some of you I already feel as good personal friends.

Here goes the parting haiku:

While the sun is setting

I end my blog.

Everything is peaceful.

To blog or not to blog

It is funny how things tend to evolve rather contrarily to expectations. I took off with our van for another few days of solitude on an island, thinking it would be a lot of bicycling and jogging during the day time and writing – posts for this blog among other things – in the evenings. Since I seem to be under a vicious curse, I got bad weather again and so once more not much outdoor stuff happening. And the real  surprise was that I did not find it enjoyable to write posts for this blog.

So, here I am sitting with a list of about 30 themes for posts, yet I just do not feel inspired to write anything. But I do enjoy writing other stuff. Day after day. And I started to wonder what is going on.

Basically I see two possibilities – either it is only a phase and perhaps after some time, when I get enough of rest and other needs taken care of, I will start enjoying blogging again. Or, as the other option goes, perhaps I just don’t feel like writing this blog anymore. Perhaps I just need to shift some focus from this cyber world back into the so-called real life. As you very well know, reading and writing blogs consumes quite some hours per week and right now I feel I would perhaps rather spend this time:

• connecting with my kids and my wife
• walking, cycling, jogging… in nature
• listening to music
• getting back to my guitar and start learning flamenco
• focusing on some very inspiring projects I have been having playing with for quite some time
• writing a book
• meditating
• sleeping …

And there’s another thing that bother’s me in regards to this blogging thing and I just cannot seem to find a way around it: it is a self-promoting trip. It feels like screaming into the world: “Hey, look, this is me me me, I am so smart and so cool…” And, frankly, I am tired of this aspect of my existence. I just want to cut the crap and silence this ego-monster down.

I guess I will just let it evolve in a natural course and see what comes up as the most true part of myself. And follow it.

By the way, I can see this one is the 99th post. I wonder what the 100th will be…

Snow. Peace. Love. Meaning.

After a romantic dinner at the sushi restaurant here in town, me and my wife enjoyed Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona at the local cinema and were pleasantly surprised by the amount of snow all around when we, after the film was over, walked out into the night. The easy stroll back home, through the silence of the falling snow, ignited the magic within my being.

I was too awake to go to bed with my wife and so I sat in the living room in darkness, with my water pipe and Keith Jarrett’s Vienna Concert way after midnight, just watching through the window, getting carried away by this enchanting sight of snow and peace.

At first my thoughts circled around the awareness of the incredible speed that the life is passing by with. My son Filip is 17 years and a half. This is how old I was when I went to Africa. Soon he will start driving the car and begin thinking about the University. Dev and Lucija; I barely manage to recognize them when we bump into each other in the kitchen. I am surrounded by these big people. Where have my little children gone? When did all of this happen? Did I fall asleep? Did I blink?

The next thought after this lead, of course, back to my main theme; the meaning of it all. Am I living my life in a meaningful manner? Am I wasting it and will I regret many things when entering the tunnel after some time?

Then the peaceful realization got born within me. An organically and naturally grown little glimpse of the meaning started to breathe. The title of the first chapter of Jack Kornfield’s book A Path With Heart came to my mind, the crucial question that has been with me since I have read it in his book a long, long time ago: “Did I love well?”

Did I love well? I believe that when everything ends this is going to be the only question that will matter and have the power to bring peace within me.

Did I love well?

Yes, the question of the meaning is just as simple. Sometimes.

So…

Do I love well?

Racism immunity?

I have always thought that the fact that I was growing up in an all-white society really gave me a rather limited perspective on life and was sort of envious of people that were born in more culturally diverse societies. But about a month ago at the interculturalist congress and Granada, Spain, while sharing with a young American lady about various topics that had to do with racism, I have realized that perhaps not all was bad about my situation and that I have actually inherited something beautiful – the state of being colour blind. Let me explain.

You see, I grew up in the country that does not exist anymore: Yugoslavia. We were brought up in a discourse that the West, with it’s capitalist exploitation of people, was bad. And we were also taught that the East, with it’s communist dictatorship and ignorance to basic human rights, was also bad. We were taught that neither of the two extremes of the Cold War were of any good and that the world needed the third way. The opportunity for the third way was seen in the Non-Aligned movement that basically consisted of the Third World countries, and Yugoslavia, the only member from Europe. So the heroes that were presented to us were in general, along with Tito, of Asian and African origin, like Gandhi, Nehru, Naser, Kaunda, Mandela… We were taught to respect these people and race did not play any role AT ALL. In fact, white race was, in general, seen as aggressive and non-white as oppressed freedom fighters and a new hope for humanity.

Yet another fact was that we had no first-hand relations with non-white individuals at all. In fact NOBODY had any experience and there was no heritage in this regard whatsoever. Blank page. Nothing happened in the past. No stories, no biases, nothing. So, while talking to this young American lady, who had to, while growing up in the U.S., dig her way through all the cultural prejudices, personal and family stories, discourses of all sort of kinds, in order to build her own relationship (which will, no matter what she does, never be only her own, it will never be pure), I realized how lucky I really was. Whenever this white American lady sees an, say, African American on the street, so many associations automatically jump up, so many layers get stimulated, so many lenses pop up in her mind, blurring and biasing her image, on perhaps a very subtle and weak lever, but nevertheless it is there. This is at least how she has explained to me.

Listening to her I realized that actually my first contact with a non-white person was when I found myself, at age 17, in Africa on my escape from life. And there was no background to it, no pre-planted seeds, no attitudes, no preconceive ideas, just a simple and straight interaction with another human being. The colour of skin mattered just as much as the colour of hair. Nothing. On the conscious level at least.

And to this day I cannot find anything else in regard to my perception of diversity of the colour of the human skin. Seems like my relation to the question of “other races” started out of nothing and did not evolve in any weird ways. I feel like a happy colour blind person. So, as weird as this dead country of Yugoslavia was, I am actually really happy I was born here.

And, speaking of Yugoslavia, here’s a video of my ex-schoolmate with his artistic name Magnifico, about Yugoslavia – The Land of Champions. It is a nostalgic account of the times lost, with using the iconography of spaghetti western films (and some kung-fu movies too) that we all grew up watching and adoring, and with strictly sticking to the macho Balkan English accent. Enjoy!

Is it really impossible?

The trip around Andalusia was far better than what I have expected – see some photos. I have experienced quite a bit of the world already, but Andalusia surprised me with a rather unique symbiosis of two cultures that shaped it through the history; Muslim and Latino. The beauty of it all was for me to see these two cultures not existing side by side, but somehow melted into something new – at least this is how it seemed to me, as an ignorant visitor.

So, if you want a hot flamenco night, here it is.

And if you want to chill out in an Arabic tea house, with a pipe, no problem.

Or, if you perhaps prefer to go relax in a Hamam, but would love to go there with your spouse and enjoy it together and not separated, than this is the right place to do it. Though, with the latino temperament all around you should not expect quite the same level of meditative atmosphere as in Arabic countries.

And it is all genuine; this is not a Las Vegas approach to the World cultural heritage, you know.

Anyway, the main reason for the trip was the participation at the congress of interculturalists in Granada, and with all the topics discussed about the cross-cultural differences and communications, I couldn’t not stop wondering why is it so difficult to think a bit wider, to go beyond ethnicity and culture and see us all as Earthlings. Same culture, same species… Killing each other over petty meaningless differences.

Mamma Mia, here I cry again

Me and Marjeta went to see Mamma Mia! this evening and it was a bingo, pure joy for us. Ok, it is not the deepest movie that we have ever seen and neither does it have any sort of a mind blowing plot, but this was meant to be an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. And emotional it was!

One trigger of the emotions was the pure nostalgia that connects me with Abba. It was the first pop band in my life that I became a fan of, knew all the songs and sang them over and over again, sitting by the tape recorder. And, of course, I was deeply in love with Agnetha. Now, who wasn’t?

But the crucial thing for me was that the whole movie was about people coming out with the deeper self and deeper reality, and coming together on more fundamental levels. Yes, I guess it was the coming out and coming together that did it again. As it always does. And we cried and cried, ran out of handkerchiefs after half an hour already.

And it made me remember the sharing we had at the NVC training in July about the question why do we cry when we are happy, when we are touched. Why are we not just plain happy, like kids? They do not cry when they are happy, for the first few years of their lives at least.

So, the best explanation we came up with was that when we are touched, when we open up emotionally and get in touch with ourselves, with others and with life, when there is a sense of reunion, reconciliation, we feel two different emotions at the same time; on the one hand it is happiness, fulfilment, joy. But on the other hand we, at the very same moment, get connected with all the past pain that accumulated in us during the period of separateness. We re-experience the time when there was pain because of having no contact with ourselves, life or others. There seems to be some deep existential mourning and grieving going on.

This sounds so true to life, at least to me. For instance, whenever I watch the video I have posted a couple of weeks ago, I cry, every single time. It is always pure joy of coming out and coming together, yet there seems to be an awesome lot of mourning within me, mourning over all these billions of tons of separateness, barriers, distinctions and pain within us and between us.

Children, on the other hand, have not yet generated that many painful experiences and can still enjoy pure joy and happiness. May they enjoy it forever.

The Hunt for Mona Lisa

A few years back I carried out a small-scale ethnographic research on the question to what extent are tourists genuinely interested in historical monuments and art pieces, after they have made the effort to travel far to see them. My observations were rather entertaining, but also thought provoking.

While sitting for hours at a tourist historical attraction, I observed that most of the tourist seemed predominantly bored by the monuments and historical sites they were visited and lacked a genuine interest for what they were visiting. A tour guide on one site told me that the first questions at the beginnings of guided visits to the site was usually: “How long is this going to last?” It seemed that tourist felt they just had to do it, to tick it off the list so they could, without guilt, retreat back to their beers, hotels, shopping, beaches…

But the entertaining part was to observe the choreography of a typical visit, for instance at the archaeological site. Nearly all parties carried a photo or a video camera – in most cases men were using them, sometimes women, but never both. On the other hand, women were as a rule carrying and studying the map of the site. The standard procedure for the couple at the site was that, after reaching an individual monument, men would take couple of photographs or video shots while women would study the map and try to locate their position on it. After both, the photographer and the navigator, completed their tasks, a tiny satisfaction could be observed on their faces; they looked around for a moment, seemingly trying to figure out what more was there to do at the spot, and than continued to the next monument.

In extreme cases the camera person was continuously making video recordings throughout all the journey around the site, with the navigator quietly leading the way and briefly pausing at the monuments.

So, men definitely looked like hunters, shooting down every single trophy at least half a dozen times, while women supported and lead them, did some intellectual and parenting work… Pretty archetypical. And, oh boy, were there many nervous conflicts to be observed.

So, this time I visited Louvre in Paris because of my daughter mainly (I have visited it before, in a much less crowded time of the year) and while finding our way through the crowd…

…I was automatically continuing with my observations. So here are people worshipping the Mona Lisa…

…and then the Venus.

So, this leads me back to the question: “Why travel?”

Beautiful things still do happen

As I already have expressed many times in this blog, especially in The terrifying lightness of denial and Is life really all that beautiful?, I am gradually perceiving and facing the horrible amounts of pain and suffering in this world and along with this and with my age the eagerness to save the world I once had, is slowly dying out. And the depression and apathy are creeping in.

But, occasionally, there are strong sun rays that break through the clouds and this growing shell of my pessimism, and here is one of them.

This is something I was presented two days ago and no matter how many times I watch it, it keeps always opening up my heart and filling my eyes with tears. Yes, there are beautiful things that still do happen and yes, sometimes they are being brought about by a very commercial things as well.

As one of my fellow bloggers said, the producers of this show perhaps this one time went to sleep with a warm feeling that they have actually enabled something beautiful to occur.

Sounds of Silence

Today I woke up with a headache and things got worse in next two hours, so I decided to go back to bed. Lying there with a fever-like dizziness, I started to get extremely sensitive to sounds around me and everything was so irritating; the distant sound of cars, the sound of refrigerator switching on somewhere far bellow, the sound of the roof getting warmer from the sun rays and expelling some sort of cracking sounds… It was driving me crazy, but somehow I managed to relax and fall asleep for another couple of hours.

Sitting later with a cup of tea in the kitchen, feeling much better, I grabbed the new issue of the Ode magazine, the magazine for intelligent optimists (the level of my intelligence is still OK, but my optimism is definitely going downhill), and realized that it was a special issue, The Silence Issue. Reading articles about the noise pollution and the importance and the meaning of silence in our lives, it dawned on me just how much I have been suffering from the lack of silence in my life.

I guess this is why I go to Zen seshins and actually enjoy them from the first until the last second (who cares about hurting knees, just give me some silence and I will not complain…). This is why I almost don’t even listen to music in my car anymore. This is why I tend to run away from people, sit in my room alone… I need silence. It is like air and water and food for me. When I do not get enough of it, I start biting.

There is less and less of silence in our lives. Shopping music everywhere, traffic noise, TV-s turned on 24/7, everybody walking around either talking over the cell phone or with their ears stuffed with i-pod music. Couple of weeks back me and Marjeta stopped in a tiny little Albanian town, sat on a bench and enjoyed the local scene, with people outside on the stools and benches, talking to each other. And I felt something was really weird, but couldn’t tell what it was, until I realized after about ten minutes that there was no background noise at all. No cars, no music, no nothing. NOTHING! Just voices of people speaking. In the middle of a town. It was a bit spooky, but it was great too. Being in a place where just interacting was perfectly good enough, no need to stuff in more noise. It was beautiful, so pristine and primal.

So, yes, I guess I need to seriously consider this need of mine for silence, and start planning how to bring more of it back into my life.

About five years ago I attended a seminar about awareness of the body and of the moves of the body and within the body. The seminar was held by a French ex-ballet dancer, deep among the sand dunes of Moroccan Sahara. We were sleeping in improvised nomad tents and haven’t seen, for about 10 days, nothing but the dunes around us, stretching out to the horizon. I don’t know if you have an experience of what the sand dunes do to the sound and human perception of the sound, but just having been surrounded with this sound of silence for days after days, with only being able to see endless dunes and nothing less, had a tremendous impact on my perception of my existence in this time and space. At least for a whole week it was so damn clearly obvious that this life was not what it seems to be. And I completely understood an old Tuareg proverb:

God created lands full of water so people can live in

and God created the desert so people can find their souls