Driving our lives through the curves of time

I am sitting on the one-day-two-nights ferryboat ride across the Adriatic Sea towards the bellowed Greece, to then slowly, very slowly, start roaming with our van around the Peloponnese and afterwards through Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia… There’s not much to do on the boat, so there’s plenty of time to rest and start unwinding now after all the workshops, trainings and facilitations I have lead in the last months.

Just this morning I remembered the question that GirrafeDancer asked in one of his comments about how I manage all my work, travels, personal life, family life… Well, I am very content to notice that I have made quite a considerable progress in this regards in the last few years. So, this is what works well for me. Having been wrapped up in the question of meaning for the most of my life, this is where I start when thinking about managing my life:

What is most important in my life? What are my core passions, what brings meaning and life to my existence?

In my case and in this period of my life, this would be the answer (random order):

• exploring and understanding life within me and life around me
• providing meaningful contribution to the life of other people, especially in helping them connect and establish true and empathic relationships
• deep, open, inspiring and supporting relationships with my wife and friends
• supporting our kids in them becoming independent, fulfilled, open, empathic, responsible, curious, creative adults
• taking care of my physical and psychological needs and wellbeing

Once I clarify that (and I do it at least once a year), I want to establish

What actions or ways of living would support my core passions?

Here are my own ways:

• In terms of exploring and understanding life within me and around me, Zen meditation, deepening NVC awareness and skills, spending time alone, exploring intercultural communication, exploring group Dialogue process and potentials… Basically it is really about being a happy learner and this is why I will have spent 6 weeks of this year on trainings myself. Besides that, I believe writing this blog also falls into this category.
• Meaningful contribution is linked mainly to my work and so I tend to quit doing things that I don’t find as contributing and I eternally work on focusing and refocusing. So, for instance, I have been introducing and bringing in the trainings I give in business environment more and more of the meaningful and deep stuff – though it may be a bit unusual. Who cares? Business people are people too, with their lives, feelings, fears, needs, hopes…, so let’s talk about that. And I try to devote more of my time to projects like Talk Together.” Not to mention the book about establishing a dialogue with kids, that is being edited just now. With possibly more to come.
• Relationships – with my beautiful wife it comes down to spending a lot of quality time together, but also to work on deepening our relationship. Similarly I keep asking myself: which friends do I really find mutually inspiring, enriching and enjoyable to be with and how do I want to spend time with them?
• Kids: Aged between 15 and 19, it is on the one hand very obvious that soon they will be away living their own lives and so that the time is sort of running out. And on the other hand I need to work harder on exploring, together with them, strategies about how they would also enjoy being with me.
• •My own physical and psychological wellbeing? Well, sleep, nutrition and physical exercise is the thing that supports it on the physical level, having time on my own and also having nurturing and easy time with my wife proves to be crucial as well.
• Before making these ideas more specific, I also want to

Identify and cross out the life-wasters

since they don’t support my passions whatsoever and leave me empty, tired and frustrated at the end. Some things that I have in large extend successfully crossed out already are:

• watching  TV, reading just about everything in the newspapers and yellow press, spending hours with people on talking about not-alive and not-inspiring stuff, shopping, browsing internet and filling my mind with all that’s there (still need to work on this one… )…

From the wish-list to a specific plan

Now it is all about bringing it down to specific actions and breaking it down to quarterly, monthy, weekly and daily scheduling . Otherwise I will just keep copypasting this wish list every January 1. So, what am I going to do, when, how, with what resources, what needs to be my first step…

Support, monitoring, measuring, celebrating

Since I have learned in my life that lofty plans tend to remain in the air because that mind is weak, I pay attention to how to put them in practice. I have paired up with my good friend and we write monthly reports to each other about how we are doing with our plans (thus supporting each other in keeping up with them), I have monthly plans and weekly schedules posted above my desk, I have reminders in my electronic calendar…

And yes, to celebrate even the little steps seems to be an important and inspiring thing, so just now I again celebrate how much I have learned and experienced in the last five years of my life. Not everything is perfect in the sense that it would be according to my wildest dreams, but, at the same time, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about.

I remember two old-style British ladies that I meet at the top of a high in the port of Barcelona. It was a very small observing platform at the top, the wind was strong and we were swinging back and forth considerably. The first lady said with a worried voice: “Jane, this thing is definitely not stable!”

And lady Jane’s brilliant answer was: “It is stable ENOUGH, Ruth!”

Yes, in the same way I believe my life is absolutely perfect enough

A little boy and a buffalo

It is not big news if I tell you I am not much of a photographer. Sometimes I like to think I am and I enjoy making shots of faces and of sunsets, yet most of the time it is a frustration. Which gets worse when I enviously look at my daughter’s photos or photos that my blogging mate Razzbuffnik keeps producing. Damn Aussie!

Anyway, there are weird things that tend to happen with the help of internet and the blogosphere. You see, 24 years back when in India for the first time, on my search for enlightenment, I had a National (that’s how Panasonic was called long ago, kids) point-and-shoot little camera and I did some shots here and there. For the needs of this blog I scanned some of them with our simple office scanner.

So, about a year ago a reader from Canada contacted me, asking me whether he could use the photo of the a little boy leading a big buffalo (I still remember I took that one in Mathura). I was rather surprised, never thinking one could use my photos for anything at all… Anyway, to cut the story short, he did some editing and art work with the photo and it has already been printed in Canada as a greeting card!

Just imagine! I find this rather crazy, funny and very, very enjoyable. It is amazing how the internet connects the world, across the space and through the time.

The boy is, I guess, about thirty now, the buffalo has long been reincarnated (perhaps into our bossy cat), and the world keeps spinning round and round.

A packing time again, whoopee!

The work is over for the year, and it is the time to rest, sleep and take time for reconnecting with people around me as well as with myself. The first step will be to get our van out and drive with my two kids off to Rome, tomorrow morning that is. That will give us some quality time to reconnect, but also to enjoy some Tuscany and Rome and check out the illuminati path – or whatever it is called. Then the time to be alone with my wife over the New Year and the week after will come and after that the time to be alone with myself. All great stuff!

The time in Rome is also going to be a good training at avoiding this ridiculous holiday obsession with shopping and eating (notice how every couple of months there is a good reason to celebrate something – whatever it might be – with eating and buying things. If this is not a global conspiracy, then I don’t know what qualifies like one at all!)

Anyway, since it is quite rainy these days, here comes a Haiku that my daughter produced (in the matter of minutes) a few months ago while in rainy England.

A rain drop falls

followed by another

and another

Being looked after – in Cairo and everywhere, actually

The congress was great but I will write about it another time (there’s just too much to write right now). I also managed to find the “Tanzanian park” (very emotional moment for me), but did not find the priest – it’s been 26 years already, in the meantime Cairo got a metro and some new streets that replaced buildings… I was surprised by all this and did not have enough time or this unplanned thorough research. Which makes a perfect reason to go back to Cairo soon and give it another shot. Yupeeee!

But I did manage to walk around the town a lot, sitting down to drink a tea and smoke a shisha, enjoying the absence of tourists (I guess they sort of step, from their fancy hotels, straight into the a/c dark glassed luxury buses and head to Pyramids or whatever, avoiding to spoil their clean goretex heavy duty fancy walking shoes with the unclean surfaces of Cairo streets. Yes, I know, I am being cynical here. And I love it!). And I yet again experienced on several occasions how a community formed immediately, a little street community that instantaneously, if I was open and respectful of course, accepted me and tried to care of my needs. Not for money or anything else, but just for the joy of giving and providing, as it seemed.

Memories were flooding through my mind, tons of them, and the picture became clearer and clearer, until it hit me hard: I realized that I was being looked after so much in my life, so often and so lovingly, that I, upon this realization, felt utterly touched and humbled.

Yes, I have been looked after on so many occasions in my life, and by so open and eagerly giving and providing people, that I am not even going to try to write it all down since it would literally take hundreds of pages. But yes, while writing this, pictures just keep flashing somewhere inside my mind, from Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, I mean, from everywhere and from everytime.

Why did they do it? Why did they collect a glass of buffalo milk (not a small thing in that area)  in the nearby village to greet us somewhere in the dark night of Pakistan, us, who were the only people to have electricity (in our van) kilometres around? Why were guys waking me up each time I rolled, in my sleep, toward the edge on the roof of the train in Sudan? Why did my aunt spend hundreds of hours with me when I was a little boy – why did she play with me, take me on the long walks around the meadows and forests? Why did my dear friend from Belgrade, after reading about my accident, immediately call me and offered to sit in his car and drive over (a six-hour drive) to take care of me?

OK, folks, right now I am so overwhelmed with all these memories of being looked after in my life, by friends, family as well as by the total strangers, that I am sure this in not my story only. I believe this relates to all of us. I dare to say we are being taken care of and looked after all of the time, by people around us, through tiny little things. And sometimes through very big deeds. It must be Ubuntu alive somewhere within us. It must be that love is all around…

But I guess we just prefer to look the other way. It seems we prefer to look for and focus on the bad stuff. Rather than appreciate the good stuff and build on that. Perhaps we just like to be victims, perhaps we find this survivalistic discourse so darn entertaining. Or perhaps we were just never taught differently by our families, teachers, cultures…

Well, I will definitely, from now on, do my best to appreciate and cherish the good, the love, the attention and the appreciation. I will try to see it and enjoy it fully, with gratitude.

It would be such a waste to look the other way, wouldn’t it?

Mildly anxious about Cairo

Tomorrow early morning I will be flying off to Cairo, Egypt, for a congress of interculturalists. And I am feeling a bit edgy about it. Not that the travelling itself causes that; there has been so much of travelling and flying here and there in the last years that the excitement has all gone and has been replaced by the irritation over being squeezed in the seats of the planes and over the endless security checks at the airports. The anxiousness is also not about having so many things to do before leaving, since basically everything has been done already – about nine hours before the departure from the house. So I will even get a proper sleep this night.

The nervousness has been building up during the last few weeks because I feel that this is going to be a trip into my past and into my long forgotten feelings.

I spent a few weeks in Cairo in 1983, on my hippy journey into the unknown, at 17. After hitching a free ride with a ship from Jordan across the Red Sea to Port Suez, I entered Cairo late at night, no money at all, no clue about whatever, no address to go to, no food, nothing. Somehow I managed to come down to Aswan a few days later, but my attempt to enter Sudan without a visa failed and after a week or so I was in Cairo again. Well, it is a pretty long story, but in the next weeks I befriended some Tanzanian guys with equally empty pockets, and one of them kicked me from the self-pitying state of mind into a pro-active one, telling me that if I ever wanted to get enough money together to buy a visa for Sudan, I needed to get on my feet and start doing something about it. So, there I was, for the start going from one church to another, trying out my luck. In one Coptic Orthodox church a priest with a long black beard and utterly shining eyes stood at the courtyard, smiling warmly at me. Before I could complete my lies about being robbed, he stopped me, squeezed some money in my pocket and told me: “You come to us. We will take care of you, feed you, host you and help you get whatever you need.” His eyes were lovingly smiling and sparkling, as if he knew me all the way down to the bottom. And so I came and was fully accepted and taken care of, for about a couple of weeks. The priest was one of the most gentle souls I have ever met, just being warm and supportive, never even attempted to convince me into his religion or anything. Finally I left, clean, well fed, with the Sudanese visa and a train ticket in my pocket. And with a very warm heart.

In 1986 I took my first trip to India. I flew from Europe via Cairo and experienced a nightmare at the airport, with my passport and tickets being temporarily lost because of some confusion of officials, then raced in a van toward the plane that was already standing on the runway ready to take off, racing back after a few minutes because I had failed to provide baksheesh that would actually get me on the plane, spent another few days losing my mind over illogical discussions with the airport officials and finally found myself in the Cairo city, having to get some senseless paperwork done in order to finally sit on my plane. And so I also paid a visit to the priest. It felt like coming home, to my old and dear friends that had accepted me in my dark times just the way I was, never questioning a thing, never asking for anything, just embracing and holding me…

Anyway, the fact that I am going to return to Cairo after so many years keeps resurrecting many memories and evoking a wide variety of feelings from deep within. I am not sure I will be able to find all the places, it’s been 26 years after all, but just thinking about it keeps bringing me in touch with the feelings of confusion and hopelessness of a lost teenager in a big wild world. I would love to find that little dodgy park where I was sitting under a tree, completely clueless, and was approached by Tanzanians, who soon in a way adopted me… And I certainly wish I will find the dearest priest in a good health and be able to express my gratitude for how deeply he had touched me.

Oh boy, it really feels like walking into a time machine, heading towards the distant past.

Both sides of the same shiny coin

It is funny how being a trainer and a facilitator makes me think very deeply over and over about certain issues of my own personal life – I guess much deeper than I would have, had I worked as, say, an engineer. Perhaps.

Anyway, one of the issues we often play with on my workshops is the question of crucial turning moments of our lives. Moments when we took a big leap into the unknown and so our lives took a radically different course. And so, while working on these things with the groups, I think about my own turning points over and over again.

It seems to me that one of the main turning points in my life was when I, at the age of 17, in secret packed my backpack, took my passport and a few bucks I have had, and left home. This ended in a half-a-year hippy style roaming through the Balkans, Middle East and North-East and East Africa. Partially this was a turning point because I finally ceased whining over my imperfect life, imperfect parents, imperfect teachers…, but rather chose to do something about it; made a bold step into the unknown to see what turns out. I still can not really understand where did I get the courage to do that from. I must had been pretty desperate.

But perhaps even more importantly, this step forced me to start facing the existential dilemma of freedom – at the age of 17. You see, on the one hand there was an utter beauty to the freedom I was experiencing from the moment I walked away from my pre-set life. Suddenly I was totally free, free to go wherever I wanted, free to do whatever I choose to. I was free to rediscover myself every single day, to live or to not live, to carry on a virtuous life or to lie and steal… Suddenly all the moral and cultural obligations started to melt away and the feeling of freedom while moving through my days somewhere on the South Balkans, was incredibly uplifting and intoxicating.

But soon enough I started to discover the other side of the coin, the other side of freedom; the responsibility. When I, a brave free guy, found myself with zero money on the streets of Istanbul, freedom was not so fun anymore. When I was going hungry in the dodgy parts of Cairo, I couldn’t just go home and open the fridge – since there was no home anywhere near. I was free and I was fully responsible for myself at the same time – there was nobody to blame anymore, the way I was used to blame everybody in my previous and not-so-free life. I was also completely free and fully responsible to choose whether I wanted to wait a few weeks – in the company of about a trillion blood-thirsty mosquitoes – in Southern Sudan for the jungle river to recede after the rainy season so that the truck could pass through, or to ford it (neck deep) with the risk of a close encounter with a crocodile, and keep walking on the other side through the wilderness until, well, until I got somewhere. When a drunken soldier had his gun pointed at my head somewhere in the middle of Ugandan forests, demanding money which I did, of course, not have and which I was actually needing just about as badly as he was, it was completely within my responsibility to find a way of getting my ass out of it. Nobody volunteered to take the responsibility for it and I was not in a position to call my daddy to help me out. And so on and so forth…

To cut the long story short, the choice of making that step into the unknown certainly reshaped my life and after that nothing was anywhere near the way it used to be. Not only did all these experiences utterly reshaped my perception and interpretation of life, but the freedom and the responsibility entered full throttle, and they were not just fun. Speaking of freedom; not so long afterwards the freedom crash-landed when I was called to do the obligatory military service. Oh boy, was this a different story altogether, ha ha…

The both sides of this freedom/responsibility coin I am still taking dead seriously – as you may track down throughout this rambling of mine in this blog. And perhaps this is also the reason why I get so irritated with people whining over the imperfect circumstances in their life and acting out this victim role forever. Because I used to waste my time there too and I am still a bit embarrassed by that period.

And perhaps this is why I struggle and juggle so seriously with this dilemma as a parent of teenagers, trying to get the responsibility side of that damn coin across, not as an moral obligation, but simply as another aspect of life. Because I would truly love to contribute to the lives of my teenagers in a way that would help them to at least start sorting out this eternal dilemma of life as soon as possible and enter the adult lives with more inner clarity than I have had. Which is, in the absence of maturity rituals and while trying to not use power over them, not the easiest thing on Earth. But being aware that learning to take full responsibility for one’s own choices and feelings seems to be a crucial step on the path of emotional growing up and also on the path toward a fulfilling life, I just feel that as a parent I definitely wish to find a way to help them in this matter.

A celebration

The year is coming to the end and me and my dearest wife are, as usual at that time of the year, evaluating the quality of our lives in the past year and thinking and talking how to make our lives even more full and meaningful in the year to come. So today, while taking it easy at the nearby sauna and talking about what was good in this year, I realized that I actually have a lot to celebrate. For instance:

• as I have vowed, in the second part of the year I worked less and my life feels different, much different now. I am living again, I am not constantly tired, I have even time to just sit and watch the clouds occasionally…
• I spent a lot of quality travelling time alone with my beloved wife, like Crete, Albania, Croatian island, Andalucia… With just the two of us and no pressures, just being together and enjoying it all.
• I managed to spend quite some time alone, taking care of my need for peace and silence and for solitude, mostly on islands and Zen retreats.
• I have gained a considerable amount of clarity about some of my existential dilemmas, especially on what I want to focus on in regards to my work in the future. It is very clear now that NVC will play a major part in my life in the future, especially in terms of mediation, working with kids… So there are projects opening up in front of me, very meaningful and inspiring, and I feel incredibly excited about this coming period.
• our kids are doing well, really well. Of course they are having their teenage ups and downs, but they are adorable individuals and our communication in our little community is progressing well.
• I have managed to spend beautiful time with kids, time, that have contributed to our lives and will stay with us forever, be it our short trip to Budapest, a longish trip to France and Belgium, or some wild time during our adrenalin vacation.
  
• I have attended very inspiring events this year, like the Dialogue Process training in Germany, NVC training in Germany, Warrior of the Heart training in Belgium, Congress of Interculturalists in Spain… My hand was very lucky, very lucky indeed.
• So many new beautiful friends appeared in my life and our house was full of inspiring visitors
  
• I have managed to eat a bit less and exercise a bit more – good, very good. Is my mind getting less weak?
  
• It seems I am not losing my hair anymore. At least in the last half a year or so the shower and bath tubs are just not as full of my hair after I step out. I am not sure what has happened, but, hey, who cares, let’s celebrate!
• I was blessed to experience some utterly magical moments, like the one with dolphins.
  
• And I am still writing this blog. One full year and I still enjoy it immensely. Not to mention all this beautiful people I have connected to via this blog. Touches me deeply. It is true that sometimes I get a bit restless, wanting to meet you all, but the night is still young, so let’s celebrate the overture and afterwards we will celebrate even more.

Boy, writing this (and having my fingers rather tired already) I can see that my life is not all that dull. Which makes another reason for celebrating.

I am truly happy about the above, deeply gratefully celebrating it all. Thank you, thank you, thank you…

Oh, did I mention that I celebrate Obama’s election?

And so many other things…