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!”

Definitely not a life-supporting choice

Being on my traditional solitude time on an Croatian island, I decided to go for a bicycling tour, although the sky was getting darker and darker. I hoped to complete the 50 km circle that I had in mind, before the heavy rain would start. Of course the thunderstorm started just after 20 km, and in a minute I was soaking wet, as if I was cycling underwater. I decided for a short cut and started pedalling as fast as I could in order to keep my body warm, hoping to get back to my van before I would catch a cold. A few kilometres before reaching the camp the rain stopped, but I was already very cold and so I just kept cycling as crazy, since the road seemed to be already drying up.

Yeah right.

The last long and very steep descend toward the coast, Robert with a lightning speed (OK, not lightning, but it was about 50km per hour) and suddenly there was a shady part of asphalt, completely slippery. Felt like an ice.

And I went flying, with weird voices in my head and intense images. I just felt my body was really soft, not giving any resistance, just rolling and rolling on the asphalt.

Then silence, just presence and voices of Dutch tourists getting out of their van: “Do you speak English?”… It took me some time to manage first movements.

So, the result: the right knee, both elbows, both hips, the right shoulder and the right side of my back and ribs – red red red. Not bleeding anymore, but a nice German lady from the camp ( a community formed instantaneously, people taking care of me, checking out whether I was, after the treatment, just dozing off on the grass or have already fallen into coma…) who, as a nurse, came to help, told me the pain would start tomorrow.

The scary stuff is that my clothes are in a pretty bad shape, cycling gloves all torn up and helmet broken, with two huge cracks. What would my hands and head be like if I hadn’t had gloves and helmet on? What would my life be like now?

Got me thinking afterwards how our lives are completely made out of our little choices. Had I chosen to wait for the thunderstorm to pass and leave afterwards, had I chosen to take another road, had I chosen to be cautious enough to drive just a bit slower, perhaps I would have happily completed my circle and right now planning another tomorrow. Or, had I chosen to not tighten my helmet firm enough, had I chosen to go even faster, had I chosen to try to control my falling rather then just to let go…

Yes, it is all made of choices, billions of them, and there seems to be no way of knowing where the choice I am making now is going to take me. One choice helps me maintaining this arrogant self image of the master of life, the other one turns me into a bleeding helpless cyclist on the asphalt. A choice to lift up my overweight backpack the way heavy backpacks should not be lifted – while on solitude trekking in Tierra Del Fuego a few years back –  turned me into a fragile little man, alone in complete wilderness, with a badly injured knee. Yet another choice in Tierra Del Fuego, to stop climbing the glacier in the deep fog and rather find a way around the mountain, perhaps helped me live this long.

We may be resisting this existential of freedom of choice, but, oh boy, are we freely choosing all the time.

Nobody told me parenting was so complex

Parenting is so darn full of dilemmas. Sometimes I feel that if I really want to do a responsible job as a father, I can just as well sit for 10 hours per day and think.

Take schooling for an instance. I honestly feel that the schooling system around the world is pretty much screwed up, directed into creating obedient people, with minds full of meaningless data, bowing down to the authorities and endlessly following some outer goals and regulations, do the social climbing, trying to be better, best, first.

Yet, despite this, I tend to evaluate my own kids against the requirements of this very same schooling system all the time. Thought I believe it is fundamentally wrong, I direct them into it and worry when they don’t comply with its requirements.

I justify this by thinking that I want to help them to, by getting some education and study habits, become more competent to operate in this world, in this system, as it is. But I don’t believe in it and it would be much more honest, brave and inspirational if I just said: “Fuck school, follow your dream…” It would be so much more true and meaningful if I chose to be the change I want to see in this world – if I paraphrase Gandhi - and support what is alive and somewhat holly inside of them, rather that cowardly support the social system killing their very essence, with this passive attitude: “Well, you know, this is the way it is, what can you do about it, so why don’t you just persist and learn this truly stupid stuff with some sadly immature and incompetent teachers, for another vast number of years, and then you will have a stupid paper in your hands and you will be able to find a stupid job and make some stupid money with it. And by then you will forget all about your dreams anyway since you will be well adapted…”

For a moment it seems like the light at the end of tunnel if I shift my focus from them to me, to my own needs; what do I really need here, what are my basic needs and values in my relationship with these kids? This is rather easy at the beginning, since there aren’t all that many:

One thing is that I need to be in a fair relationships with them, meaning that I want us all to contribute to our community, in a responsible manner. I don’t want to be their servant and I don’t want them to be mine either. I want to cooperate mutually, freely give and receive, in a balanced way that nurtures everybody. This is very clear and very important to me.

And the other thing is that I want us to interact with each other in a respectful way, not because this is a moral thing to do, but because we genuinely do respect each other and feel this is how we want to treat each other – with care.

But with the third need I feel in this context it all gets complicated again: namely, I also have a very strong need to contribute to their own wellbeing. And now who is there to say what will contribute to their wellbeing, nowadays, in their heavy teenage period of life, when everything seems to be changing on a weekly basis. How can I ever know that? For some people the quantum leap in their lives was when they decided to persist with their schooling, and for others when they decided to quit schooling system.

I feel rather torn. I need to evaluate what they do and how they do it, since I want to do a responsible job (and not just sit at home and throw money at them), supporting them in any way I can. But what do I support? Do I support what I feel is best for them or what they feel is best for them? Do I support what they feel is best for them now or what I believe they will feel in, say, ten years? Do I just stick to what I feel is crucial in human life, like being honest, fair, empathetic, independent, responsible, free, with an independent and open mind, and a warm and loving heart? Or do I go along the framework of this not-so-very-perfect society that they will have to struggle with, whether we like it or not?

Sheesh…

Anyway, my teenagers come home with some heavier school failures (in general because they did not find time to sit down for a bit in between all the omni-important computer activities) and a part of me just wants to laugh: “Don’t worry about it, there are other things to worry about in this world.” Another part of me is very evaluative and wants to be angry because they have all the chances in the world for a very easy and comfortable life, with a bit of study. And there are millions of kids around the world that are really eager to study, but there is no school anywhere near and they need to fill their bellies first and survive bombs being thrown at them. Yet another part of me strongly feels there is absolutely nothing to worry about, I know they will make it and I feel they are great just the way they are. And another part of me just does not want to support whatever they do, if they want to sit on computer for ten hours per day, for instance. Studying seems a more meaningful thing to spend your days on.

But is it really?

This does not seem to have an ending.

Another clear thing in my mind is the reason why I want them to be doing anything in their lives; I definitely wish they do, whatever they chose to do, out of their own inner motivation. Not because they fear me, not because they fear consequences, not because they want to impress anybody, not in order to buy love or anything, but because this is the people they want to be in this life, this is their free choice, this is what they are here for, and because this is what contributes to the beauty of their lives.

Well, perhaps it is just the high time for me to saddle our van and go to an island for a few days. And get in touch with the broad picture again.

Mind cleared, focus regained

The last couple of weeks were a bit hectic around me, and the last couple of days were a bit confusing in my mind. My dear two friends from Sweden were here and we were either spending time together, laughing and crying, on NVC workshops here, or running around the country to get some sun, fresh air and fun together. After they left, a ton of things needed to be talked about and handled with my wife before she left for North Ossetia for the third time this year. Or is it the fourth time already. Boy, this time really flies.

In between I was giving trainings and seminars non-stop, in and out of the country.

And, as the cream on the top, carpenter is completely redoing one of the offices and so my office is used as a storage room for the time being and looks like this:

And, of course, consequentially I had no time nor energy to write my blog.

But in the last couple of days a tension begun to start rising within my mind and weird thoughts started to circle around: “I will start losing my readers. People will get tired of checking back only to see I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks already. I need to write a post or two. I should do it. I must do it! Otherwise my statistics will go downhill. People will abandon me. I better write something really smart and funny NOW!”

And there I was in this achieving mentality, thinking that it is all about getting somewhere, achieving some supreme goals, fight for readers, be good, be better, be the best, climb higher up the ladder… You see, not so long ago I was pretty critical about this sort of thinking.

Now, no matter how much I like to whine over constantly being exhausted from the intense interactions with people through my work as a communication trainer, team coach and a mediator, right now I can see how great it is to do this kind of work since it helps me move through traps like the one above in almost no time.

In my work certain crucial themes of life are constantly present, like the question of core personal values, existential dilemmas, innermost needs. So, being “forced” by the nature of my work to constantly face and contemplate these issues, they persistently keep bringing stuff from my life to the surface as well, literally on a daily basis, and this surely helps me to not waste too much of my life on things that I would find no meaning in. Although my dear blogging mate Razz sometimes fears I am about to go mad.

So, in the above case of my blogging dilemma the situation got cleared pretty soon; this is to say immediately upon me remembering of my core “blogging values” that lead me to start writing this blog in the first place. Instantaneously it was clear to me that these values of mine had absolutely nothing to do with achieving or becoming anything. Quite on the contrary: when I started with this blog almost a year ago, I had three clear values on my mind:

• to write what is alive in me, right here and right now. Regardless whether it is smart or not, funny or not, impressive or not, twice a day or once a month.
• to write what I believe could be of some sort of interest for anybody out there. Otherwise, why litter?
• to honestly share. Just honestly share. And NOT teach & preach.

So, when I remembered this, the urge to write something just for the sake of impressing people out there, was gone. What a relief.

Yes, sense of freedom and choice does matter a lot in my life.

But I believe by tomorrow I might get my office in order, get some sleep and get some inspiration. I can already feel something is coming up from within, wanting to be expressed.

The need for God

The other day I realized that I have been omitting writing about God in my blog and I started to wonder why – because I definitely do have many things on my mind about this issue. I guess I was trying to be nice, to not rock anybody’s boat, to play it safe, to not upset (and lose) my readers… A nice guy, you see, that’s what I am.

But, upon realizing this I immediately decided to express what’s on my mind about this topic as well, and so in the next months I intend to write posts on subjects like which God among many, the reasons for talking about God, God’s books, the plans of God, the personality and the values of God… and perhaps other things as well. And I will start with the questions of the need for God.

To begin with, let me paraphrase an old Zen saying:

If you believe in God,

things are just as they are.

If you do not believe in God,

things are just as they are.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what we think or believe about God or anything else, things are and will be just as they are. So, relax, this is what I suggest…

Anyway, the questions whether there is an omnipotent creator of everything is definitely an utterly fundamental question, but there are other questions like this too, like whether there are multiple universes or is this time/space the only one, or whether this universe is expanding or not (and what is it expanding into), and whether we are alone in the universe… All these questions are important, crucial and all-embedding, but in general we do not talk about them all that much and definitely we do not fight or even kill each other over them. Apart from the questions about God. We do kill each other over them.

So why is the question about the existence of God so important and special? Why would we want to stress and expose it over and over again? There are a few possible reasons that pop up in my mind when I ask myself the above questions:

• The existential dilemma of freedom is a scary one, since being completely free to choose also means being completely responsible for these choices. Full responsibility for our lives, for our existence. Therefore the external locus of control, the feeling that control is not within us but out there, in the hands of destiny, God, some ultimate authority, is a very comforting one and perhaps also the reason why we have the need to reassure ourselves, over and over again, that we are children of God. Not fully responsible. Thus not having to fully face the scary freedom of choice.
• Another reason for talking that much about God may be that there’s yet another existential dilemma we are having difficulties to face, and this is the question of meaning of it all. The question of the meaning of life seems to be rather unanswerable and it is not easy, we all know that, to go from day to day without some sort of a steady meaning. Now, the paradigm of the existence of God makes picture perfect and simple, bringing peace of mind. Or at least pacifying the horror of the meaninglessness. You do not have to know the meaning, as long as there is God who knows. So all you need to do is just trust and continue. Knowing that you are on the right side, on the side with a meaning.
• The third possible reason I see for talking about the question of God all that much in our lives could be in running away from the dreadful feeling of being isolated, of ultimate loneliness in this dark and cold universe. If you remind yourself every day that you are actually warmly held in God’s lap, you have this warm feeling of safety and eternal belonging. So the notion of God brings a relief from this isolation. Now, this lack of ability to be alone could be seriously problematic. Fromm said that the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love, and I could not agree with him more.
• The last, and to my mind the most powerful possible reason for having God on our lips that much could be that having a living connection with the supreme force in the universe gives one a tremendous power. By being the child of the greatest and the one and the only God means being in the right club. This connection gives you power over others, the unbelievers, the unfaithful. It was so easy for the Crusaders to kill everybody around by screaming: “God wills it.” It is so easy to fight God’s wars, to be the hand of God, to have this connection to the ultimate authority. Frankly, I have personally met so many “Godly” people, various religions, various cultures, with God on their tongues all the time, but no respect for other people, no love, no empathy, no acceptance, just the will to judge, control, change, punish… On the other hand, so many loving, gentle, respectful, empathic, warm, wise people never mention God at all.

So, these are some possible reasons that I see for the question of belief in God not being just one of the many intimate personal matters we are all having, mentioning them here and there, but rather an ultimately important concept that is not only shaping lives of individuals, but the history of humankind, to a such dramatic extent.

And I wonder what your thoughts are.

One person is enough

When working with people on helping them to handle conflicts in their lives, be it in their private or working environment, the first step, and a very tough one, is to shift perspective from the victim to the proactive one. Because every single training always begins with stories and explanations about THEM doing something to US. They are being aggressive. They do not cooperate. They do not know how to communicate. They do not open up. They keep attacking and being provocative. They have started it. They manipulate. They did this and they did that. They are wrong. My boss is terrible. My wife does not understand. My kids are irresponsible. My parents are neurotic. It is impossible to communicate with these terrible people and it is impossible to solve any sort of conflicts with them.

Isn’t this a nice perception of life? Enabling us to be all the time on the right side. With a feeling that our life is really hard. Unfair. No justice. Is God on a vacation or what?

Now, let’s face a few pieces of reality here. The fact number one is that there will always be difficult communicators around us, interacting with us in a way we will not like all that much. The fact number two is that we are often difficult communicators too (if you are never ever a difficult communicator, but always a perfect one, please stop reading because you are wasting your time here. You see, this is all about us, the imperfect ones.)

Fact number three: we have a fundamental choice here, to choose between the two possibilities.

The first possibility

is to happily agree that it is all their fault, go for a cup of coffee or a bear with all the like-minded people we can possibly gather and start whining over those terrible, immature, neurotic earthlings, throw some diagnosis’s at them and…, well and continue throwing our own lives out through the window.

Because this is precisely what we do in cases like that. We define as the essence of our lives something that is out there, something that has power over us, over our feelings, over our state of beingness. We sell out our life and our power of choice and then go into the lovely little impotent role of a helpless infants: ”They are doing this to us and there’s nothing we can do.” Rather than focusing on our lives, our feelings, our choices, our values, our needs, we focus on causes out there and this way we only feed this empty illusionary structures that do not get us anywhere. Frankly, I do not believe that whining can ever help a bit.

But, hey, it is a perfectly legitimate choice, to be an eternal victim of evil communicators. I mean, why not, if it meets our needs… Sounds like a fun way to spend a couple of incarnations.

The second possibility:

Instead of crying over the bad weather when the rain starts, we can put on a waterproof jacket and trousers, perhaps an umbrella, and go out, out, out, and start walking. And if we get a bit wet…, SO WHAT! As my blogging mate Razz says, let’s harden the fuck up.

Perhaps we can start with a bit of understanding of the situation: nobody is after us, really. These people do not wake in the morning and start making evil plans on how to drive us nuts (they actually believe it is us who are difficult and, well, I am sure they have a point or two here). They are just trying to figure out how to live their lives with as little pain as possible and as much fulfilment, happiness and meaning as they can. They are not trying to make our life miserable. Their behaviour is, as Marshall Rosenberg would say, just a tragically distorted expression of their own unmet needs.

And now the question is what are we going to do about it? Perhaps take some responsibility and initiative and try, do, act, persist, move. Because, from my perspective at least, although it takes at least two individuals to have an interpersonal conflict, one person is enough to solve it. Perhaps not entirely, but to start, to try and to persist. First attempts will, of course, not bring about any relief, but we will just keep trying, and at a certain point this other person may feel less threatened, endangered, may perhaps start to feel some hope and choose to respond, bit by bit. But if we wait for other people to do the job, I guess our visas for this planet may well expire before this happens.

So, let’s never, never, never ever be victims of this life. Never whine, never hide. Let’s take it all fully, engage, interact. Let’s live the life we want to live, be the persons we want to be.

And yes, it will take more than one attempt to become perfect. And a lot of failures.

So what!

The Die-Hard Role of a Victim

Through my 12 years of working as a psychotherapist the most common inner enemy I was trying to help people to cope with was a role of a victim. This role of a victim of circumstances, destiny, people and forces out there does not only seem to be a common favourite theme that connects us all (in the Western world at least), but also an unconscious mechanism that has roots stretching so deep down that it is almost impossible to cut out completely.

I knew about the dimensions and omnipresence of the role of a victim in human lives and personalities literally decades ago and used to make, in my lectures and trainings, lots of jokes about victim’s dramas and acts – until one day it finally dawned on my slow mind that my own self image and personality was actually built on the drama of a victim; of my childhood, parents, schooling system, society, individuals and groups, destiny and even God… I almost could not find anything in my life that was not coloured with this “victim” colour. This realization shut up my mouth for quite a while. It was such a cold shower to realize how much I actually loved self-pitying and provoking sympathy and pity within others. And this urge is still there, to be honest. In particular I love to be a victim of my wife and my kids, of course.

I guess the story of our love affair with the role of a victim starts with our conflict with the world and with other people which just don’t meet our expectations and needs. People behave out of their free choice and do not perform quite according to our standards, furthermore even gravitation, time and other physical constraints do not strictly follow our needs… And since we do not want to feel there is anything wrong with us, therefore it must be that there is something wrong with other people. So it is them who are doing it to us thus making our lives miserable! It must be them, who else could it be? And so we sit down with couple of like-minders and indulge in our favourite sport, which is whining over an enemy out there. With a cup of coffee or a bottle of bear, it does not really matter.

The way that Erich Fromm in his book The Fear of Freedom and Irwin Yalom in his capital work Existential Psychotherapy explained our urge to hide behind the role of victim may not have as much to do with our traumas from the past as it has with the difficult and yet unresolved existential question of freedom. It appears that we are scared to death of being free. Yes, we do pray and wait and fight for freedom, but once we start having it we are terrified of the fact that freedom brings along the responsibility. Now this is heavy. To be fully responsible for our lives and existence with nobody and nothing to blame anymore – this is almost unbearable and so we prefer to create our lives in a way that we are not really free, but can at least go on being victims.

I wouldn’t want to sound as suggesting that if other people are not guilty and wrong and to blame, than it must be us who are. I do not think an issue of guilt applies in this context at all. I believe it is really crucial to be constantly aware of our own limited perspective and conscious and unconscious interpretations of what we experience to be the reality around us. And within this very relative point of reference we are left with basically two choices: accept things as they appear to be, take a deep breath and make another responsible step into the unknown, or to rather choose to sit down, point our fingers out there and blame it all on everybody and everything around and indulge in self-pitying for the rest of our lives.

I know than we are not omnipotent and that we cannot absolutely freely create every bit of this reality, but what helps me in almost every possible circumstance is to ask myself: “Now, if Buddha or a perfect Zen Roshi was in my place here and now, would he complain and whine over other people, feel he/she is a victim of circumstances?” In the next fraction of a second I most often immediately become aware of an immense room for improvement in my world and choose to make another step into the unknown. With a smile.