The magic of intention

Last weekend I took my two teenagers and we drove off to Milan, Italy, on another prolonged weekend, to just hang out together, re-connect, enjoy each other’s company, with no pressure squeezing us anywhere.

The reason we picked Milan was that none of us had seen it yet and we like discovering new places, but primarily we all wanted to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper. And kids hoped to do some shopping – something I could not care less about. But since just waking around old cities and observing life is fairly enjoyable for me, I did not mind either.

Many weeks ahead I tried to buy the tickets for The Last Supper over the internet, just to learn that they tend to be sold out many months in advance and that there was not tickets left for that weekend. I attempted many different websites in order to buy tickets and I sent numerous e-mails, but just kept getting negative answers. No tickets left in October! With our hotel already booked it seemed we were going to miss our primary target and I sort of started to face this fact.

However, I just couldn’t let it go, really. So I did some more research on the places like Trip Advisor and learned that sometimes there are some tickets left and that one needs to call and be very persistent to get them. So I picked the timing very carefully (9.30 seemed best – I guessed after the morning coffee they would be fresh and positive), put on my best voice, expressed a lot of empathy and connecting language to the lady on the other side…, and got the tickets. No problem. Piece of cake. Thank you, thank you, you may all sit down now and stop clapping.

A small thing indeed, but reminded me of a big learning that got confirmed so many times in my life. I first started to notice this thing after reading about the magic parking technique about twenty years ago (weird, everything in my life seemed to have happened about twenty years ago). The idea was to just be persistent with intention when trying to find a parking in the city, not falling into the pitfalls of whining, upset, panic… So this is what I started to practice; get into the street where I wanted to park, squeeze in somewhere temporarily and wait, with clear intention to get a parking lot and with still and peaceful mind. I felt like a hawk. My attention was sharp, my spirit was calm and I was fully ready. It never felt more than five minutes before I spotted a person on the pavement, taking car-keys out of their pocket or purse while walking. I started the engine and followed them slowly (felt like Bruce Willis)… The next minute I was happily locking my parked car.

From then on it happened so many times, so many hopeless times on airports, traffic jams, train stations, deadlines, problems, critical situations, where I could have gone down the automatic line of despair, but somehow managed to stay focused. When in New York, for instance, we were half a Manhattan away from Broadway, with tickets for the In the Heights show that was just about to start, stuck in the metro station and just learned that the line, OUR LINE!, got shut down due to technical problems… There were so many great reasons to start arguing there and then about who’s fault it was, who was the first one to be late, why did we miss the last metro, who, what, why, why not… Yet we managed to stay focused, with clear intention and, thought it looked that the only way to get there would be for Scotty to beam us over, we managed to sit down in the theatre just seconds before the lights went out, true all sweaty and barely able to catch our breath. But we were there!

The trick seems to be to not go, in these crucial moment, down the path of blaming either ourselves or others, cursing over the destiny, whining and crying and feeling pity for oneself, just simply not go there, but rather breathe, remain calm and present, attentive and focused on whatever we are hoping to achieve. This sheer intention tends to do the magic.

I, of course, don’t think that starting a two hour journey an hour late will do the trick, no matter how much intention we have. Since the right intention will start way before that, enabling us to start on time in order to make it on time.

And I also don’t want to push in to the limits either, claiming we can fully and arbitrarily create everything in our lives, like some modern quantum physicist and philosophers suggest. I just believe that often, when things seem hopeless and impossible, they just simply seem that way, but they don’t necessarily are impossible and hopeless. And with a peaceful mind, clear focus and intention, with keeping moving rather than stopping in despair, we can get way much further.

Yet, on the second thought, while speaking about the laws of physics: I have experienced enough “impossible” things in my life to have learned to never call anything impossible. Perhaps, with a 100% intention and 0% reluctance, maybe it is possible to alter the physical universe and walk through the walls, who knows.

Or maybe not.

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.

Do not have children

Observing a family with two small kids, setting up a tent next to our camper during our short adrenaline vacation in Slovenian mountains (rafting, high ropes, canyoning, paragliding, bungee – verdict: canyoning most enjoyable, bungee most terrifying, paragliding possible future), I remembered a post by my blogging friend Robin Easton on how families with small children are often being looked down upon and avoided in camps, everybody fearing that their vacation is going to be disturbed. So, I immediately decided to not fall into this trap (as I actually even vowed to in my comment to Robin’s post) and be positive and open towards them.

But, oh boy, did that prove to be a difficult task in the next couple of days.

Kids were about 2 and 4 and they were crying ALL THE TIME. Parents were a young and completely depressed couple, just attempting to switch kids off in the evenings, in the mornings, during the days, just to park them somewhere and have some peace of mind. Unsuccessfully. I have not seen them smile at their kids even once, never giving them a single encouraging and gentle glance, let alone any sort of touch, hug, kiss. It was basically just ordering them around and rolling their eyes when the crying started again. They never unpacked their bicycles, never brought any ball or toy or anything from the tent. Kids seemed completely lost, helpless, unhappy, confused, and parents appeared to be at the edge of sanity, worn out, disillusioned, depressed.

It was so easy to have empathy for all four of them. Yet my knowledge of their language was not good enough to do anything really and I also did not feel like jumping into any sort of rescue missions here.

This was obviously not what these two people had imagined a family life to be like – well, this is not what any parent ever desires for. A constant mutual torturing. Yet, not every family scene in the camp was like that at all. There were extremely happy families around, with laughter, play, joy, hugs and kisses, expressions of love and beauty, everybody enjoying each other and life.

I guess I am a bit pissed off by this let’s-have-kids propaganda. Photos of happy mothers with happy babies everywhere, romantic images of loving families, all the celebrities – all delighted and mystically uplifted – speaking how having kids changed their life and brought meaning to them and all of that. And then, when young couples are all crazy about each other, when their brain is temporarily out of order because of being in love, when all families are hinting them to hurry up and produce some grandchildren, yes, it is then so easy to see only the bright part of it and jump into having kids.

Yet, all too often they have no clue about the reality behind it all, the one that was so lucidly expressed in my beloved film Lost in Translation, when Bob, telling Charlotte about life and having children, says: “The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born… …Your life, as you know it… is gone. Never to return.«

So, I would like to scream to all the young future parents, please, for everybody’s sake, DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN – unless you fully understand, that:

• you actually do not have to have children. It is perfectly fine to live your life with no kids. There’s plenty of children in this world and nobody will suffer if you simply choose to not have them because you do not feel like having them.
• yes, having kids is one of the most beautiful things that can happen in life, yet it is also a very, very, very, very hard work
• once you have kids, you have them for good. You cannot change your mind. Ever.
  
• you will be fully responsible for them and your relationship with them for many, many years. No time-outs, no excuses.
• raising children will demand huge amounts of your time and energy. Therefore you will have much less time and energy for yourself and for your relationships with your spouse. This will bring about conflicts, dilemmas, problems, that right now you do not even dream of.
• raising children will ever demand changes within yourself and the relationship with your spouse. Raising children is actually not doing work on children but rather working on yourself and all the stuff that keeps coming up. You can not do a good job with your gloves and asbestos suit on. You will need to get fully naked and be willing to be influenced on a daily basis. It will change you a great deal, whether you want it or not.

But, on the other hand, it is all about the unconditional love, the beauty of life and all the magical subtle joys that will bring about the best moments of your life. There are so many of your needs that will be met and you will have a honour and a pleasure to meet so many needs of your children. And the hugs you will be getting from them will be the warmest and most sincere hugs you will ever experience. And their tiny little fingers trustingly holding your tired hand on a late afternoon walk, while sharing some basic truths of life – well, this will keep you going for centuries.