Why we just stand and do nothing?

I almost exploded of anger. After having stood in the queue along with I guess hundreds of people for almost an hour (for a roller-coaster ride, I am embarrassed to admit), it pissed me off so much to see yet another guy trying to be smart and jump the queue in front of us. So I started to yell at him, and everybody sort of backed away in awe, my kids were a bit embarrassed…, at least my blogging mate Razz would have been proud of me, I guess. Yet it seemed truly strange that I was alone fighting for us all.

A similar thing happened back in Rome, in a hundreds of metres long queue of people wanting to see the Sistine Chapel. A group of three just simply walked by and tried to sneak in up at the very beginning of the line. I jumped there and started a very nervous and loud exchange of words – and everybody else just stood and watched. Later on they kept saying: “Yeah, you were right, they were really arrogant…”, but, hey, where were they while the thing was going on? How come dozens of people did not shout at every little attempt of cheating – and soon nobody would even think of trying it.

Yes, if somebody’s trying to jump the queue it really gets me going. I just value fairness and mutual respect and equality so much. And of course I am aware of inter-cultural differences and therefore I will not make such a scene in cultures where linear perception of time and queuing just isn’t a way of perceiving and living. But both of the above instances were happening here, in Europe, where we do think linear and where we do queue!

Anyway, I am still thinking about this passiveness and apathy of us – and I know I have been often passive and apathetic just as well. It all reminds me of the so-called bystander effect, in which the mere presence of other people restrains our own helping behaviour in an emergency, like in individual cases of murders of Shanda Sharer and Kitty Genovese, the inconceivable human episode of The Holocaust or even Kevin Carter and his Pulitzer winning photo, for which he actually said to had been waiting for about 20 minutes for the vulture to spread its wings – which would make a better shot.

Both my cases are, of course, not anywhere near in terms of seriousness, but perhaps the reasons for a rather large (and thus powerful) group of people being passive while observing individuals obviously violating their rights and boundaries, are somewhat similar or even same. The first might be, as in the by-stander effect, the diffusion of responsibility, because individuals don’t feel the individual drive to act since the responsibility is shared among everybody and thus minimised for each individual.

And the second, which is to my mind more present in my cases, is the urge to behave in correct and socially acceptable ways. Or, in other words, the grand fear of being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, the fear that was beaten into us through schooling and which evaluates every move we make. Is it right or is it wrong? Feeling free to do whatever feels to be the right thing to do opens up a huge amount of responsibility and freaks out our ego.

But, can you imagine a world in which we would not feel afraid of being wrong? A world in which we would dare to speak, act and express ourselves, without first having built up the piles of inner pressure and frustrations? A world in which everybody would stand up, speak up and act when seeing an act of violence… Oh what a world it would be…

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.

The one that shook my world

The other day my dear friend Ian wrote a post about the ten books that shook his world. I immediately thought that was a great idea and decided to do it myself too.
After a minute I realized I was not going to do it, after all. It would just take too much time and effort of trying to remember them all, write about them as well as what they meant too me…, nah, just too much. I am not as dedicated as Ian and he wins. Touché.
But, in the process of thinking about it I did remember one of the very important books of my life, one that I haven’t been thinking about for a long long time since I read it, say, 25 years or so ago, when I was pretty young: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
When I discovered Hesse I read many of his novels and I loved them all: Demian, Siddharta, Journey to the East and especially Steppenwolf. By the way, do people still read Hesse at all? Anybody knows what the situation is nowadays? In my time if you were into personal growth, Hesse was a must. I believe even more so if you were male, as I remember. Which, now that I think of it, is quite interesting.
Anyway, for me The Glass Bead Game was above it all. I still remember how very shocked I felt when reaching the last page and reading something I was totally unprepared for. After everything the main characters has gone through, after finally achieving the very top of the world, he decides to let it all go. He decides to abandon it all and to step into something very simple yet meaningful, into serving. But then, finally feeling completely free and content, he suddenly dies. Abruptly. The end. No more.
I can so easily reconnect with that moment, lying in my bed with the last page in front of me, my heart pounding hard and my face staring in disbelief. It felt as if all the four existential dilemmas (freedom, death, isolation, meaninglessness) suddenly hit me in my forehead, really hard. For days my mind was pulsating with thoughts: “Everything I begin, will end. Everything I build, will eventually crush down. Nothing is permanent and whatever I may achieve, whatever peak I might reach, even if I reach the absolute freedom, it will all end in total isolation and with death I will vanish from this world. So what is the meaning of it all? What difference does anything make? Why move? Why try?“
The romantic worlds and illusions started to crush down and I kept attempting to build them up again, and again, and again. I wanted to have a nice illusion of absolute meaning, of eternity, of connectedness and free choice, yet the pictures never held for very long and there were always pieces missing. Only in the last couple of years I seem to be starting to come to peace with it all.
Well, that book definitely shook my world. I believe I would be somewhat different had I not read it. But I am totally happy I did, of course. No mourning here, just a celebration.

 

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.

The favourite fantasy

This morning I went to the local shop just across the street to fetch some oranges in order to start yet another writing day. Then a weird moment occurred; I found myself standing at the crossroad and noticed the complete silence around me. Ok, it was Saturday morning which means less traffic, but it was not that early (8.00 AM), yet the silence was intense and complete enough to make me stop and have a questioning look around. There was no cars and no people to be seen. Everything was motionless, not even one car, not even one pedestrian, not one cyclist… Nothing. After observing this amazing complete stillness of the normally fairly busy crossroad for a few seconds, I finally crossed the street and, approaching the shop also started to notice other people, hear cars approaching from the distance. OK, the flu hasn’t finished off everybody yet, but I was, apparently by sheer coincidence, reminded of the favourite fantasy from my childhood.

You see, from the age of about 8 to something like 14 I enjoyed getting lost in the fantasy which always started off by everybody on the planet dropping dead. Perhaps of some epidemic deadly disease (hm, speaking of swine flu…) or some other mysterious reasons, my fantasy always began with waking up one morning just to realize that everybody was dead and that I was most probably alone in the world. From this point on it developed to the complex survival strategies; where to get a real good car that would not break down, some weapons to be protected from hungry and wild animals, a huge stack of food that would keep me fed for at least a year, then drive down to the Adriatic coast, find a safe and an easy-to-operate boat to get myself with all the food and equipment to a small island (damn, is this why I like retreating to islands so much?) where I would wait so that all the dead bodies on the mainland rot down to the bones, the smell and germs disappear…. Then came strategies about how to check out whether there was a nice girl alive on the planet, without exposing myself to risks of meeting any sort of bad guys… I am just giving you some basics here, but I went deep into it, I assure you, and strategies I developed were really complex and precise.

This fantasy of mine got even further stimulated after seeing the movie Omega Man. If you haven’t seen it, it is more or less the same thing as the late I am Legend with Will Smith (which you – of course – have seen) – I believe they are both made after the same book by Richard Matheson.

Anyway, when I now think back about this fantasy, I wonder why did I like to take refuge in it so much? I guess because with being alone in the world I would be finally free of all pressures, all the relationships I had to deal with and did not know how, I would be free of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts in my young life. Yeah, I would be completely free, independent, autonomous. I guess these needs were those that were being neglected and unmet the most.

Yes, it is not so easy to be a child.

Not so long ago I read somebody saying that this was also his favourite childhood fantasy and that he believes this is the most popular one. Is this really so? Then we are even more similar then I had thought.

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.

The beautiful dilemmas of life

The other day in New York City I was talking with a friend of mine about possible reasons for such a strong need in humans for an ideology – a religion, a philosophy, a new-age system and alike. Why is there always a seemingly endless queue of happy customers for just about any possible type of ideology?

Then it dawned on me – since the purpose of ideologies is to help us make some sense of the world, they offer us a model of the world and provide us with answers. This way they seemingly take the dilemmas away, especially these existential dilemmas, the most annoying ones. You know, the big four existential dilemmas about freedom/responsibility, death, isolation and meaninglessness.

Yes, this is what an ideology does – if you go for one, you are suddenly provided with all the answers, about life, death, future, nature of things, nature of yourself… Everything is suddenly clear, you have gotten rid of the stressful and frightening dilemmas and you are fine. As long as you stick to these answers you are safe, you will not be disturbed, you will have the comforting feeling that you know what your life is all about. It’s like a drug, isn’t it? Creating an illusion that your existence has no unknown realms, everything has been explored, there’s nothing to be afraid of, everything is clear. Just don’t forget to give some donation on your way out of the temple. And make sure you don’t ever question the provided universal answers.

This may be the reason why I find it so hard to communicate with people who belong to religious or new-age ideologies – whenever I express a dilemma of mine (like, oh, I am really wandering about the purpose of what I am doing in my life, for instance) they instantaneously jump with an answer (yes, but but but you must, you have to, it is like this, it is like that…).

I guess it all has to do with the ability to face and live with the unknown. To face the fact that there are and will always be these existential dilemmas around in our lives and they will not be ultimately answered – until the moment of death at least. Because all the possible insights into the nature of our existence are inherently embedded in so many contexts that they cannot ever be reliable. Yes, letting go of the illusion of knowing and sinking back into the humble role of ignorant explorer can be frightening. But you get used to it and start using the sentence: “I don’t know” more often again. Perhaps this is what Suzuki meant when he said that the true goal of Zen practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind, since only the beginner’s mind, the mind of the not-knower is free of self-centeredness and involves true openness to the complexity of existence. Tomorrow I am leaving for a Zen seshin retreat and I will have plenty of time to climb another few rungs out of the illusion that I know anything at all, and explore the beginner’s mind.