A drag of freedom

I drifted away. I got distracted by days passing by, lost in things to do and be taken care of. And I forgot I used to write. That I love to write. 

Things changed, not as much as they could but probably as much as they should, at least for now.  Planes brought me to cities that asked me questions I cannot answer, which still tickle my soul and make me want to go back. 

I am on the brink of a big amount of time off, something almost unknown to me which fills me with excitement and butterflies in my stomach. 

Looking back at the time since I last let my words drop on a screen, I feel like I became more and more grown-up and more and more convinced of the need to gain some recklessness.

Sunny Mediterranean streets seduced me with the allure of an enthralling alternative, and made me dizzy with exhilaration. But every time I opposed control and kept it all together with my usual analysis, dissections of thoughts and endless waterfall of questions.

During this positive yet at trait strenuous time, my mind went back more than once to an odd memory: the time I smoked my first joint, at an embarrassing advanced age. When, in the company of a questionable man, I naively took two or three deep drags, surprised that nothing happened. Until it did. And while roaming the streets of the little Dutch city with the questionable and stoned man, with my brain melting like ice-cream in the sun, I remember that I kept saying to myself “if you concentrate, if you focus, you can keep it under control, you can!!”. But you can´t. 

And sometimes, you just should not.

Ideals and reality

How to come to terms with ideals? How not to be drawn away from reality, following an unreacheable list to check?

Life is so much more than this. Life is grand, full of imperfections and yet so perfect. Life is profound, if you just dare look beyond the illusion that if you put things in the place you think they belong, all is going to be ok. That´s the time it is not. 

You just have to open up and let yourself be carried - and tought - by what happens to you.  

We all have a choice. And a heart. We should feel more. 

golden summer (in November)

And when you land in gorgeous places like this, glorious and majestic despite constant economical struggles and questionable justice, you are left wondering...

don´t we just worry way too much for petty things? 

Indisputable Fortune

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. We think we had difficult parents, that our friends did us wrong, that our boss is a pain in the neck, that we grew up in the wrong neighbourhood and therefore need to be tough. Sometimes we like to play war. 

And sometimes we forget that the vast majority of us had a chance to experience innocence. 

This morning, Ishmael Beah reminded me of our indisputable fortune in his witty story reported by The Moth, which can be found here

Thank you, "unusual", sophisticated Ishmael. 

the good vibe

It's all about connection.
It's all about finding what links you to the others rather than what divides you from them.
It's all about building a common ground, going through the world with your shield down. It's that feeling that you know they know, that you feel they feel the same, they understand.
And to be understood, you have to understand. You have to stop, think,  analyse and think about how you communicate. How you can find a thread strong enough to carry your meaning until it meets the meaning of the other.
It's an exercise.  And as every other exercise, the more you practice, the better you get at it. The easier it gets.

egoism with a brain

“The intelligent egoist is the one that thinks about others first”

I was puzzled as I heard this statement during a conference a few years ago and at first I could not understand what the guy was talking about, it sounded like a paradox.

“Because if you only think about yourself” he added “at your immediate and mere personal satisfaction, in the long run you actually end up damaging yourself. The intelligent egoist is the one that understands what he needs to give in order to get what he wants”.

I was at a sales conference and did not expect to hear anything too inspiring, yet this sentence impressed me more than what I´d imagine: this afternoon, some 8 years later, while washing my hands absorbed in my thoughts about trivial troubles of people around me, this puny little motto made it through the wilderness of my mind and made me think “Man, so very true”.

A shame that it there is no lack of egoists, but very few of them appear to be intelligent ones.

misled

You think that comparing a meaningless picture to an Edward Hopper painting is a good enough sign of a common ground. 

You astound when he asks you where Cheryl´s book is and you end up exchanging your favorite literature one night before falling asleep, because you think it´s a sign of a common soul.

You smile when he says he wants to go to the Philharmonic before leaving, because it´s a sign of a common sensitivity.

You hope that those hands holding you back each time you say you had enough are a sign of a common heart.

  

You are wrong. 

   

we gotta know

I don´t understand how people don´t know.

Recently, I have been answered so many I don´t know´s to questions that were really not that difficult. I wasn´t asking things like “What is the global economy going to look like in 5 years?” or “Who do you think will win the next election in Belize” or “How many of our friends do you think will still be together in 15 years?”.

My questions were more about what people think, what they feel, why they liked a certain thing.

I have a friend who just returned home after a year spent abroad in my country. During the months we have known each other, he told me a few times how he fell in love with Sweden when he went there on a spontaneous short trip a few years ago. So, just before departing with him on a short vacation -probably moved by a latent desire to figure out what we could possibly want to do or see during the upcoming travel- I candidly asked him “What is it that you liked so much about Sweden?”

“I don´t know”.

We were sitting in a park, on the side of a pond. It was a peaceful and lazy afternoon during the week, and only students and pensioners were strolling around us. His answer made me think of one morning in my freshmen year in high school, as my teacher told us one thing that made sense to me more than most of the theories and facts that I was later asked to learn.
“We read poetry, here” she said, raising her voice as to catch our attention. “And literature that made history. It can be excellent according to the critics and yet it can mean nothing to you or you might even detest it. Or you can love it. It actually doesn´t matter, as long as you are able to explain why. Nobody is here to tell you what is good and what is not. You decide for yourself. But you have to know why”.

I was surprised at this random recollection and deep inside I thanked my teacher for that statement because I understood that back then she planted a seed which would allow me to appreciate my life experiences more.

Surely you can just like something without asking yourself why. Ultimately, it´s not that you are constantly expected to justify your perception of the world. It´s more subtle, though, it´s a deeper, broader  level. It´s like activating a million synapses, if you can explain to yourself why you are experiencing a pleasant moment. Or even an unpleasant one. If you question your perception, you better understand yourself and what surrounds you.

And being able to give words to this is nothing but enrichment. For yourself and the others.
I promise to myself that I will always make the effort to find a better answer than "I don´t know". 

all alone she moves

Carry on, carry on until you reach the hallway made of gold

On trusting beauty. And benevolent clouds

Do people get accustomed to beauty?
Do people get accustomed to ugliness, squalor and dreariness? To pain and disrespect?  
It is proven that we do get used to events, emotions, objects, tastes, people. It’s a defense mechanism that, for instance, allows us to survive when a beloved person dies. We think at first that the pain is unbearable and that we are not going to be able to live without that person, yet after a span of time (sometimes ages, yes), we get used to that hole in our soul and we go on. We know that the abyss is there and is not going to disappear. But we also realize that we still wake up every morning and we are demanded to live on. Paradoxically a consoling - though awkward - truth. The same way, however, we get used to exciting, beautiful and thrilling things, those we thought would guarantee a constant degree of happiness throughout our life, which, on the contrary, after a span of time, (sometimes ages, yes again) become bleak and flat. It seems like we always need “newness” and to overcome this natural (unfavorable?) impulse, a fair amount of endurance and self-control is required. I once read an excellent article about this phenomenon which struck me and surprisingly turned out to make my life easier.

I was thinking about that article again a few days ago, as man I know, who is a pilot, sent me a picture of a sunrise, taken from the cockpit. He is in cargo business, so he mostly flies at night, and lives what I picture to be an interesting, yet somehow strange life. Though it´s a life of status and many privileges, I imagine how it can be lonely too, at traits. Surely dark, let alone for the fact that he wakes up to go to the airport when most of the others are dreaming and rolling under their warm duvets.

Some time ago, in the middle of the night, the flying man sent me an astonishing photo depicting intense blue, fluffy clouds barely disclosing a timid emerging sun. “Gorgeous”, I thought, with a dash of envy, considering that – again – that night I, instead, had “only” slept and as I opened my eyes the marvelous spectacle that the friend witnessed while jetting goods around was already over. 
I considered that my pilot friend sees this every day. Day after day. So I wondered if it´s possible that he still feels, really feels, the poetry of it (or was he only trying to impress me, showing how cool sitting with a whole plane underneath your butt and the whole sky around you is?). Paraphrasing, is it possible to wake up next to your long-term partner, day after day, steal a glance at a body abandoned on a mattress to then think “is this really happening to me? Am I this lucky FOR REAL?!”? Or are we all doomed to just fall into a reassuring, mechanical habit, where the sparklers are mostly the one you lit up on New Year´s Eve while wishing for a different pinch of salt than the one you use to pep up an insipid meal?

I did ask to my captain friend if he still feels the power of the beauty he flies thorough every night, and reassuringly he answered “yes, of course!”. Sometimes, he added, he has the urge to take a picture of a cloud for its particular shape or nuance. And because this is precisely what I wanted to hear and because I am so sneaky, I immediately crafted an extended syllogism for which, yes, waking up next to your beloved after years can still be mesmerizing. 

It probably boils down to the simple truth: it depends on how you want to live. 

If you let beauty touch you.

If that be a question to me, I would vehemently exclaim that, yes, I am totally open for beauty to touch, caress, penetrate, permeate, even scratch me! I am ready to give beauty a pass-partout to my soul and to each and every of my senses. But can you open yourself up to beauty without granting free access to ugliness and evil as well? This (rhetorical) question kept bouncing in my head like in an old-time flipper a couple of nights ago as I was relishing some lovely, special attentions. Quite trivial special attentions, actually. Like gently and silently putting down my phone as I was attempting to find out, around 3 am, when my next train home would be. No words to tenderly ask “…what are you doing?!”. Something maybe ridiculously small and simple, which I noticed, however, left me astonished. It was like putting balm on a sore lip. Like wearing sunglasses on a bright sunny day. Like taking a shower after a long run and then let yourself fall on a soft bed bed with your damp robe still on.

It simply felt right. It made sense. 

Realizing this, I cursed against those moments and people that stole from me the pleasure of naturally trusting this goodness without questioning the authenticity of it. 

This is what we are called to do with beauty: we are naturally inclined to relish it, to let it fill us with its greatness, its inspiration. 

Nobody questions the intentions of a sunrise. 

You don´t doubt the authenticity of blue, fluffy clouds, even if they can turn into dangerous, potentially deadly storms.

I don´t know how much the flying man really felt the sunset he sent me. Or why he shared it with me, but no matter what, I see it as a good sign: I like people who believe in benevolent, magnificent clouds.