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. 

Speechless

Sometimes you are so busy browsing around Europe that you have just a few words left. Yet the impressions are always abundant.

 

The times, they are a-changing

(in my opinion, not always for the better) 

Eureka is just a street

It happens often. Mostly whilst working on boring excel lists, full of names and numbers and such dry materials. It happens softly: my mind just drifts away and brings me in that indefinite space called memory, so impalpable yet so vividly real as to make me feel the warmth of sun beams on my arms during a tepid and cloudy late winter afternoon.

It happened just a few moments ago: cell F17, VLOOKUP and…swoosh, I am on Telegraph Hill, it´s late June and I am sweating because I surely know that San Francisco is all up and down, but I did not expect Telegraph HILL (yes, that could have been a hint, true) to be that high. I don´t know it yet, but this city has already absorbed all the love that I am pouring out of my elated heart, the love that some big hands are sadly incapable of holding. That this city is slowly becoming a necessary surrogate, I slightly sense already, but on the streets of San Francisco I don´t want to listen to anything else but the noise of traffic and the chit chat of Californian girls coming out of one of the perceived millions of Starbucks I see downtown. I want to inhale the dust of the stores of Chinatown, cramped with goods wrapped up in cellophane as some strange post-modern, urban bales. I only want to lightheartedly spend money and time in high-end stores at Union Square. After all, here everything seems so cheap and I am happy, I am a very special tourist killing time waiting for the working hours to pass so that I can go to the Mission and meet up with the friends. And then afterwards go home, that home that is not really mine, where I have been invited after a “hearthquake”, to pretend that things can be ok nonetheless. That home so fucked up that every sensible person would just run-Forrest-run, but where I nevertheless so much want to belong.That home on the hill, with the view of the Golden Gate and the many unhealed, itching scars. And the wild garden. And the white front porch with the wicker lovers ‘chair, where I had my vegan dinner on a mid-summer night, content and carefree, because he was sitting next to me.

That home on the corner to Eureka Street where the enthusiasm remains just the name on a sign, or even more just a distant illusion.

Cell F17, VLOOKUP. Back to the secure world. It might not be as exciting as the one of infedele memories but at least it´s not like constantly balancing on the brink of a precipice. 

Modern bliss