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". 

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. 

Bauchgefühl, are you real or just a crazy bitch?

Sometimes I wish I could hit the fast-forward button. Obviously if I could then press the rewind button shortly after: I am not eager to become old instantly or dying to see how I will look in my 50s, 60s or 80s (if I ever get there, after all it´s not guaranteed). I am just sometimes puzzled by my feelings about other people´s choices and would love to see, without having to wait a decade or two, if my “Bauchgefühl” is right or if it´s totally messed up, which could even lead to make me look like I am being a jealous moralist spinster instead.

When we observe the lives of people around us we have a somehow privileged viewpoint: we are somehow detached (or at least generally more detached than them) not carried away by the incontrollable stream of passion (it´s not our life, chill out, no big deal!) and we spot right away the nice little hints that reveal the real “underground” motivations of those choices, which sometimes are not that healthy and could lead to a sudden crash. Much later, obviously, but still. They are the same little hints that we so very skillfully “oversee” (aka totally ignore) when it´s us, that we are talking about.

Lately I cannot help but being, if not disappointed (that sounds way too hard, doesn´t it?) at least a little puzzled about some choices of good friends of mine. There seems to be a sort of magical planetary influence, lately, because big changes are taking place in my circle of friends and, when they drop those news-bombs, I really, really have to control my facial muscles as to not let that eyebrow immediately rise in an explosion of pure, unfiltered skepticism.

In the past years I have been told several times that it´s good to trust your gut feeling, your “sixth sense”. Though thinking that it was a splendid suggestion, I first had the proof that it was also one to follow when I went out with a guy that I had met at a party and had already seemed to me a little weird. I had felt that there was something odd, yet as the guy sent me an email that night (through a group-website of which we both were members: I had not given my address to him directly) asking in the most mannered way if I wanted to have a drink with him, instead of listening to that little voice that kept saying “no, no, find an excuse, say no” I mentally scolded myself with a snappy “now, don´t be bitchy. He might be a little strange but he is also kind, he asked you out, what´s the problem?!”. The problem was that the guy is mentally disturbed, as it later turned out. And though I was lucky enough to get back home in one piece that night (for a few seconds I had doubts about that) I did end up experiencing one of the most unpleasant nights of my life. Ignoring my instinct was not smart, now I know. Yet back then it was somehow hard to believe that my stomach had superpowers that my brains did not have. Learning by doing, I then decided to tattoo the claim “Listen to your Bauchgefühl!” on my cerebral cortex.

Now, what does a bad date have to do with my friends’ life choices? Nothing, for sure. Only I am wondering if my sixth sense is merely auto referential or if it works also with those decisions of thirds which make me feel strange, which I find a little…hazardous. 

I remember being doubtful about a pregnancy in a shaky marriage. The child was not even 2 when the marriage imploded. I had a pretty strange feeling at a wedding where I nevertheless was moved to tears and that also turned into a very complicated and pretty unhappy situation shortly after.

Now I witness a friend perpetrating her well known scheme of long-distance-high-complex-factor relationship, a second one conducting her life as a driving learner at her first lesson with a stoned teacher sitting beside just laughing hysterically (foot on the accelerator pedal – down on the brake – panic - oh, speed is actually nice - foot heavy on the accelerator again - but maybe it´s scary - full brake again - no no, accelerator, now and 1000 miles per hours, whatever!!) and a third couple with a remarkable age difference exchanging unofficial vows of eternal love only a few weeks into their new-born lovestory.

I honestly still don´t understand if I am just being jealous of their happiness or if I just want to protect my friends from situations that in the rational corner of my brain are banging loudly on the bell with the big red sign “d-a-n-g-e-r!”.

But in the end, what do I know? I live in such a perpetual status-quo that maybe my “third party Bauchgefühl” comes only from my fear of changes. And who am I to judge, who am I to know? Nobody. I don´t know anything, in the end.

Time will tell, and since there´s no fast forward button (thankfully), we all just have to wait and see.

thank you

"the moment I let go of it, was the moment I got more than I could handle

the moment I jumped off of it, was the moment I touched down"