Irrelevant thoughts

Category: Inner work

On working with the self — triggers, harmony, and what grows inside.

  • Respect

    Respect

    Respect!

    How much value does this word have? I place it at the value given by the one who uses it…, and how do I evaluate that? I look at him: how much he respects himself, how forbearing and understanding he is with others, how harsh he is with himself, having as reference the harshness he has in judging others…

    The semi-conscious — or unconscious, based on uncorrected frustrations or on other „pressures” — choice of one’s own actions and attitude can lead towards a dual system of reference (that is: I am allowed to…, while the other was not even allowed to imagine it).

    I have noticed that the term „respect” is used predominantly in a context in which the term „pampering” would rather fit, for example „I consume Prosecco because I respect myself…”, when in fact much closer to the truth would be the expression „I consume Prosecco because I pamper myself…” (or I coddle myself, or I „bonus” myself).

    Respect…, the one I understand, reveals itself in the way you treat others: you greet all your work colleagues regardless of their position, with the same attention and warmth, you speak without trying to raise yourself above them, without underlining your superiority, whether you have it or whether you do not…, you are understanding, you do not practise arrogance…

    If I am to put it otherwise… it would be „the way in which you treat your fellow men reveals the price you put on yourself”…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: Thoughts on human relationships and their naturalness (vs. their toxicity)

  • Pleasure

    Pleasure

    For a long time I tried to understand the difference between existing and living.

    We can all be placed inside the expression “the flight from pain and the chase after pleasure”…, and that expression defines the comfort zone, which, once we have it, becomes the most precious aspect of our life…, and the more wonderful it is, the more precious it becomes…

    Only that, as we keep it and use it…, we become more and more unsatisfied, more anxious…

    The search for pleasure… has as its reference the first time you tasted it…, in fact we long for the substances released in the brain, but we remain at the first level of obtaining them.

    The problem is that we try to find pleasure on the same road on which we met it…, and we do not realize that we need more of it, or more often, only to admit that we still do not perceive it as at our first tastings…, few go past the way in which they look for pleasure…, they do not realize that the first methods were suited to that period of existence and of awareness, and that afterwards the model has to be refined, the way of obtaining them.

    I arrived here trying to relive the joy that had been given to me, at various moments, and I found that the sensation had spoiled. In the meantime I had had others of greater intensity (or of greater weight), and going then to those I found that they too are at least slightly spoiled, what I perceive from memories no longer brings the same lived feeling…

    And then the joys I brought to others “struck me”…, their state of emotion, which produced my joy…, that one was almost as intense…, I cannot say that it does not lose intensity, but not in the same measure as my own joys, and in any case they are far more alive than my own joys, made by me or by others…

    On the other hand…, fears…, with me they stay as intense as the first time they came…, so what is fine loses its intensity, what is bad holds…, thinking about how I deal with this…, I found the reference of making small, unexpected joys for those around me…, that keeps me, in memories too, with plenty of satisfactions and joy…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: Respect

  • I lost the glove

    I lost the glove

    When I was young I wanted to know everything that could be known. I found the television fascinating, which brought programmes into our house…, the radio, which did the same thing only along a line of sound…, I wanted to know how aeroplanes are made, I wanted to know everything there was to know…

    And somewhere around the 8th grade, learning in chemistry about Mendeleev’s table, I realized that the difference between the elements is only the number of electrons…, that between Gold and Iron there stands only that. I was left almost in shock…, I had heard stories about the “Philosopher’s Stone”, mysticism had made room for itself where there was no science…, and when you understand that “a teaspoon of electrons” can change something into something else, it is as if the Sun has risen and you see in colours; at night, in mysticism, you see everything grey and only contours…

    Much later I found out that in fact the protons are the cause…, their number makes the element, the electrons only follow them. Me, at thirteen, it struck in the form with the electrons, and that is how it stayed with me. But the fact that I found out only years later is the very proof of the thing I keep saying: the road does not end…

    I had been doing chemistry since around the 5th grade. That I understood only in the 8th has to do also with the teachers who taught only the school curriculum, without any inclination to explain things to the children in terms they could grasp, and somehow to make them understand…

    Nowadays everyone has access to information…, and precisely because of that, finding out is no longer a joy. The conversations between people are about sensational subjects…, nothing concrete, ideas are no longer discussed. And slowly…, slowly, myth makes its way back into social life — not because things are not known, but because knowing no longer brings anyone any joy…

    We are flooded with information and lost in it, bewildered…, and the common purpose, at the level of a people or of a civilization, I still do not see — other than money enough to secure yourself a high degree of comfort, without wishing to learn, to understand…, only to exist, and to call that “life”…

    And here is the link I saw late: curiosity about the world and curiosity about a person are the same appetite. When one goes out, the other does not remain…

    I have always considered that in a relationship of partnership things are easier, and I believe people are searching all the time…, only partnership is not handed out at the push of a button, and we have been raised to press. That is how it comes about that people search…, and keep on searching…

    It is said of two people that they fit like a glove…, and the expression knows more than it lets show: it speaks of a pair that recognizes itself, not of one that arranges itself. Today we have every form of communication, which mediates the distance between us…, we have almost everything at a button…, only we are so superficial that we can no longer bring our souls close…, we can no longer find the glove…

    A glove has its meaning only when it is worn…, otherwise it spoils, forgotten on a shelf in the wardrobe…

    We are in a phase in which only unpaired gloves are to be found…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: Pleasure

  • I realized that I am Grateful

    I realized that I am Grateful

    The other day I was driving through the county…, I went to visit a cave…, and then I went on to see some other places…

    Very many monasteries, and very many people at the monasteries, clusters of parked cars…, and I was wondering…, why do people go and stand in clusters at the gates, why do they go there…? Monastic life has a form “torn from the world”, but people do not go there wholly, to leave the world…, they bring it with them. They go on the principle that those monks are “cleaner”, and that their prayer carries more “weight” before God…, and they go because they need “something”…, they pay for a pomelnic or two — a list of names handed over to be prayed for…

    Having this thought and driving on, I pictured how people arrive at the monastery, and I am watching as the monk who greets them asks them “With what problem?”, and the people answer “with a health problem…”, “with a problem with money…”, “with a problem with the neighbour…”, and in the string of my thoughts the monk turns towards me and asks me “And you, with what problem?”

    I caught myself having no answer…, in my mind I fell silent, mute, at that turn of thought…, then I realized… “I have come to give thanks, I am GRATEFUL for my life!”

    This thought lit up my day…, so that you understand: I do not have a perfect life, I do not have a family, I do not have many of the things that are considered “needs”, I am divorced, I have no partner…, but I am glad of life and grateful for everything I have lived, for my whole road…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: I lost the glove

  • How it would be if I were

    How it would be if I were

    I cannot manage to understand why you would want to seem smarter than you are preparing to be.

    If you make an effort, if you read, if you learn…, you simply become, you learn foreign languages, there are a heap of forms through which you can turn yourself from the stance of an ignorant person into the stance of a smart person…, none of us was born smart, we all took the genetic fund and used what we had…, only there is no fast train…, you have to walk the road, to let your brain build new neural connections, that takes time, to get used to the newly assimilated notions, to integrate them into the processes of thinking…, etc…

    The intention to “take photos” with muscles, the way there used to be all sorts of cardboard figures “with muscles”, and there was a hole instead of a face, for each person to put his own face in and have a photo taken…, that is roughly how it looks, in my optics, to try to seem smart…

    And this is very hard, when everyone who finds himself at that point has the clear and entirely undoubting impression that he is smart…

    I met someone who told me, full of importance, that he wants to “invest” in a “kite” — he said it in English; in my language the thing is a zmeu, a paper dragon on a string. I was left perplexed, I asked what kind of investment that is…, I understood that he was masking a personal whim, in the way he put it, inside an “investment”…, as an expression…, that throws him outside the understanding of words, and if there were an area where people know what weight words carry…, he would have been outside, at a great distance from the gate…

    I feel myself the prisoner of these times in which, no matter what I say, it is twisted and interpreted “somehow”, and that is because we have got used to no longer naming things, but to using big words, each for his own reasons, but in general to “taking photos” (with muscles)…

    This society brings us into the comfort zone, where you have everything at the push of a button, you have remote controls, you have half-prepared food…, you no longer hear conversations of the kind “how are you managing with some problem in mathematics”, or “have you read such and such a book”…, all that is spoken is “have you been there?”, or “have you seen that?”, or “have you heard about such a thing (person)?”…, advice is no longer asked for in order to become…, a competition is held in order to seem “superior”, on criteria that are quite childish… (I have been, I have seen, I have heard)

    At some point a phrase was going around on sites (Facebook, for example), “life begins beyond the limit of the comfort zone”…, only there is no one left to understand it, because all around everything is comfort…

    If you do not expose yourself to situations that put you in the stance of going past your limits (the ones from that moment), you will never be more than that…, because you do nothing in that direction…

    And this is actually measured. In the Nordic countries, where evaluations were made on entire generations, intelligence scores kept climbing until those born around the middle of the ’70s, and from then on they came back down to where they had started. The interesting part is that the researchers compared brothers from the same family, in order to take genetics out of the equation…, and they came to the conclusion that both the climb and the fall come from the environment. They were not born weaker. The environment made them so.

    Which is exactly what I was saying at the beginning: no one is born smart, each one takes the genetic fund and does with it what he does…, only now we no longer do anything. We can say that this is how the end begins…, wrapped in warm socks and house slippers with a bit of fur on them…

    From this perspective, you do not even have to do very much in order to step out of the row…, and that is precisely what should give you pause: if the bar is that low, going over it is not a performance…, it is only the beginning of the road, the one without a fast train…

    I have met people past the age of 30 who thought of enrolling in high school, of taking their baccalaureate and of going through university…, and they set out precisely because they had above them superiors of the “comfortable” model, who did not manage very well in real life…

    Some of them enrolled for the baccalaureate four years in a row, until they passed it.

    I admire the people who went back to close a chapter of their life, to the measure of their potential…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: I realized that I am Grateful

  • Mercantilism

    Mercantilism

    I have met very many people, in the expression of my sincere intention to find a partner…, the time allotted proved unjustified…, for the most part I met “mercantilism”, in various forms…

    I think it was the form that rounded the lie…, and made it slide (roll) more easily…

    I cannot help recalling a sequence from “Game of Thrones”, when Jon Snow was sincere and any negotiation with Queen Cersei was ruined, and he said, approximately, that if we all set about lying there will be no more truth, only, in his words, “better and better lies”, and then words will no longer mean anything…

    Life, for all of us, comes with problems, needs, wishes…, but it is up to us not to make dramas out of that…, drama is a “semi-elevated” form of mercantilism, when you speculate on emotional blackmail, very often used in the couple, in order to obtain something from the other…

    It seems to me that the moment such a thing appears in the discussion…, that relationship has been “defiled” (dirtied in a way that can no longer be washed off), because one of the persons involved has put themselves and their need above the other, and has trampled the other’s person underfoot, not being fairplay enough to ask clearly, in a friendly conversation…, they forced things so that the other person would consider themselves indebted, and would have the intention of “offering”…, a boorish way of obtaining…

    It can no longer be a partnership, it is mercantilism, between 2 entities that deliberately swap their roles — at least one of them is aware — between master and servant.

    Then we gather frustrations and begin to think with a speculative note about anything the other person does or says…, and it has long ceased to be a partnership, a walking together through life as in a dance…, we are talking about flatmates “with benefits”…

    Nor is it a matter of friends any more…, the first condition of friendship is sincerity…, from second 1 in which one of them had a speculative thought about the other…, from then on it can no longer be friendship either…

    I understand, most people are taught this way…, I do not know who exactly teaches them, but what is certain is that it is practised, and practised in the belief, first of all, that they are protecting themselves…, which is false, they are protecting their frustrations and the unresolved problems inside them…

    And what is most interesting is that it is up to each one of us to resolve them…, and we credit the comfort of the lie — that we are good and great — instead of the correction and the stitching of those wounds that hurt us years later, decades later, because we did not heal them, and they were made in childhood, or in adolescence…

    Through this mercantilism we buy ourselves torment, even if it does not reveal itself at first sight, in essence that is how it comes out…, it is as if you look, like an accountant, at last month’s expenses…, and you see that you bought sweets every day, a few tens of lei each time…, out of a reasoning of the kind “it cannot be much of a problem”…, and at the end of the month you realize you have gone several times over the budget…

    With care not to let myself be defeated by failure…, I feel my way…, only I do it with great care and without compromises…, it is interesting to watch myself, my reasonings and my emotions, how I go about “trying the sea with a finger”…, and at the first sign of incompatibility I stop on it, until it clears up one way or the other…, the worst, it seems to me, is when I identify no sign at all…, and then I feel I am in danger of repeating the mistake of choosing…

    Now, in full experiment about myself…, I try not to let myself be led by wounds I have not yet seen and have not stitched…, it is interesting how I feel very well alone and do not accept “just anything” (just anyone), and at the same time I feel there is a large place…, vacant…, beside me…, and I have the tendency to stretch out my hand and somehow expect to touch someone…

    Talking to a friend, on the phone…, and asking myself, as between friends…, I was telling him that I no longer have the curiosity to meet people…, all the ones I have met had expectations of the kind that I should bring, that I should put into play…, that I should offer…, more than my person and my time…

    And, still on the phone…, I tried to explain to him why the two of us seek each other out, write to each other, call each other, and when we meet we behave as if we had last seen each other yesterday, even though the previous meeting came twenty years after the one before it…

    “Because what we receive from each other is enough, we have no expectations that you should give something more, we ask for nothing of the kind, we are glad that we give each other time, and it is up to us to make it of quality.”

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: How it would be if I were

  • The need to underline one’s importance

    The need to underline one’s importance

    Hello, my dear, this thought shared with you has as its support the explanation of the need for importance underlined through attitude and, implicitly, through appearance.

    The person who needs to underline their position through an outfit of the shirt, jacket and dress-trousers kind — and this does not refer to the position that requires etiquette, or to the meetings that come with it, it refers to everyday life…, that person dresses that way as if in armour, because they are afraid, and they have as a shield of presence… their clothes. It is the same with the model of car that wants to impose…

    And so as not to be misunderstood…, I am not talking about being well-groomed. Anyone can be well-groomed, in any way. The difference is not in the garment, it is in constancy…, if you dress the same way every day, whatever that way may be, you are showing who you are…, if your outfit rises exactly when you need to impose yourself, then you have not dressed, you have armed yourself…

    There is one more test, and it is simpler…, the well-groomed man can bear a crease, a stain, a worn shoe…, it does not bring him down…, armour can bear nothing, because any crease is a crack in the shield…

    In another order of ideas there would be one more thing, which has nothing to do with the cut…: where the person’s attention is. The one who is at ease is busy with something — with what he is working on, with the one he is talking to…, the starchy one is busy with the way he is seen. It shows in the hands…, whoever straightens his jacket, adjusts his knot, pulls at his cuff…, that one is keeping watch over his armour…, whoever is at ease forgets that he is wearing anything. It shows in the sleeves…, a rolled-up sleeve means the garment has been fitted to the man…, whoever stays all day exactly as the garment came out of the shop has fitted himself to the garment. And it shows at the throat…, the knot tight at the throat is the only piece that really tightens…, whoever wears it out of obligation undoes it the moment the obligation ends…, whoever wears it as a shield stays buttoned up until evening…

    Nothing of what I have said so far can be bought…

    I would conclude with an aspect that seems to me the best joke armour plays on itself: the suit put on in order to impose has a manufacturing defect…, from three steps away it does not say “look, an important man”, it says “look, a man who was told how to dress”…, that is, exactly the opposite of what you wanted. Whoever chooses, it shows that he chose. Whoever arms himself, looks like a uniform…

    I know a man who walks in every day on people who do not know him, who have no reason to listen to him, and from whom he must nevertheless obtain something…, he is, if you like, in a permanent attack…, and he goes about in jeans and a shirt, and in winter with a thick coat over them.

    And I know a university professor, whom I met once coming from a course with foreign students, in a suit. I did not recognize him at first…, I told him he looked as if somebody had sent him out dressed like that…, and that if he had also put on the tie, one could no longer tell whether he was giving the lecture or bringing the coffee at the break. He was offended, naturally…

    He explained to me that he wanted to be protocolary with the foreign students. I told him that the value is not in the etiquette, but in the way you approach them, in how you teach, in how simply you explain…, and I asked him how he thinks anyone is going to take part interactively when the man at the lectern walks in dressed as if for a board meeting…

    But the question worth asking is a different one, and a shorter one: who was the suit for? He had nobody to convince. He taught, and he was also the one who gave the grade. Power he already had, all of it. The other one, who has to convince from zero at every door, does not feel the need for a jacket…, he, who had nobody to convince, felt it…

    That is the difference, and it is not in the garment: it is in the need. Armour appears exactly where there is no need of it, because it does not protect you from the others…, it protects you from yourself…

    The same thing I could say when people use “precious” words, not because they are familiar with them, but because they feel the need to underline their value…, and this is evident from the context seen as a whole: for the most part they talk like sailors and only very rarely use words (terms) that throw you off balance when they come out of those persons…, if they were constant in decent expression, with metaphors, with “rare” words, that would be their particularity…, but when they use them in moments when they want to impose themselves, or feel cornered…, then it is defence disguised as attack (elevated)…, the elevated is simulated…, in order to build a “safety” distance…

    And to be honest to the end…, I laughed back then, and only much later did I see that my joke was also a way of placing myself above…, that is, exactly the thing I was reproaching him with. My armour is not bought in a shop, but that does not make it any less armour…

    A man’s worth is not in what he wears, nor in what position he holds, nor in how many listen to him because they are obliged to…, it is in how much he is able to educate himself, regardless of circumstances. That is not visible from three steps away…, and it cannot be borrowed from anywhere…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: Mercantilism

  • The convenient illusion of the Ego (and of the confusion around self-respect)

    The convenient illusion of the Ego (and of the confusion around self-respect)

    There is the “pride” through which the Ego expresses itself…, and it is generally accepted as being “normal”; I believe it is merely usual, because it is simpler, more comfortable, and we have fewer and fewer examples of — and understanding for — the concept of self-respect…

    I will enumerate a few aspects, just enough to make known to you “my reference”, in such a way that you do not feel offended. I am not interested in argumentative discussions of the kind “whose reference is better, or bigger” — which is also why I call myself Irrelevant…

    Aspect one: if you are a trained and strong fellow…, and you pick a quarrel with people who are neither trained nor strong, only so as to dominate them and to practise your illusion of potency, that is not self-respect, it is boorishness — and more than boorishness, it is a great sign of weakness.

    Aspect two: if you are a person who sees that another person needs, or wants, or would find useful, a thing that lies within the first person’s power, or that they have and it costs no great effort to offer, and they do not offer it but instead put a price on it, a price that brings the 2nd person, the one with the need, to their knees…, that is not self-respect; it is not necessarily boorishness, but it is certainly a great sign of weakness — the need for control, which springs from insecurity. You cannot expect a person who “steps with fear” (through life) to understand self-respect; hard, as long as they step that way…

    Aspect three: if you feel you can do something for others, something that counts, your contribution to their life or to the community’s, and you do it, that is self-respect — when you treat the others the way you expect to be treated as a being; and among other things it excludes duality — or triality, or quadruplicity, depending on how far the thing has gone — that is, that aspect in which you have at least 2 systems of values, one for yourself and another (or others) for everyone else.

    I have underlined 3 points of reference so that you may become familiar with “my measure”, with the subjective measure of the Irrelevant in me.

    In order to communicate to you what self-respect is, I will enumerate, and explain why, the things that exclude self-respect. The first point that comes to mind is “ignorance”: any person who chooses ignorance falls out of the scheme of the possessor of self-respect, because ignorance is a common term that describes comfortable people… One of the greatest efforts is to think…, the ignorant one is a person who spares themselves intellectually…, not to be confused with limited access to information, where the person’s tendency is still to seek to understand.

    The second aspect I would underline is “arrogance”. At a certain moment in my existence I realized how ugly arrogance is, but I did so when I was on the other side of it…, and then, meeting a person I could talk to, when he asked me “why are you upset, Irrelevant?”, I told him “I have realized how ugly arrogance is and I do not know how to get rid of the one I have grown inside me”, and he said to me “my dear Irrelevant…, arrogance is the prerogative of any intelligent person”. I told him I do not agree, but I understand his reasoning…: being intelligent, at some point you no longer have many people around you to talk with, and a “shortcut” appears (which then becomes a reflex) — to treat people from above, being used to having no partner in conversation…; however it may be, arrogance is the treating of other people from above, and implicitly the underlining of their smallness, which for the most part might lean on ignorance…, and I would say that arrogance does not help…, everyone gains more if people understand certain things, or processes, and if they cannot, it still stands that everyone gains more when, through your behaviour, you lift up the one beside you rather than point out how far down he is.

    Now that we have arrived “organically” at where self-respect appears: it is in moral conduct and in the treatment of those you interact with. This respect reveals itself also in each person’s work — they never make a mockery of what they do, they do it conscientiously, and above the financial motivation stands the moral motivation, “principles”, as some like to formulate it, except that when you mention them you feel the need to name them precisely because they are not evident…

    If people had self-respect and behaved towards others the way they hope or wish to be treated themselves…, everything would go far more simply and naturally. Think what it would be like, in traffic: being attentive to all the participants, you see a fellow driver who is in a hurry, or who simply does not know which lane to take…, and you make room for him, without horns, without “my right is bigger than your right…”, without anything of the sort…, you might have the impression that you are in a civilized country where people have some self-respect…

    Beyond traffic you can approach any other conjuncture. At work: everyone goes to work for money, you have already made the agreement of the kind “your time, your potency and your capacity for ‘this’ money”, and you have a bad day, or there is a particularity you have not understood…, or…, various details, from time to time…, would it not be simpler and easier, and perhaps even decent, for it to be explained to you, for you to be helped, a little…? — not as a habit of not knowing; that would mean you are not in the right position or the right post…

    And now, the concept of self-respect being clear, in my optics — a respect that is not practised the way the world says it has principles, because if it were…, this world would be a better place…, I tell you that it is up to each one separately to have self-respect, and it has nothing to do with what the others do…: if I am honked at in traffic because I did not signal during a quick jerk of the wheel, having not been in the right lane — travelling a great deal, I do not know all the “details” of every city, and it does happen that I take the wrong lane — and I have got in someone’s way…, I thank him for “letting me in”, I put on the hazard lights, and if our eyes meet I thank him sincerely and admit, with a raised hand, that I made “a jerk of a move”; if I were to relate to the offence the fellow driver felt and answer him with a horn of my own, it would be a pointless circus, because I have already done a jerky thing, and in any case nobody was hit, but the contest of “my right is bigger” brings nothing good…, in my optics…

    The same thing appears in any kind of relationship, especially the couple…, if you are under the impression that this is self-respect, to have the bigger right, and for the other person to agree that yours is bigger…, in my optics…, it is childish behaviour in the couple relationship…, and you are practising arrogance…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: The need to underline one’s importance

  • Thoughts on human relationships and their naturalness (vs. their toxicity)

    Thoughts on human relationships and their naturalness (vs. their toxicity)

    The naturalness expressed here is “mine”, absolutely subjective, and I am not speaking about “normal”; I consider the term outdated. I have used it so often that “normal” has come to carry the meaning of “usual” — as one might say, the word “normal” has entered inflation and has been devalued. This happens to all words used in excess, so I will not use the term “normal”.

    In order to express the naturalness as I understand it…, it is important that I make known to you my system of reference, and the naturalness I have in mind. First of all, every person is duty-bound to work with the self, not for the others, even though those around also take joy in the change for the better. This duty, which I express with such largesse, refers to making one’s own life more beautiful, simpler…, in general “more” — in my language that word is mai, which is also the name of May, the spring month in which nature blossoms…; why is this aspect important…? Beyond the simplification it brings as a result for each one’s self…, it places you in the stance of a “learner”, which matters both for outward relationships and for the relationship with the self…; if a conjuncture arises…, one that “scratches” the “harmony” you thought you had…, think about it…, if it were inner harmony…, no external factor could disturb it. If something does disturb it…, expressed on the outside, the cause is only on the inside; the outside merely offers you “a trigger”, which sets off inside you a set of reactions. Having the exercise, and practising the “learner” stance…, you stand a good chance of identifying the trigger and of solving it, instead of laying the blame on the others…, who will never do anything for your comfort…, and even if they do it, I still do not consider that it brings an advantage…, I consider that it cripples, because the self is left with that same sensitivity to that same trigger…

    Beyond the work with the self, there would be one more aspect that seems to me decent and pertinent…: we live in times of… “equality”; everybody wanted equality…, now we have it…, so why is “someone” responsible for “someone else’s” shortcoming…?; in other words…, if you want something, you set yourself to make it…; if you have any self-respect, you do not “fish” for “fools” to “trick” into making it for you…

    If these 2 conditions are fulfilled, I believe there is a chance that you will understand, and even live, the naturalness (as I understand it) of human relationships; otherwise it is a waste of time to read further…

    Now let us make relevant the naturalness I was speaking of above.

    Lately I meet many people…, and out of these, many…, all of them tend to mercantilize any relationship, especially the amorous ones…, and this because one of the 2 aspects mentioned above is not ticked off, usually the first one, because if that one is ticked…, at some point the second one gets ticked as well…; so, to express myself simply…, I consider that people should seek the presence of other persons whom they like, or who confer on them a state of quiet, of comfort, of explanations, etc…, and should seek to be respectful of the other’s time…, to be aware that the other person is there through volunteering, and not to try to constrain them, to blackmail them (emotionally or professionally), to fence them in in any way…; healthy relationships, I believe, have something in common with freedom and with gratitude…; the first form of gratitude is that you have come to know a person who is… “great”, and you seek their presence; then the gratitude for the time and the attention you receive from that person…, and from this stance something solid really can be built, on the condition that the 2 persons share the same measure of things and that each one, on their own side, is grateful for the other person…; the gratitude I speak of does not refer to “I want more”, “I want EVERYTHING for myself”…, it refers to “I am unspeakably glad that I had x time spent together, it was exceptional… etc.”; the conveying of the fulfilment you felt in a meeting, or of a leap in awareness, or of an understanding of a theory (a relationship with a teacher)…, puts more weight into each one’s life than the shortcoming that you no longer have that opportunity, or that it is rare, or…; the exercise of seeing what we lack draws you away from the joy of living…, it brings a form of handicap, because you think about and pay attention to what you lack, not to what you have…

    If people sought each other in equal measure, for the state of well-being they have in the other’s company, or for interesting subjects to discuss (not the score of last night’s match)…, the world would be better; if they made each other a gift of time and concluded that it had not been squandered, from here one can say that a good relationship can be built…; when it becomes necessary, or when it is demanded, that more than time be granted…, whatever that might be…, in my optics it is squandering…; time…, is par excellence the most important and most expensive resource of any person; if you offer it to someone and it is not enough…, then nothing will be enough for that person — however much and whatever you might give them…, it will not be enough…

    The conclusion is that if something in particular is asked for, or expected, something to bring an added value into a meeting, or into a partnership — the business area excluded, there everything is mercantilism — then the relationship is not worth it, not even worth thinking about or recounting…

    And starting from here…, if a person is accepted and sought for what they are, so as to make a partnership — professional, private, amorous…, then all the boorishness and the speculations that are in fashion are excluded…; starting from the premise that it is on a voluntary basis, everything becomes simple and clear…

    In another order of ideas…, if you do not work with the self, and you project your fears, your traumas, etc., around you…, do not be surprised that they grow inside you and that you see yourself ever more alone in your cage with bars — bars that you yourself consolidate through the manifestation of the shortcomings and of the problems…; certainly, you can strike up against loneliness even when you work with yourself and the others do not work with themselves…, but it is another loneliness: it is a quiet one, it is an assumed one, one that can even tend towards joy…; I do not know the term happiness in its entirety, in emotions, so as to use it…, but “joy” — that one I know…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: The convenient illusion of the Ego (and of the confusion around self-respect)