Irrelevant thoughts

Tag: personal growth

  • 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