Emotion and communication – let’s try again:
- This is an honest attempt to improve communication between people. Why do I post it on my wall? Because too many people who read my stuff failed catastrophically in their approach to communicate with me and with many others
- Starting your letter, e-mail, text or dialogue part by stating your emotion does nothing good. Many people like me (and the large majority of men) will only be bored, overwhelmed or simply entertain in a deep desire to disappear
- A statement about emotion or feelings has a place in human communication, but, honestly, facts must come first. You need to provide information for your interlocutor to process and also some peace for that to happen efficiently
- Other people’s emotions can be just boring. But they can be overwhelming, too. You didn’t think they could, did you? You never thought that dumping your emotions on your interlocutor is a form of abuse? There you go: it is.
Christmas, you guys, traditions, conventions and meaning
I don’t share religious views on social media as I don’t share who I vote for, or other personal items. Whatever personal content I share is for entertainment purposes only, like goblins and gnomes.
Today, however, I will share perhaps one of the only items that I still hang on to in my journey towards extreme minimalism. I got rid of a huge library: thousands of books and articles. Bags and bags of clothes. Ornaments.
All the Christmas things I had while my daughter was growing up, which are completely unimportant to her for years – tree, glass balls, a sophisticated nativity scene -, I gave them all to charity.
But I kept this small, very old and simple nativity scene. Saint Joseph is missing and so is one of the Wise Men (or Kings). There is a weird elephant, two dogs and two hunters.
It belonged to my grandmother and I have no idea how it remained with me. I have moved countless times to different cities and countries – yet, it is here.
My grandmother is possibly one of the strongest women I met. She was a pianist and a piano teacher. She passed on her strong blood to my mother, who passed it on to me and I use it to lift weights.
I have no idea if there is anything after death. What I know is that we live through our legacy. My grandmother taught some of the best pianists in this country. Her music still plays inside my mind and there is no sound more perfect that that. I like to think that if she is there, somewhere, she may be proud of me when I lift something heavy.
For you, what I wish is that you hang on to what is meaningful, to traditions that were meant to keep Meaning from being eroded. Meaning is something precious, yet, because immaterial, quite vulnerable. Conventions that are created to prevent intimacy and introspection erode Meaning.
Although I am not a religious person, I would like to hitchhike on my friend’s Christmas celebration and contribute my tradition, my Meaning: my ancestor’s Nativity Scene.
May you all find meaning in your own traditions and may you all cherish what grounds you to a warm place of your own.
Meaninglessness
A message to my (real) friends who are (real) MEN (in the sense of human awareness – “men” as a genderless term, please keep your shallow political correctness away or I will symbolically punch you back: you won’t like it) and feel (really) in danger
(part of an e-mail)
I don’t have an answer. These things don’t have answers. The reason, I believe, is that there is no “meaning of life” hidden somewhere “out there”. It is a construction. A totally symbolic construction, which either one embraces from the outside or, with a lot of blood and guts, constructs for oneself.
When you realize this, there is a new dimension of freedom and danger. Because knowing you are the master of all construction means you are also the master of all DECONSTRUCTION.
You will choose to live or die and why – no religion or “higher value” will do that for you.
Death is no threat. I’ve been there and looked at it face-to-face (or guts-to-guts, since it is inside all of us). The real threat are the disintegrating forces in society. Stupidity and shallowness; the dense meaninglessness which we can’t understand how in hell can move normal people, when it is actually a powerful destructive force. Meaninglessness, eating away the symbolic landscape or our designed projects and principles. The fabric of life itself.
Conventional beliefs and shallow relationships are poison to us.
The problem is that it is highly unlikely that we can develop effective, bullet-proof, ways to protect ourselves from this. Our strength is also our vulnerability: it is the acute awareness that we have about MEANINGLESSNESS.
We despise them, but in a way, they are stronger than us: the toxicity of their shallow selves and actions can actually kill us.
Keep safe, hang on to any thread of meaning you can until the Nothingness Wave passes.
In my case, it is really organic and environmental: it is the heat wave. I must hang on, look at the bright blue sky that brings darkness to my heart and think “this are my neurotransmitters reacting according to my Northern genome, nothing more, nothing less”. It requires summoning that small voice that is always alive inside us called REASON.
This is what makes us different from “them”.
Hang on – I will. The sun, the heat, human stupidity and conventional shallowness will not kill me – not right now. You do that too, at your end.
PS – this will go to my blog when I have time to elaborate it better. Responding to this sort of call is my responsibility as one who has always danced with death. We need to help each other.
Alpha male
A lot of people need to review basic calculus and simple mendelian genetics: if the bold, smart, big, strong, protective (because paleolithic females were never alone and never had to protect the young, in hunter-gatherer condition, sure – SARCASM MODE ON – … add a little anthropology to math and biology up there) and resourceful alpha males always picked sweet, weak, vulnerable, pretty-according-to-the-beauty-industry-parameters (which ones, 150,000 years ago? : ) ) females our species would be?… Still paleolithic, by heterozygosity! LOL
Wake up, dudes: you can only be strong, big and have a powerful grip because your alpha ancestors chose strong, big, smart and aggressive alpha females to reproduce and these genes spread out.
A little science with your eggs? : )