Oddballs and black sheep

I like people like me, oddballs and black sheep, and I instantly recognise them on the street. Sometimes it’s the way they look, their size, their dress, make-up or body art. Sometimes it’s their overconfident posture, their backbone, and some other times it’s their shyness; slightly reserved, slightly hunched, they don’t hold your gaze for long.

Our path is long, filled with weeds and rocks. No truck has gone before us to open the way. And whilst we walk through the wild vegetation, we upset some wasps, and they don’t know what to make of us, they’ve never seen something like us before, and we scare them, so they sting. They sting and sting and sting, and it hurts. They feel they have the right to sting, because this is their world, and we disturbed it. God knows what kind of habits or secrets we carry in that unusual-looking nonconformist backpack of ours, and so we must die.

But my friends, after a day's battle, whilst we’re nursing our wounds and mending our hearts and sucking the poison out, we must remember one thing… That we are here today, enjoying the privilege of freedom and of life because of our oddball ancestors. Because from the beginning of time all the way to today’s modern-day jungle, it is the oddballs and black sheep who got their hands dirty, who dared, who fought, who propelled the world forward and opened the way for the future generations. Us Edward Scissorhands of this world, we can’t change, and we shouldn’t want to, because our mission is sacred. So we must keep on, stay focused and replenish our strength in the friendship, understanding and companionship of fellow warriors. Be each other's pom-pom girls and rah rah team, and build each other up. Share our battle stories over a hip flask of sweet-smelling wine, together. Death will ultimately free our soul, but until then, let’s make the journey on the road less travelled a little more comfortable. Together.

This and that, here and there, aka the golden ability of flexibility

Do you sometimes feel like you’re inconsistent, all over the place, like you can’t decide whether your personality is one way or the other way? Do you feel like a “schizo” (as a friend put it), puzzling yourself about being serious one day and silly the next, quiet and gregarious, hard-working and sometimes lazy, involved and aloof, and pushing yourself to finally MAKE-UP-YOUR-MIND?

If so, congratulations! You possess an absolutely essential ability that life’s toughest survivors possess: flexibility.

I used to consider myself terribly inconsistent. Here’s why: I will work myself to the bone for very long hours (workaholic), but then for days I will just sit on my couch and veg (lazy). I will strip at a club (far out) but I also consider myself to be quite conservative (square). I will plan my day/month/life (consistent) but then I will have bouts of complete unpredictability (erratic). I describe myself as positive (happy) but I enjoy the sounds of the cello most because of its moodiness (melancholic). Crazy right? Wrong!

Life’s best survivors often feel like misfits because a key source of their strength, flexibility, is viewed by some people as emotional instability. Those with rigid thinking can't handle complex people very well, and often view them as defective. Take any test in a magazine that they tell you you’re either one way or the other, not both. But it is in fact healthiest to have two opposite feelings. Having a very wide range of emotions and traits makes us very adaptable, as we are equipped to handle all types of different circumstances. To react in the same fixed way to all situations reduces our ability to adjust to changing and unpredictable events. The knack of responding in a variety of ways gives us choices, even though being two extremes at the same time may feel very weird.

Which of the following pairs of traits do you recognize in yourself?

sensitive, tough
strong, gentle
cowardly, courageous
mature, playful
humorous, serious
distant, friendly
self-confident, self-critical
trusting, cautious
dependent, independent
impulsive, well-organised
happy, discontent
cooperative, rebellious
proud, humble
selfish, unselfish
involved, detached
lazy, hard-working
logical, creative
calm, emotional
shy, bold
loving, angry
consistent, unpredictable
messy, neat
optimistic, pessimistic
...
feel free to add your own.

So, rather than thinking you're mental, embrace the conflict in your traits as they make you a person perfectly equipped to hold up well in "cross-fire". Shifting traits and changes are not superficial. Nor are they signs of emotional stability. They indicate deep inner resilience. After all, adaptation is key to survival in nature. If as a plant or animal you are unable to modify yourself to the changing environment, you vanish forever.

Daydreaming

I think the power of imagination and fantasy has been a mental sanctuary during my hardest times. When the pain gets hard to bear, daydreaming releases the fist that squeezes my heart. I dream about the past and I dream about the future.

THE PAST

I go through really tough times in my life by taking flight into the past. I lose myself in vivid recollections-of walking along the ocean shore with my mom and dad. I totally lose myself in experiences of playing my cello, watching my favourite musical, dancing dancing dancing, laughing, making love. I run around with my dog, dead nine years, with an indescribable sensation of joy. In my darkest moment, the past is a beautiful escape that lifts the spirit and makes the day a little better.

THE FUTURE

Now this is my favourite type of "fantasy". I love dreaming of the future so much because this is more than escaping, this is creating a future for myself, moulding it tiny bit by tiny bit. Because if you’ve thought about a future scenario, if you’ve really thought about every little detail of it, and you really want it, you get it.

Viktor Frankl is a holocaust survivor and a motivational speaker. He was unhappy in the concentration camp, quite understandably. So he made himself imagine something pleasant. In his fantasy he saw himself giving a lecture about the psychology of life in a concentration camp. He said that by imagining himself in the future he became detached from his daily sufferings. He observed what was happening as though it was in the past. He converted his experience in the camp to an interesting scientific study that he would lecture about on a world tour.

Viktor found that he was able to endure a lot of pain because he had a mental picture of a pleasant future ahead for him. In his book he wrote, “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future-his future-was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”

For Frankl, faith in the future meant faith in one’s ability to live through present danger, grief, or trouble and to carry oneself forward into a time to come. This is not hope. It is instead a process of steeling yourself to handle the present in order to make a good future possible. With hoping, you may get what you want, or you may not. With faith, you hold your desired outcome close, whatever happens. It’s what I call “tunnel vision”. You are on a mission and nothing can stop you.

I hear that life’s calmest, happiest people meditate. Maybe I should try that. Or maybe meditating is daydreaming without the fancy name. Whatever it is, thinking of happy things makes me happy. Quite simply.

Update 05/11:
woolgathering \WOOL-gath-(uh)-ring\, noun: Indulgence in idle daydreaming.

Loving this word!

Happy Valentine's Day

What the world needs now,
Is love, sweet love,

It's the only thing that there's just too little of.

What the world needs now,

Is love, sweet love,

No, not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don't need another mountain,

There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb,

There are oceans and rivers enough to cross,

Enough to last 'til the end of time.

What the world needs now,

Is love, sweet love,

It's the only thing that there's just too little of.

What the world needs now,

Is love, sweet love,

No, not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don't need another meadow,

There are cornfields and wheatfields enough to grow,

There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine,

Oh listen Lord, if you want to know...oh...

What the world needs now,

Is love, sweet love,

It's the only thing that there's just too little of.

What the world needs now,

Is love, sweet love,

No, not just for some oh but just for every, every, everyone.

Excited!!

Think excitement, talk excitement, act out excitement, and you are bound to become an excited person. Life will take on a new zest, deeper interest and greater meaning. You can think, talk and act yourself into dullness or into monotony or into unhappiness. By the same process you can build up inspiration, excitement and surging depth of joy.
- Norman Vincent Peale

Mistakes

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
- Anatole France

This day

For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision:
But today well lived
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

- Sanskrit proverb

Feel-good exercise of the week - I am...

Late 2007 events have forced me to be with myself. Space in my flat, space in my mind, space in my heart, just loads of empty space everywhere. I don't cope well with empty space. Makes me feel lonely and like I'm wasting time. 'How the fcuk do I fill the space?' has been my no1 preoccupation the last couple of months. Well, this question has just been my mind rebelling to a little foreign voice inside that tell me 'it's ok to have space, nothing wrong with space'.

Space forces you to look within. Do I like what I see? Been quite some time since I looked.

I'm about to make a list of all the qualities that I love about myself. Not the qualities that have to do with my performance, but simply my qualities of being. For example, cheerful, kind, creative, generous, adventurous, innovative, loving, committed, devoted, etc. Now my list will be BIG - at least 50 items. And I will add to it daily. I will add everything big and small that I am proud of. I will gush all over myself.

Try it.

Happy 2008!

The Andes survivors

Excerpts from interviews from some of the Andes survivors. I include the Alfredo Delgado interview in its entirety and some insightful parts from a couple of others. All interviews from top to bottom were intensely enjoyable and inspiring to read. Read them in Spanish or English.

Alfredo Delgado, 1973, one month after being rescued

- We are going to talk, but not about what happened at the mountains, not about the external facts; we are going to talk about the things that happened inside of you, about the person you were and the person you are; about the things that changed in your relationship with the world and life, and the things remained as they were before the accident. Is this O.K?
- Yes, it is.

- To start…, something very vague: How are you? How do you find yourself?
- I’m not here yet, I still don’t find myself.

- How can that be possible?
- The thing is that I’m still floating; I couldn’t come down to earth yet and I haven’t come back to my old life. The interviews, the way back to Montevideo, the people’s welcome, each encounter with a friend is a new blow. It’s being hard to me to get back to my life, because there is always something that comes and blows me; a hug, an encounter. There is nothing I can do, I can’t finish waking up.

- Maybe you have already waked up but you haven’t realized it...
- I don’t understand your point.

- Maybe you have waked up but in a different way, so different that you can’t notice it, and because of that you are confusing your wake up to a new vision of the world with a sort of nightmare or something like that.
- Yes, it could be something like that. I’m waking up and I see everything different, but I’m sure I haven’t return yet, I’m not completely awake because I haven’t had a single break since I got here, everything is too recent. I can’t get used to be back I just can’t. I see that corner that I’ve seen many times but I see it for the first time since the accident and it makes me feel something strange. I see that coffee, that bridge, those threes and I feel that everything is new but old at the same time. Who was going to say that I would ever walk here again, that I would ever pass through this bike store again?

- How was the return to your bed and your pillow?
- Not very good. It has been hard to me trying to catch up on sleep. The first days I didn’t sleep much, little more than 4 hours, but now I’m sleeping almost 6 hours. This problem is because during those 70 days on the mountains I could never sleep more than 3 or 4 hours a day. I spent the nights without sleeping a wink; I could only sleep during short periods of time because I was afraid of sleeping and also being awake. That wasn’t living, that was surviving. We used all our energies and thoughts to find a way out, and by doing that we learnt new things, things unknown to us.

- What sort of things?
- Among other things I learnt, together with the rest, something which is essential to live together in an extreme situation like the one we were living; I learnt to grit my teeth and to hide my feelings. Due to the circumstances I learnt to withdraw myself into a sort of shell that didn’t let the others notice what was happening inside me. Doing this we avoided to hurt the others and we could give strength to each other. It was with this shell that I could remain without having shed a single tear, not even when my friend died, two months after the accident and being only at ten days of the rescue. That friend was my closest friend since we were very little, he died on my arms but I didn’t let my tears out because the tears of one of us could make the whole group collapse.

- How was the cold?
- The cold, how cold is the cold… It’s so hard to describe how freezing the cold is… when there are 30 degrees below zero nothing can relieve the cold, so you learn something you didn’t know; what the “human heat”, the body’s temperature and the warmth are, especially the warmth which comes from seeing a person with faith and will to survive in front of you, at half a meter or at ten centimeters from you. If after the accident only 4 or 5 of us would have survived, we would certainly be dead because surviving depends almost entirely on the state of mind of the others. In a group of more than fifteen people is always possible to find six or seven in a good mood and those are the ones that hold the group up; when these ones are no longer in that mood there will certainly appear another six or seven to hold up the rest of the group. The cold does not affect only your body but it affects also your soul. We piled ourselves up in the endless nights inside the plane, we squeezed up, we heard our breading, we warmed each other up to heat the bones but above all to maintain our state of mind. I never knew what the human heat was, but now I know it and I will never forget it.

- And what happens, Delgado, when men are starving?
- The cold, the anguish, the hunger, are successive steps which start to undress us more and more. We started to get prepared for the inevitable before the reserves were off. All of us philosophically bore the idea of taking the dead bodies to feed ourselves, but not all of us bore it physically. Anticipating this possibility it was commented once and when the moment came of taking that tremendous decision we expected an atrocious reaction… but we didn’t reach the desperation or the limit because the cold consumes lot of your calories, and taking this to the limit was falling into an abyss. We were forced to decide before we run out of strengths because after that it would be too late to recover from it. The cold, the loneliness, the isolation, the death surrounding us, the hunger it was one step after the other; each step seemed to be the last, the end, but in each of them we learnt that there is always a strength remaining somewhere, strengths unexpected that come from the most unexpected places of us. I learnt this too, how enormously strong we become as we become weak.

- On these nights in which you slept three or four hours could you balance the anguishes of the day? Did you dream? What did you dream?
- At first as I closed my eyes I was already dreaming …, it was terrible. I dreamt that I was living my life normally, my ordinary life in Montevideo and I believed inside the dream that the accident was a nightmare. In my dreams I saw myself at Montevideo, going to the university, with my girlfriend, at home, with my parents…, every time I woke up was a tremendous shock, I opened my eyes and I saw the phosphorescent letter of the plane’s sign which says “EXIT”. It was so depressing! On the first few days it was all the same, sleep and dream about that, my life in Montevideo and the nightmare of the plane’s crash and after that the slap of waking up and seeing the plane’s sign “EXIT”. I felt that I was going crazy. The depressions that came after my wake up were devastating me more and more. And it was for that reason that I decided not to sleep, but without sleeping I wouldn’t stand much, so I manage to go my mind blank before sleeping. That was a big effort but with the time I made it, I could finish with the torture of dreaming.

- And during the slow and long days, what effect did the memories and the distance of both your family and friends have on you?
- With the memories it was the same as with the dreams. At first I remembered my parents and my girlfriend very clearly, but when I stopped remembering and went back to the reality it was a shock. I realized that instead of helping me that was weakening me, bruising me inside. So I decided to stop hurting myself by cutting the people from my memories.

- How did you do that?
- I remembered places, moments, but no people. Sometimes I traveled to my home in my memories and I walked through it, I sat on a corner or I read in my bedroom; others I remembered a summer, a three and some shade and I stayed there for a while. But I always took care of taking the people out of my memories; doing that I could take my travels as stimulus to avoid getting depressed. I knew that if I got depressed too frequently, that depression would turn into madness.

- Delgado did you ever have the premonition or the feeling of what happened to you at the mountain?
- Yes, I knew that the plane was going to crash. It was when we were at Mendoza, in The Plumerillo; I was just about going into the plane when I felt that something was going to happen, I felt it clearly, very clearly.

- And what did you do?
- I just delayed a few seconds, but it was too late to regrets, I entered the plane convinced that we were going to have an accident, convinced but quiet at the same time; I was so convinced that I sat on a seat at the back, because my experience told me that the plane’s tail was much safer than the other parts of the plane. The stewardess cleared those seats saying that it were for them. I ended up on a seat in the middle of the plane…and at the first turbulence I confirmed my premonition, so I just closed my eyes and prayed. The accident happened right after that, and I saved my life by not being seated at the tail, because the tail came off the rest of the plane’s body.

- That premonition, the feeling of death was just for that moment or does it happens frequently to you?
- I’ve never had such a clear feeling, but I always felt that I was going to die young and in an accident. I told my mother and my girlfriend that feeling.

- Have you found out the reason of that supposition?
- I always thought that, because I had the feeling that I had lived too much, because in spite of not having an opulent existence, life had been very generous with me.

- So, you saw the death as a sort of compensation?
- Exactly. Although I haven’t had an easy life, I was very happy; that’s the reason why when I was a boy, being 17 or 18 years old, I already felt that and I told it to my relatives.

- Did you take that feeling of death with fear or with anguish?
- No, I’ve never had fear of death… I think that nobody has it, what’s feared is the way in which death can come, for example: the death which comes with lot of pain and agony.

- And at the mountain, facing the death so close to you, did that attitude change?
- I was surrounded by deaths whether it were at the accident or because of it or even the deaths caused by the avalanche. I learnt to live with it with the feeling that there is something superior. That life sheared with death, let’s say pacific, was possible because I became more convinced that after the death comes something better… it couldn’t exist something worse than that situation. I had the idea of dying inside me, and I took it with clearness of conscious. I could almost affirm that I felt it like a companion.

-All that is over now Delgado, the mountains were left behind. Now you are here so, what happens now between you and that idea of the death?
- Some years ago I had the feeling of a prompt and accidental death, but now I am completely calm about what may happen to me. It’s not that I don’t want to live any more, actually is right the opposite, but if somebody comes and tells me that I have only three days left, I would remain immutable, I would keep walking with you across this street.

- You are another man; you know that, another man different from the one who boarded that plane to Chile, Aren’t you?
- Yes, I’ve moved to another world, to an unknown maturity. Now I know, or I think I know, what happens inside an old man who sees the death like something that could knock his door at any moment. The religion was essential to my way of seeing things and to accept the death. I could only put up with that horrible situation during 70 days and 70 nights because I saw a life purgatory in it. Many times I wondered why we had to put up with such a terrible and unnecessary pain. I always answered myself that it was a prior act, a requirement to enter a better life. Many times, up in the mountains, I said to myself: “Maybe this is the purgatory”. This justified absurd and unbearable facts, like the death of a friend sixty days after the accident and at ten days of being rescued.

- In the middle of that nightmare, did you ever stop your thoughts and enjoy the landscape? Is an absurd question but maybe it isn’t so absurd considering the situation.
- During that “season”, or that “summer”, there were moments in which, effectively, I stopped my “travels” around far empty places, and I enjoyed the silence, the landscape. That was a new sensation. That silence wasn’t a bedroom’s silence or a sea shore silence or a plain silence… that silence had other sound…

- Wasn’t that sound of the new silence overwhelming to you?
- The feeling of being overwhelmed was due to the snow to me, you can’t imagine how I missed the green. It was like a desperation I had for something green, it was like being thirsty of something green. The snow was unknown to my eyes, and suddenly it invaded all…, it was all white, white, white…

- Another absurd question: Don’t you miss sometimes that feeling about the white color, or that sound from the silence?
- No, not yet. In that situation there was a side of peace, of deep peace but I haven’t came down yet, I haven’t had time; maybe later, when I found myself immersed in this agitated world, I could miss some peaceful moments in the middle of the snow.

- How was the relationship with God up in the mountains?
- My faith in God was crucial. The God I talk with has nothing to do with any specific religion, or has to do with all of them. The God I’m talking about, to define him, is something, somebody who is very close to the conscience, which is in fact the only thing people can’t lie to.

- Talking of conscience, what happens between you and her during those 70 days?
- Lots of things happened, much more than a revision of facts and situations of my life. I did a behavior test. That test gave, as a result, something that may seems a banality: terrible wills to change and to be a better person sprung up on me… It seems a bit childish, but I can’t express that strong will to be good in other words.

- That will is still alive? How long would last in you?
- I can’t tell you how I will be in six months or in a year if I don’t know what I want to be. I can’t tell you if this feeling I had now will still be here in a year, two or more. But I’ve reached at the conclusion that I must live in the most upright way possible. Things have changed: I used to think mostly about me, now I’m thinking more about the others. …Material things, comfort, dollars and all that it’s in the background to me.

- Has your opinion about the world and the century we are living in also changed?
- Yes. There are very elemental things which I now feel deeply inside. I know this is an extraordinary century in many technical aspects, but the madness about comfort, the lack of concern about other people’s problems, about what happens to the others, about the spiritual values, all this spoil the rest. The spiritual side of us, which is so left out now, is precisely what allowed us to survive. We were realistic but even in the most terrible moments we thought about the others, we resorted to our internal strengths, which were withdrawn and neglected.

- Your personality and your relationship with the others have also changed?
- Yes, pretty much. I used to be very witty and nice, cheerful, funny, but now I have that shell on me, and my love and affection don’t show anymore. I want to be like I was before; I want to show my feelings. Now, when I want to caress somebody or when a tear comes to my eyes they remain in the middle of the way. In that aspect I want to be the one I used to be.

- And in what aspects you don’t want to be the one you were?
- Before the accident, although I was a good-tempered person, I had periods of very bad-mood. I’d like to modify that. I also used to sleep a lot, but now I’m going to sleep only the indispensable hours, I’ve understood now how valuable a minute of life is, and I don’t want to waste my time.

- How was your childhood? Go back to your first memories.
- My childhood? The earlier memory I have from childhood? No, I can’t remember.

- Make an effort, try to remember something, some situation, some face, something you saw, or something that happened to you.
- Let’s see… my childhood, no it’s useless, I can’t remember anything.

- Nor even a special prank?
- No, I just can’t, it’s very difficult for me to remember. You can’t imagine how hard I’m trying… Childhood, with those seventy days is something so distant to me that no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember anything clearly.

- Don’t you remember your school days?
- Yes, but vaguely… from the school, what comes now to my mind is my best friend, Numa. ..Numa Turcatti, Turcatti with double “t”. He was in the plane too I convinced him to go, I convinced his mother first to make him go because he wasn’t very enthusiastic about going out… Numa died sixty days after the accident, only ten days before the rescue, in the morning, in my arms. He was like a brother to me, even more than that… and I didn’t cry, I couldn’t cry because I already had the shell on me.

- How old are you?
- Twenty-five, I spent my 25th birthday at the mountains.

- Some minutes ago you said: “When I was a child”, referring to your 17 years. You speak as if you were a man approaching to his 40 or 50 years. How long do you expect to live now?
- I place myself in God’s hands. Look, what are the premonitions for? I used to believe that I was going to die young in an accident, and that was not true…, it doesn’t matter if I die tomorrow, I’m not young anymore, I’m 25-years-old plus those 70 days and nights.

Nando Parrado

- Does what you did at the Andes amaze you?
- There are questions that don’t have answers and you can’t spend the rest of your life wondering about those things otherwise you can’t live. I’m very practical and I have inherited it from my father who once said to me: “Nando, what happened is already past, and the sun which rises every day doesn’t care about what happened, you have to continue with your life…” I assume that I had an enormous trouble, a fatal accident that I wish it hadn’t ever happened, but it has happened and I had to assume it just as it was. I lost my mother, my sister and my best friends in there; I had to pay a huge cost. Today I don’t suffer it but Roberto can tell you how horrible and inhuman was what we had to live at the Andes. He’s the only one who can tell you, better than anyone, because nobody imagines what was that walk like. On the 25th anniversary we went there and we wanted to do the same rout but just the other way round, but we couldn’t although we went really prepared with a great expert’s team of mountaineers, people who climbed the Everest and horses; the glaciers were so dangerous that we couldn’t, and I see that the difference is that we had only our lives, nothing more than that, and still we did everything we could to get out of there, we didn’t notice if we were dying or in danger, we just didn’t care about that. It’s a situation that goes beyond anything; it’s all lost for you. I couldn’t have done that without Roberto and he couldn’t have done it without me because we encouraged each other. That rout was just for two people. We were a perfect team we did a perfect combination. When we saw the laborer we weren’t just tired we were dying, there was no more strength, energy or muscle; you have to bear in mind that we had been walking for ten days over the snow and constantly in danger, and after being more that sixty days in inhuman conditions.


- Did that prove that you have to pass change your attitude towards life?
- It has given me the opportunity to believe in human spirit, in people, what people is able to do facing some situations; all that helped me on my way, comparing my problems today with the ones we faced at the Andes, today’s problems are very small. I consider my problems and I say, luckily I’ve problems. Today I should be buried in a glacier. I’m optimistic in a hundred per cent.

- What’s the most important thing you taught your daughters?
- This might appeared a bit twee but the most important thing I taught them is “love”. I totally agree with that song that affirms that “love moves the world”. The economy, politics, those things don’t exist; the most powerful strength in the world is love. The love for my father made me find the way out of those mountains because I had to save my life for him. The love towards my wife changed my life , the love for my friends makes me happy every day. It’s proved statistically that every man that has done something important in his life did it for somebody else; and generally for a woman.

- Talking about women have you fell in love more than once?
- I’m a difficult guy. I had my passions like everyone else but I think that I’ve fallen in love only once. The day I met Veronica, my wife, my life changed for ever. When I return from The Andes I was still a boy and due to all the things that happened to us I wanted to swallow the life in one go. I lived out of control for some years, I wanted to do everything, to experiment everything I could. I didn’t stop. I used to do motor racing, which was my passion, I used to run motorbikes. I used to travel all the time, I knew lots of people, I was kind of Kamikaze. I had the feeling that I couldn’t waste my time , not a single minute, it seemed to me that the time wouldn’t be enough for me. Veronica calm me, she showed me another world. She took me out of that intensity that for moments became infuriating and injected me some peace.


Carlos Paez

- It was “a miracle” to you having survived, or it was just “something provoked or made by men’s hand”?
- If there is a miracle, that is certainly “the man”, how is he been created with the ability to support and adapt to extreme situations. But this was not a miracle. Some people entitle it as a miracle and called it “the Andes miracle”, but I think that it’s more a natural men’s fight for life. We keep the holiest human right up to the end, which is fighting for our lives. More than a right, it is an obligation. I think that God influenced in this, but it would have been a miracle if the 45 of us would have appeared alive after 70 days. This is not our case.


Gustavo Zerbino

- Do true leaders come up in hard moments?
- Leaders are everywhere. It is in the adversity when they seem to have stepped forward but what really has happened is that somebody has stepped back. The leader is who gives examples by little gestures. At the mountain the leader was the one who laughed, the one who comforted you, it was somebody different each time. Being at 4.000 meters high you don’t have strength not even to stand up, but when you see that one partner with a broken leg stands up, that’s your leader. The love we felt in those adverse moments was stronger than ever. You have to accept the reality and decide from that point.

- So you’ve decided to be happy for the rest of your life?
- My days are intense. It’s an explosion. I live each day as it were the last one. When I got angry I’m fierce because I try to give people my best and if that effort is not seen by the others then I got very angry.

Renaissance

From the ashes of my relationship, my dead cat and my half-empty flat, emerges an opportunity for rebirth. Once my tears have washed away the ashes, a blank canvas will appear, one on which I can paint a new landscape.

Who am I without the love of my life? How do I fill the void of the half-empty closets and the half-empty bookcases of my half-furnished apartment?

I throw away my half and build from scratch.

A new year, a new me.

Renaissance.

I think I'll go left

The year of being the opposite of who I know myself to be

After a dramatic turn in life people change. Life is not how I know it anymore and I feel a strong urge to redefine myself. I spent 30 years carefully crafting myself to my present state, and all I want to do now is take a step back and explore ways in which I can be different. This doesn't come from feeling lost or insecure. Ok maybe a little bit. But it also takes courage to leave what you know to be true behind in order to explore aspects of you that you've forgotten about or aren't even sure they're there. I want to bring it all out again and play; I want to revisit the loft of my heart and look for old, dusty, forgotten play-doh crafts and see what new figures I can mold. I almost feel like I did when I moved out of my parents' house; I was young, I was no one and I had nothing to lose, which is a wonderfully liberating feeling. Only now I am just more mature and my shield is stronger, which is a slightly more fortunate place to be.

Who knows if I find what I'm looking for; I don't even have a destination in mind. I shall turn into a beautiful red autumn leaf, throw myself into the sea and look forward to the exotic shores where the currents will take me.

As someone wiser than me once said, and I paraphrase, you have to travel to faraway places in search of what you need, only to return home to find it.

See you in 2008!

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

Let’s do something, while we have the chance! It’s not every day that we are needed. . . . Let us make the most of it before it is too late!
-- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
-- Mahatma Ghandi

There is no responsibility, without freedom;
No freedom, without power;
No power, without knowledge;
No knowledge, without love.
-- moi

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year

If you are lonely I will get lonely so you are not alone.
- Dimitra

2007 is coming to a close-hurray!

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
~G.K. Chesterton

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
~James Agate

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
~Henry Ward Beecher

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
~Oprah Winfrey

And ...

Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you've met your New Year's resolution.
~Jay Leno

;-)

It

They say do your best
strive to be great
claw yourself through your fears
make mistakes
and learn.
They say never give up
dream big
aim high.
Visualise a grand future
make it happen in your mind
in the greatest detail
and it will eventually become
your reality.
Don't let setbacks
destroy your faith.
Be joyful
considerate
kind
respectful
and the universe
will reward you.

So I do my best
to be strong
I hush my terrified heartbeat
my knot of a stomach
from the agony of bravery.
I put myself
in the dragon's mouth
sacrificing my sanity
and risking humiliation
at the altar of knowledge.
I make lists
I cultivate my dreams
I visualise my scenarios of excellence
when I go to bed at night.
I am joyful
considerate
kind
respectful
and good
expecting
that the universe
will reward me.

And I just know it in my heart that
one day
something will happen
and as clear as day
I will see
it.
All the pain
all the disappointment
all the courage
all the faith
they were not in vain
because they brought me to
it.
My gift
my legacy
my reward
everything I went through
will make sense
everything I went through
was worth
it.

But sometimes
a terrible
terrible
thought crosses my mind.
What if
it
never comes?

What if
in my deathbed
my last thought is
"I never made it
I never succeeded
I never found my gift
my purpose
my legacy.
I never got my opportunity
to reach my full potential
and make a real difference
in the lives of fellow living things
everywhere.
I never found my treasure
like the Alchemist".

Well
regrettably
that is a possibility.
However
even though my last moments
could be filled with heartbreak and regret
I will still enjoy
a little reward.
I will take comfort in the fact that
I lived my life to the full
I was brave
I took risks
no stone was left unturned.
So what if
it
never comes?
Without having achieved anything special
now and forever
I will always be
the best thing anyone could ever be.
A fighter.

I might not have won the war
but I went down
fighting.

Better than having surrendered.

How to fight loneliness

How to fight loneliness?
Smile all the time

Shine you teeth 'til meaningless
And sharpen them with lies

And whatever's going down
Will follow you around
That's how you fight loneliness

You laugh at every joke

Drag your blanket blindly
And fill your heart with smoke

And the first thing that you want
Will be the last thing you ever need
That's how you fight it

Just smile all the time


- Wilco

Convention of those wounded in love

by Paulo Coelho

General provisions:

A – Whereas the saying “all is fair in love and war” is absolutely correct;

B – Whereas for war we have the Geneva Convention, approved on 22 August 1864, which provides for those wounded in the battle field, but until now no convention has been signed concerning those wounded in love, who are far greater in number;

It is hereby decreed that:

Article 1 – All lovers, of any sex, are alerted that love, besides being a blessing, is also something extremely dangerous, unpredictable and capable of causing serious damage. Consequently, anyone planning to love should be aware that they are exposing their body and soul to various types of wounds, and that they shall not be able to blame their partner at any moment, since the risk is the same for both.

Article 2 – Once struck by a stray arrow fired from Cupid’s bow, they should immediately ask the archer to shoot the same arrow in the opposite direction, so as not to be afflicted by the wound known as “unrequited love”. Should Cupid refuse to perform such a gesture, the Convention now being promulgated demands that the wounded partner remove the arrow from his/her heart and throw it in the garbage. In order to guarantee this, those concerned should avoid telephone calls, messages over the Internet, sending flowers that are always returned, or each and every means of seduction, since these may yield results in the short run but always end up wrong after a while. The Convention decrees that the wounded person should immediately seek the company of other people and try to control the obsessive thought: “this person is worth fighting for”.

Article 3 – If the wound is caused by third parties, in other words if the loved one has become interested in someone not in the script previously drafted, vengeance is expressly forbidden. In this case, it is allowed to use tears until the eyes dry up, to punch walls or pillows, to insult the ex-partner in conversations with friends, to allege his/her complete lack of taste, but without offending their honor. The Convention determines that the rule contained in Article 2 be applied: seek the company of other persons, preferably in places different from those frequented by the other party.

Article 4 – In the case of light wounds, herein classified as small treacheries, fulminating passions that are short-lived, passing sexual disinterest, the medicine called Pardon should be applied generously and quickly. Once this medicine has been applied, one should never reconsider one's decision, not even once, and the theme must be completely forgotten and never used as an argument in a fight or in a moment of hatred.

Article 5 – In all definitive wounds, also known as “breaking up”, the only medicine capable of having an effect is called Time. It is no use seeking consolation from fortune-tellers (who always say that the lost lover will return), romantic books (which always have a happy ending), soap-operas on the television or other such things. One should suffer intensely, completely avoiding drugs, tranquilizers and praying to saints. Alcohol is only tolerated if kept to a maximum of two glasses of wine a day.

Final determination: Those wounded in love, unlike those wounded in armed conflict, are neither victims nor torturers. They chose something that is part of life, and so they have to accept both the agony and the ecstasy of their choice.

And those who have never been wounded in love will never be able to say: “I have lived”. Because they haven’t.

Love you Drew!

I think that whatever scares you is exactly where you should go because safe and comfortable means you've already done it.

- The Amazing Drew Barrymore

Gratitude

There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.
- Ralph H. Blum

Endings

You lose them the way you get them
Jobs, loves, friends...
We make our own endings, when we make our beginnings.

If he betrays another to be with you
why are you so surprised he betrays you to be with another?

You have the power to see the ending at the beginning.
You make it so.
The ripples in the water are from the rocks you throw.

On life in the woods

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1854

O Me! O Life!

O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring-What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here-that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1891

What you seek is what you find

I used to wonder what will my life be like, and now I know.
It is what I make it to be.

Seek the darkness, you will find it.
Seek the light, you will find it.

When I complain, I cannot point at others. Them them them, their fault.
That which one seeks, one shall find.

I don't like red, I don't like red, I don't like red, I don't like red, I don't like red, I don't like red.
Tricky thing... I am seeing red here, red everywhere.

Get it yet?

Change the way you think and you will change what you seek. Soon you will see, this life can be anything you make it out to be.

Now's the time

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.
- Napoleon Hill

Perseverance

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
- Samuel Johnson

Limits

There is nothing wrong with having limits. It takes courage to say "I choose to pursue this no further". It is as far from giving up as you can get. I was raised to believe that with enough energy and enthusiasm I can achieve anything, and this is true, but sometimes you must be brave and abort your mission. Because there is no point to success if the road to success destroys you. And you must be wise enough to know when hardship stops being a life lesson and starts to destroy your soul. Will the end result be sweet enough to compensate for it?

Appreciation

Appreciation can make a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.
- Margaret Cousins

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

As Much As You Can

Even if you cannot shape your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can; do not debase it
in excessive contact with the world,
in the excessive movements and talk.

Do not debase it by taking it,
dragging it often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
until it becomes burdensome as an alien life.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1913)

Gratitude

Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson

Starting over

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

An Old Man

At the back of the noisy café
bent over a table sits an old man;
a newspaper in front of him, without company.

And in the scorn of his miserable old age
he ponders how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, and the power of the word, and good looks.

He knows he has aged much; he feels it, he sees it.
And yet the time he was young seems
like yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.

And he ponders how Prudence deceived him;
and how he always trusted her -- what a folly! --
that liar who said: "Tomorrow. There is ample time."

He remembers the impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless wisdom....

But from so much thinking and remembering
the old man gets dizzy. And falls asleep
bent over the café table.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1897)

Exercise of the week-Dear God...

If only someone, like, say God, could tell me what to do. My dad does; bless him, he can talk till the cows come home. But even though everybody can have an opinion, it doesn’t always speak to my heart.

Here’s this technique I picked up along the way, and feel free to give it a try even if you’re not religious (I'm not). Write a letter to God. Tell Her/Him/It everything you feel, describe your problem, ask your questions, share your dilemmas and insecurity. What good will this do, my virtual ears hear you think. Well, nothing, but what happens next will. Immediately after you write a letter to God, put on God’s stylish hat and answer your own letter! Think like God, say things the way God would say them, and give this poor confused soul (you) the answers it craves! Miraculously, you will. That letter will tell you what to do. Weird, but it works.

Though I’ve seen the episode of South Park where they find out that the higher power is actually a giant spider. When this theory's proven we may have to redirect our letters. For now we're good.

Hi I'm God, who are you? Oh wait, I know.

Rewards

Who are these people, I want to invite them to my party.

I am organising a party and I am s-t-r-e-s-s-i-n-g! I love being the hostess and put all my energy and creativity in them. I really go all the way. But the stress of organising and entertaining is too great and everyone always has a better time than me. For me nothing is perfect enough. But this time it will be different. This time I will relax and apply what my husband in another dimension, Ethan Hawke, said once: "Your actions have to be their own rewards; you can't depend on external validation". So this time, it will be first and foremost a party that I'd want to go to, one that would give me pleasure and let everything else follow...

I can feel the stress melting away already. A small, quite tiny, portion of it anyway.

I can't do anything right! The curse of the perfectionist

Don't be so hard on yourself! Nobody's perfect. It's an old saying, but absolutely right. A common link among successful achievers is that while they made mistakes, struggled, had setbacks and failures, they pulled themselves up, kept on going, and learned from their mistakes.

Life happens. So if one day things don't go as planned, that's okay. There's always tomorrow. Instead of being your own harshest critic, make the decision to be your biggest fan. Focus on the daily activities that moved you forward, and give yourself a pat on the back the moment you take a positive action or a step in the right direction. Call your friend and share your victories. Make sure that the person you share it with is someone who will show enthusiasm and support you in your victory. Revel in the great feelings that come when you honor yourself by sticking with your commitments.

Take some time to think about ways you can reward yourself for staying the course and meeting your goals, day by day. Don't overlook this stage - you've earned it! Each day, enjoy rewards, such as a phone call to a friend, a favorite snack, listening to a CD that you love, or renting a great movie. And remember, the single greatest reward you'll earn is the person you become in the process.

Circumstances

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw

Plan. And embrace the unexpected.

Begin with the end in mind.
- Stephen Covey

I have my life all planned out and I can't wait to see how it doesn't turn out the way I thought.
- Alabama Cherry

Because you’re worth it

Last weekend a friend of mine invited me to stay with her. She knows that I am fighting a particularly demanding battle at the moment so she enticed me with a special weekend to cheer me up.

I had no idea what was in store. The Queen that is me experienced the luxury of lying on a particularly lush sofa in my PJs for two days straight and had home-cooked meals, wine, cola, snacks, chocolates, more snacks, a little joint to mellow the heart, and 12 DVDs to choose from paraded in front of me. So I just chilled, and ate, and drank, and smoked, and poured my heart out to a compassionate ear. And I wasn’t allowed to wash half a dish!

All this she offered me and only one piece of advice: that I can’t take on the world alone, and that I need to give my friends a chance to help me. And that if I need to give up my flat now that my ex will be moving out, I have a place to stay.

I went home on the Sunday night trying to convince myself that I was worth all this. I don't know why I am more comfortable being a giver rather than a taker but I should damn learn to take. Because all the times I have been there for everyone I love, the times I took calls from heartbroken mates in the middle of the night, the times I gave people the little money I had to help them out, that time I bought a plane ticket for a broke friend in distress to come and stay with me and have a break from her life… all those things I do for my clan every day and don’t even remember, they lead to someone doing the same for me. And not out of duty either.

Lesson learnt? You have got to let people give you their things and their time and their love, sometimes in great abundance. Take them. Take everything you’re offered.

Don’t think about it too much.

Don’t question it.

It’s not an inconvenience.

(cheesy line coming…) Because you’re worth it.

So, thank you my friend, and thank you to all my friends who circled around me as I’m down and bleeding.

Dad

Whatever happens, if you think positively, everything will be alright.
-Dad :-)

Bless my dad, always smiling, always positive. An average Joe, far from perfect, but the wisest, kindest, happiest, most playful, most generous man I know. We speak on the phone for ages, and I write his little sayings down, so that I can remember his words, my concience, when he's no longer with me. His sayings are like seeds that feed this really bushy garden in my head!

Like this time when he got out of surgery and the moment he opened his eyes, all groggy and in pain, he joked "this was fun, can I do it again?"

Or this one time when he told me "When I die, don't feel sorry, it's no big deal. I've had a great life and life must go on. Be happy!"

"If you accept yourself for who you are, you will never feel jealous or hostile towards anyone"

I guess this blog is for him, and by him through me. My dad, the ultimate smiling warrior.

Competing against yourself

Never mind what others do; do better than yourself, beat your own record from day to day, and you are a success.
- William J.H. Boetcker

Friends

If I were a train, going forward in my usual steady and determined fashion, I'd be derailing right about now. I'd forgotten how much break-ups suck, like I forget about any type of pain really, until it slaps me unexpectedly in the face like a cold fish. But there's pain and there's pain. Sometimes when you're going through problems at work or whatever, you feel this dull ache. It's there and then it's not and then it comes back and then you forget about it again. But then there's this other type of pain, one so deep and overwhelming, it doesn't wait to let itself out in the privacy of your apartment and orders the tears to stream down your face whenever it feels like it. As I was saying, I'd forgotten how much break-ups suck.

Matters of the heart are hardcore stuff; they can bring the hardest warrior to her knees. What to do, what to do...

Taking sick leave and staying in, wearing the same PJs and sleeping the days away are a temptation but NO, life will go on as normal.

Occupation to take the mind off is also an option but it means very little if you still go to work and stare at the blank screen for hours, feeling too distracted to do anything but think think think.

See friends, talk with friends, sleep with friends (just kidding)... I think the key to recovery is friends. Maybe assigning to one of them the special role of break-up buddy; a break-up buddy is a good listener, and funny; one that pampers you and makes you feel loved; one who is accessible for chats and a cuddle and can firmly remind you WHY things didn't work out; one that can make workable, sensible suggestions (as opposed to "MAKE THIS MOTHERFUCKER'S LIFE A MISERYYYYYY!!!").

Therapy is good too, if you can afford it. Better yet, get a break-up buddy who's a therapist. I had a session for free the other day by someone very kind. It brought such lightness to the heart! For a day anyway.

I miss my ex, I miss my cat. Life WILL get better.

Happy birthday Ethan Hawke!

He's smart, he's sexy, he's a dead poet. And I hear he will soon be sucking blood from people's necks. Damn!

Turn up

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.
- Sam Ewing

Screw normal

Research indicates that average, or "normal," people produce average, or "normal," results. It takes an "abnormal" or unique person to create, innovate, or do things differently. The people who stand out from the pack always do it their way.

People will always try to fit you into the mold they think is best. I've friends, and associates suggest changing all sorts of things about me, from adopting a "hipper" look to changing the way I sign my name.

It takes courage to not only hold true to your uniqueness, but to embrace it, knowing that many will not "get it." That's okay. As your uniqueness opens new doors for you and your appreciation of who you really are expands, you'll see that you have a unique way to express yourself in this world... a way that no one can duplicate.

Consider Nia Varalos...

As long as Nia Vardalos could remember, she wanted to be a performer.

She figured that as long as she took the right classes, worked hard, and auditioned for every part, her talents would eventually be recognized.

Unfortunately, Hollywood doesn't judge actors on talent alone. And in 1996, when she moved to Los Angeles to be an actor, the harsh and often unfair reality - that talent often takes a back seat to appearance - slapped her in the face. After months and months of badgering her agent and waiting to be sent out on auditions for the upcoming sitcom season, her agent finally leveled with her: "You're not pretty enough to be a leading lady, you're not fat enough to be a character actor, and you're Greek. There's nothing I can do for you."

Nia decided to write and produce her own one-woman show. "Don't make it too ethnic," everyone told her. But she ignored them and wrote about what made her laugh the most, her wacky Greek family. She found a small theater in Los Angeles and debuted My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Over the next year, word of mouth spread about the show. Film producers started to turn up. Some wanted to buy the idea, but only if they could change it to My Big Fat Italian Wedding. No deal. Nia stuck to her convictions. But she was running out of money fast.

With her last cash, she decided to run an ad in the Los Angles Times, hoping to attract a wider audience. Jackpot. Rita Wilson, who is Greek, came to the show, loved it, and returned with her husband, Tom Hanks.

When Wilson mentioned to Nia that the play would make a good movie, the always prepared Nia handed her the screenplay. Hanks and Wilson pitched the idea to several studios, but they always got the same response: They loved the script, but didn't want Nia.

Convinced it could be a success, Hanks and Wilson ended up producing My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was made for $5 million and starred Nia Vardalos. The film has broken box office records, raked in more than $200 million, and become the highest-grossing romantic comedy ever. And its success is all due to one woman who refused to be denied her chance to bring her unique vision to life.

[excerpted from the audio coaching program, Unstoppable Challenge and Unstoppable Women, www.unstoppable.net]

The Review

November… It’s almost that time of the year again, time for The Review. As in, was this year “worthy” or “a waste” and why. I realize this may sound a little harsh, after all declaring a year “a waste” goes against everything I believe to be true: we all do the best that we can; if we could have done more, we would have done more. Nevertheless, a do detest wasting time (my nightmare is I will wake up in 2040 and say “what have I been doing all these years!!”) so a little review to make sure I’m on the right path is not a bad exercise.

So, The Review is the time to celebrate the opportunities of the year past or mourn the wasted time and get back on track. I have yet to mourn a year, after all I started The Review when I moved abroad ten years ago, and in your 20s it’s all happening isn’t it? But the 30s are another story. You’ve had your first loves, first disappointments, first jobs… quite a lot is by now tried and tested. So now that I’m 30 The Review will potentially start getting harder.

I guess I should clarify The Review’s criteria on which I judge whether a year deserves a tag of excellence or whether it needs to be sent to “lived and forgotten” basket. A successful year is one when:

1. I travelled to a country/place I’ve never been to before (Staines doesn’t count)
2. I kept good touch with friends
3. I visited my family often
4. Nothing disastrous happened at work
5. I am a good partner and a good mom to my kitty
(notice the complete lack of any weight-related goals-hurray!)

I can’t tell whether my standards are really low or really high, but succeeding in all of the above is hard work.

What I do next is divide the year into good and bad events. Let’s examine 2007, shall we?

2007 Good

1. I welcomed the New Year in New York
2. Had great times with my mom and my aunt who visited me
3. I started learning to play the cello and joined an orchestra, a dream I’ve had all my life
4. I didn’t fuck up big at work and I am steadily progressing
5. I found a hypnosis course to cure my public speaking phobia and someone to fund it
6. I had an awesome spring at the island of Chios with my folks
7. I spent an excellent weekend with good friends in Blackpool, of all places
8. I put my finances in order
9. I became a Godmother
10. I posed for Spencer Tunick

2007 Bad

Now this has been a particularly challenging year. In fact, I’m knackered! I’m up to here. But I’ve learnt a lot too, and if good can come out of misfortune, then my “2007 Bad” list becomes a good one. Let’s see:

1. I’m in the middle of a divorce. Well, I’m not actually married but I doubt proper divorcees feel less bruised
2. Someone I love very much has been going through a hard time
3. My little Mellow died
4. I haven’t been as close as I should to my friends

The Verdict

This has been a year of loss but of a lot of gain as well. It has been challenging, with brilliant moments and deeply sad ones. Isn’t this a sign of life though?

Have I lived life to the full? Most certainly. Is everyone I love in good health? Yes. Did I progress and become a better person? I think so. I gave it a good try. I’m not broken yet. I did my best. Life is still good, with excellent prospects of getting better. I'm climbing a particularly tough mountain but downhill could start any moment now, the peak can't be that far away. Another year, another battle, another win. 2008, I am blowing a kiss to you. Be kind.

It was Bad and it was Beautiful

I am amongst those who know Sandra Bernhard because of her frolicking with Madonna and shocking the American nation in the early 90s. Is she well-known for any other reason? Well, the mouthy 52 year-old American has been performing as a stand-up comic and actress for 30 years so she must have some kind of talent, I told myself before entering the half-empty halls of Croydon's rather hopeless Fairfield Halls. A large glass of wine was quickly downed to calm our nerves, after all the guest opening act was embarrassingly terrible and we had first row seats, ideally placed to be mercilessly teased by a diva unable to revive the glory of the past. That's what it all felt like.

She entered the stage like the Great Dame of Broadway. She was all legs and mouth, stylish and ugly-pretty (with emphasis on pretty). "You will love me" she sung with a surprisingly thunderous, beautiful, jazzy voice and for a moment I thought I was somewhere else, in New York's Carnegie Hall maybe. "You guys couldn't pay the $1.50 train fare to see my London show?" she asked. "Having seen Croydon the whole Kate Moss mess makes sense to me" she playfully spat at an audience that was relieved she mocked this surreal, rather substandard experience rather than pretend it wasn't happening.

There were funny moments and not so funny moments. There were witty monologues about celebrity culture, racism, sexism, talentless talent shows, her daughter, her famous friends, but just watching her ramble was amusing in itself. This woman can turn a lukewarm script into entertainment solely with the power of her presence and her personality. She flawlessly sang Prince's "Little Red Corvette" and Guns & Roses "Welcome to the Jungle". She left the stage a couple of times whilst her band played a tune to fill the gap, and she came back dressed in the top part of a military uniform-the bottom part was missing, flashing black tights over some comically unattractive white big pants. This made no sense, but it was funny. Her "Everything Bad and Beautiful" UK tour ended with a standing ovation and it wasn't out of pity either; we loved this show, even though we don't quite know why.

This very long review/introduction will finish with her excellent response to those that accuse her of being rude:

"People don't like the truth. They don't like to be called on their bullshit. They'd rather be nice. They'd rather hide behind the pretension of being nice, and being nice doesn't really get you anywhere in this world. It's a cop-out. It always has been. Being nice is bullshit. Being real, being concerned, being passionate, loving, all comes from very strong emotions. Being nice is a weak emotion. It's not even an emotion. It's just a weakness, period."

Wow, after a career spanning 30 years I have just discovered Sandra Bernhard!

Think the right thing

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
- James Allen

Home

Home is where the heart is
or so they say...

My heart is in the South
I get out of the plane
and get a blast of warm flowery air
up my starved nostrils.
Mom and dad
always there waiting to pick me up
the world is perfect
perfect
perfect
in mom and dad's warm embrace.

My bed is made
sheets crisp and sweet-smelling
of mommy
the stove is on
I can't wait to see what's bubbling in the pot
This is my home.

I walk down my neighbourhood
crickets singing 'welcome back'
my eyes taking in
my small town
where time stands still
a thousand memories in every corner.

My heart is somewhere else too.
The air doesn't smell so sweet
and there are no crickets to welcome me home.
Humanity is not to be taken for granted here
millions come
millions go
in my big impersonal city.

But I am no child here
I am myself
honest
on my own two feet
free to love
who I want to love
and be
who I want to be
in a land of equal rights
and opportunity.

Perfect isn't it?

I have two homes
yet I am nowhere
I am in one place
and my heart craves the other
Best of both worlds?
Or curse of eternal division.

I don't know.
Ask me next year.

<^..^>

I'll lend you for a little time
a friend of mine.
For you to love the while she lives,
and mourn for when she's dead.
It may be six or seven years, or
twenty-two or three,
But will you, till I call her back
take care of her for me?

Give life a good go

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

RIP little Mellow <^..^>

A little snail led me to you yesterday, thank you snail. Bye bye Smell, have a nice journey, see you in heaven... I left your collar on, the one with the bell, so that I can hear you coming to me.

Giving your life for someone

Four British parents died trying to rescue their kids off a treacherous stretch of the Algarve coast. Two of the seven kids swimming that day, aged nine and eleven, lost both their parents. The biggest challenge for these kids will not be to grow up without parents. The biggest challenge will be to accept that they were loved enough, valuable enough, special enough, good enough to die for.

Fuck. Who really believes that about themselves… Do you?

My heart goes out to these little angels. Best of luck to them.

I can

There’s no mountain I can’t climb, there’s no tower too high, no plane that I can’t learn how to fly.
- Eminem

Feel-good exercise of the week – Create your personal thriving plan, Part 2

Where was I?

Oh yes. I was listing various ways of developing qualities and skills that help at times of crisis, or as I like to call it, when shit hits the fan!

• What I consider to be hugely important is taking the time to appreciate yourself for everything that you do. We’re so strong all the time and then sometimes we just want to crawl up someone’s bossom, have our head stroked and be told “it’s ok, well done!” Ok, maybe a hug will do. Seriously though, being a warrior in this modern-day jungle is not easy and very rarely anyone complements us on our achievement. People can give you looks that say “what’s so special about you?” Well, lots! I just survived a messy divorce! Or I just found the courage to leave my shitty job! (insert your own achievement here). If appreciation doesn’t come from the outside, then give your own self a well-deserved cuddle.

• When something bad happens, no matter how unfair it seems, try to convert disaster into good fortune: Adapt to the new reality and get your cool back > Shift your perception to view this as a learning experience > Find the gift. The latter is hard and it will not become obvious straight away. One probably needs months, if not years, to process and overcome what’s happened and to discover the meadow that the thorny path was leading to. The more you practice, the better you get at it.

Hardship can lead to the discovery of strengths we did not know we had. An emotionally toxic experience can be made emotionally nutritious: the ol’ “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” cliché.

Mistakes

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
- Elbert Hubbard

Feel-good exercise of the week – Create your personal thriving plan, Part 1

I was going home last night and through the reflection of the train window I caught a girl crying. She tried to hide her sadness and she felt too embarrassed to display emotion in public, but then she just couldn't hold it anymore. So she had a little cry for 10 seconds and then composed herself again.

I felt like I stole such a personal moment. It is as embarrassing as watching people have sex in public (another train story that I’ll share with you some other time!), though the sex in public is also quite amusing. Anyway. I felt sad for this girl. I thought, “shit, the world is filled with sad people, people with real problems and real pain. And here I am with some blog talking about how to overcome pain and be strong and survive. What the hell do I know about people’s pain?”

Well, I know of my pain. But I do believe that no book, no shrink, no blog can teach people how to develop their own version of the survivor, anti-conformist, thriving, resilient personality. I did go to therapy and I spent countless hours reading self-help books trying to find answers. One day my shrink said “you are looking for answers in other people’s experiences. You have to “write your own book””. And that’s probably the only thing I got out of our two years together. Anyway. She was right. The more we listen to what people say we should do, the less chance we have of developing our own skills. And with my blog it must seem like I’m totally not practicing what I preach but bear with me, I have a point.

Perhaps no one can tell you or me what to do or who to be. But there is a way to create a plan for developing qualities and skills that will improve our agility for handling change, challenges and crises. And from my own personal experience (there you go Maggie, happy now?), here’s my own personal recipe on learning what can’t be taught:

• Ask questions. Respond to confusion, change or criticism by asking “What is happening?” Read a new reality rapidly, assess the situation.

• Increase your mental and emotional flexibility. Embrace the paradox in your personality. It is alright to feel one way and the opposite (energetic and lazy, happy and melancholic etc), because that is a way to develop many response choices for yourself and adapt quicker when shit hits the fan.

• Accept the fact that change, ambiguity and uncertainty are a way of life. When you start getting too comfortable, that’s a sign that it’s time to change, move on, move up, challenge yourself.

• Learn how to learn from all experiences. Turn every negative experience into a lesson. That way you are always becoming more capable and more effective. Learning is the antidote to feeling victimised. All those bastards who make our lives difficult are our teachers in the school of life. Instead of trying to get bastards to change, ask yourself “Why am I so vulnerable? What are my blind spots? How could I handle myself better with such people?”

• Develop empathy skills, especially with bastards. Put yourself in the other person’s place. Ask “what do they feel and think? What are their views, assumptions, explanations and values? How do they benefit from acting as they do?” Practice thanking bastards for giving you unpleasant feedback.

More to come next week!

Past, Present, Future

Squeeze the past like a sponge, smell the present like a flower, blow a kiss to the future.
- Persian proverb

I’m so sensitive, I’m insensitive

When I was a teenager I saw a documentary about schizophrenics and one of them said "I'm so sane, I'm insane!". He made perfect sense somehow, and since then I like to apply this oxymoron to opposing aspects of my personality.

I’m so sensitive, I’m insensitive. Or so I’ve been accused. But people don’t seem to understand that my empathy exposes me to others’ pain and distress. I can feel the pain as if it’s mine, a confusing emotional state. So to control this I do some insensitivity training with myself, and that means getting tough. Because making things work well, which I like to do, sometimes requires not being nice. Sometimes it even means letting others struggle, holding back and letting others suffer the consequences of their actions.

I’m not insensitive. Misunderstood, yes. I sometimes get criticised for taking care of myself. The more I pull out of a problematic situation, one in which people have been gaining attention for their pain and distress, the more they sometimes attempt to keep me in it by becoming even more extreme, rubbing their pain in my face even harder. But pulling out is not being insensitive. Pulling out requires courage. You have to let people handle their difficulties themselves sometimes.

I can also get a little lonely. I read somewhere that people that are capable and complex always long for someone that understands them. Highly competent, intelligent women, for example, typically find that the better they get, there are fewer and fewer men equal to them. Unfortunately, exceptional people are often looked at as being something of a freak.

Being abnormal is ok. Normal does not mean “good” or “right” or “healthy”. It means “average”. Gosh, who wants to be that? Swim against the stream I say. It’s tough and it can get lonely, but it is a satisfying existence. I can’t imagine conforming and being happy. Conforming leads to a life of lies, suppression of the true self and regrets.

A Peruvian priest’s sermon

In Paulo Coelho's book “The Alchemist”, the young shepherd Santiago meets an old man in the town square. He is searching for a treasure, but does not know how to reach it. The old man starts up a conversation with him:

“How many sheep have you got?”

“Enough,” answers Santiago.

“Then we have a problem. I can’t help if you think you have enough sheep.”

Based on this extract, the Peruvian priest Clemente Sobrado wrote an interesting piece:

One of the biggest problems that we drag around with us all our life is to want to believe we have “enough sheep”. We are surrounded by certainties, and nobody wants someone showing up to propose something new. If we could only suspect that we don’t have everything, and that we aren’t all that we could be!

Maybe we are all faced with a very serious problem, namely that although we have the opportunity to help one another, the truth is that few people let themselves be helped.

Why is that? Because they think they have “enough sheep”. They already know everything, they are always right, they feel comfortable in their lives.

Almost all of us are like that: we have many things but few aspirations. We have many ideas already sorted out, and we don’t want to give them up. Our life scheme is already organized and we don’t need someone trying to make changes.

We’ve done enough praying, practiced charity, read the lives of the saints, gone to Mass, taken communion. A friend of mine once said: “I don’t know why I come to visit you, father. I am already a good Christian.”

On that day I could not help answering:

“Then don’t come to visit me, because there are a lot of people waiting to see me and they are all full of doubts. But one thing you ought to know: You aren’t bad enough to be bad, nor good enough to be good, nor holy enough to work miracles.

“You are just a Christian satisfied with what you have achieved. And all those who are satisfied have in fact renounced the ideal of always improving. Let’s talk about this some other time, all right?”

Ever since then, whenever we speak on the telephone he starts by saying: “this person who is calling hasn’t yet grown up as much as he could”.

Lord, give us always a dissatisfied heart.

Give us a heart where the questions that we never want to ask can be voiced.

Deliver us from our conformism.

Make us able to enjoy what we have, but let us understand that this is not everything.

Let us appreciate that we are good people.

But above all, make us always ask ourselves how we can become better people.

Because if we ask, then it is quite possible that You will come and show us horizons that we couldn’t see before.

www.warriorofthelight.com

Destiny

There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.
- Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Off to the Scottish Highlands, back next week

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
- George Moore

Feel-good exercise of the week-Have a rant!

The "good-child" handicap...

I was raised to be a good child and I spent a lot of my youth having great difficulty dealing with problems because I was taught not to complain or be unhappy, and to not be selfish. Yet later in life I realised that expressing unhappiness and acting in ways that may seem selfish was essential to my sanity. What I didn't know as a youngster was that expressing negative thinking sometimes is not the same as being a person who is negative all the time.

My mom called me the other night. When I heard her on the phone all my stresses started pouring out. I had a good old rant! I told her how miserable I felt. How the engineer has still not come to fix my boiler. How I have a problem with a colleague at work who doesn't know how to work in a team. How this presentation I did a month ago that went badly still bothers me. How I have another one at the end of the month and I stress over it already. How I spilled coffee on the carpet and how I hate the smell of spilled coffee on the carpet. Urgh!

But you know what? I then laughed. Because once I had a good time feeling miserable, I went to bed feeling light as a feather. I now know that letting myself feel really negative about things once in a while does not make me a negative person. Just the opposite. It is a sign of excellent mental health. People who try to program themselves to have only positive feelings are fragile. They need a protective environment because they don't handle pressure or conflict very well.

So this week, pick a friend and have a good ol' rant. Empty that closet of negativity, name one after the other all the shit that's going on in your life. Have a good cry. But give yourself, say, until 10pm to enjoy this. Go back to your normal cool self and repeat once a month.

BOOOOOO-HOOOOOO!

Oh yes, feel much better :-)

The need to spread the goodness

"Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man, who lives in essential servitude."
- Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassett

I was reading a Susan Sarandon interview the other day, and she was saying how her charity work is actually of more benefit to her than the people she helps because it gives her a deep sense of fulfillment and happiness to be able to offer a helping hand to those in need. I thought that was selfish of her to think so, but that it is actually ok to be selfish. After all, the need for things to be working well for not just us, but everyone around us, is another great trait of life's best survivors.

Look at your own self. When things are working well, do you drift into the background? Do you feel kinda lazy and inattentive? Well, you're not really; you are just not spending your energy unless it is necessary: you don't have to show off your strengths; you do not need to manipulate events to try to claim credit for successes. You just kind of hybernate.

I know I feel most alive when I'm battling the sharks of life. The rest of the time, I just sit back and let things run by themselves. I am more of a foul-weather friend. When things are working well, I drift about seeming to be uninvolved; but when there's trouble, I show up, ready to lend a hand or take charge. Because knowing others are in pain is a really bothersome feeling for me. When life is going well for others, I feel better. Life's best survivors don't want to be exposed to energy-draining people or conditions, so they work to make things better for others, and in consequence, for themselves.

If that's selfish, then so be it.

I will

I will! I am! I can! I will actualize my dream. I will press ahead. I will settle down and see it through. I will solve the problems. I will pay the price. I will never walk away from my dream until I see my dream walk away: Alert! Alive! Achieved!
- Robert Schuller

The opposite of death

"The opposite of death is not life; it's love."
-Nando Parado describing how the love for his father pushed him to trek through the Andes in the well-documented, extraordinary story of the Andes Survivors.

Although it happened 35 years ago, time has not diminished the drama of the tale of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains. Of the forty five people on the plane at the time of the crash, sixteen came down from the mountain seventy two days later with a story not easily forgotten.

The plane crashed in the Andes mountains. It was an exercise in terror for those on the plane, as it barreled down the mountain, before finally coming to rest in a valley of snow high up in the Andes. Of the forty five persons on board, thirty two initially survived the crash. Some, however, had sustained serious injuries. Time would not be their friend. Moreover, with little warm clothing the survivors were exposed to the extreme cold of the night air. Damp, cold, and hungry, amid the anguished cries of the injured, thus began the first of many such nights.

By their tenth day in the Andes, the limited food supplies, which they had rationed with all the care of a miser, had virtually run out. Starving and ravenously hungry, they voiced what they all knew to be true, but had not dared to voice before. They must eat, or they would die. The only thing left for them to eat, however, was abhorrent and deeply repugnant to them. Digging deep into their conservative, religious souls, they found a way to justify actions that would have them transcend a new reality. Their fallen comrades would now provide the means of their sustenance. All eventually succumbed to this only means of survival.

This, while one of the most dramatic parts of their story, is just that, a part. Their survival entailed much more. They had to endure other deprivations. They had to survive the elements. They had to overcome a profound despair over being seemingly forgotten by the outside world. Ultimately, only sixteen were able to do so. And only two were able to take the long trip, step after exhausting step, through the mountains back to civilization, to rescue themselves and their friends.

The leader of the two is Nando Parado, and he told his tale in one of my favourite books, 'Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and my Long Trek Home'. Nando lost his mother and sister in the crash, and struggling to stay alive, his guide becomes his beloved father: "each [stride] brought me closer to my father... each step I took was a step stolen back from death."

Nando is a natural athlete in the game of life. He saw and did unimaginable things to survive but he eventually picked himself up, learnt important lessons, set positive goals and rebuilt his life. His experience taught me that people seldom tap into their deepest strengths and abilities until forced to do so by a major adversity. People, like Nando, like you and me, who have suffered and prevailed find that after their ordeal they begin to operate at a higher level than ever before. The terrible experiences in our lives, despite the pain they bring, can become our redemption.

Karate Kid-The Musical

I miss Daniel-San! I want to see him on stage. Imagine... the karate moves! The baddies! Miyagi! The catching of the fly with chop sticks! I love it. Unfortunately "Karate Kid-The Musical" premiered on Broadway back in late 2004 and closed down 2 weeks after. So then I had an idea... why don't I write it a new, better script??

Hmmm.

Ok...

Well, I think I shall leave musical-writing to the professionals, but in my google search "how to write a musical" (hasn't every successful writer done it?!) I came across this quote:

"I'll give you a tip – it's risk. Once you're willing to risk everything, you can accomplish anything."
- Patricia Routledge, actress

I can't say I will risk everything to write "Karate Kid-The Musical" but in other areas of my life this quotation most definitely applies!

The Choice

"Pain is inevitable, misery is optional."
- Josh

Will you be depressed, or will you be happy? It's a choice, and friend Lollie gives you precise instructions on creating an experience of misery, or an experience of happiness for yourself. Check it out.

Creep

I couldn't sum up my high-school reunion experience better than brother Paulo Coelho. This is dedicated to the creeps of my adolescence, who are now choking on my dust. What are the creeps of your adolescence up to these days? Curing cancer? Winning Nobel prizes? I didn't think so. Enjoy:

Although the word is a bit on the strong side, the truth is that all of us have known a creep in our lives (the dictionary defines the term as “an individual without any character, dignity or spirit”). He is the kind of person who tries to stand out more when we are adolescents, when we are fighting to affirm our identities, our dreams, our place in the world. We are filled with doubts about what to do, and all of a sudden here comes the creep: always the leader, the one who thinks he is the best-looking, the most intelligent, the most able to face the challenges that lie ahead.

To remain in this position, he attacks our self-esteem: he wants us to think we are ugly, dull, without any future, and that we should imitate him and his way of leading the guys on the block (or in the building, or the condominium). In the case of boys, normally he imposes himself by brute force or by his “smart” attitudes, as if he knew more than everybody else. In the case of girls, the creep is always the one who seems to attract the looks of all the guys, get invited to all the parties, always be the most elegant.

Creeps (both male and female) look at us with a certain air of superiority and try to dictate the rules of the group. We naturally feel intimidated at such conduct, unsure of what to do, and end up letting the creep guide us for some time. Although we do not know it, we are giving the creep the power that he neither has nor deserves, and this will be the only moment in his life that his ephemeral light will manage to shine. But that is all part of our apprenticeship, since that is the way we develop our defenses in the future.

And so we grow up. Little by little each of us makes his choices, the group of adolescents splits up, and the creep disappears, although we still preserve his image of beauty, wisdom, leadership, elegance, strength and superiority.

During this important rite of passage called adolescence, all of us have our fundamental values tested – except the creep. While we suffer from feeling neglected, insecure and fragile, he sails smoothly by: after all, he is our leader! He does not have to endure all those endless difficult hours the rest of us spend on rainy afternoons and lying awake at nights.

One fine day, when we are already adults, we think about getting together with our friends from adolescence. We organize a party, usually in a restaurant – where everyone shows up with their husbands and wives. Nothing better than to sit down at a good meal, with good wine, and remember a little the years that made us all that we are today.

The creep shows up – generally married like the rest of us. We are all interested in what has become of his/her life, there is still a certain fascination and awe about an attitude so full of self-confidence. Where did that person go whom we secretly envied and admired?

The first surprise is that the creep went nowhere. Or rather, he may have taken a couple of successful steps, but soon life proved implacable towards his arrogance – the adult world is quite different from the one we live in when we are young.

But the creep still has one refuge: his adolescent gang. And since he thinks that the world has not moved forward, he wants to relive his moments of glory. When dinner starts, it seems that we have all been transported back, but soon we realize that he was just an instrument to enable us to grow. After a couple of drinks, we see the creep at bay, trying to prove a strength that no longer exists, feeling that we still believe that he is the leader of us all.

We smile, exchange kind words with everyone, pay the bill and leave with the impression that the creep has made the wrong choice. We think: “everything in that person should have worked out right, and it didn’t”.

All of us have known a creep or two in our lives. And that’s just as well.

-Paulo Coelho