Love to Emily&Alex

There is that bit about “bad times” in the wedding vows, but it almost sounds like a good luck charm.  What bad times...??  You are getting married!!!  

There may be a clandestine tuck though, a whisper, a last piece of advice given.  But in general we like to think of a wedding as a magical event not to be spoiled by reality.  

Here are my few bites of advice as I have rounded the corner of our second decade together:

Don’t fool yourself.  Love is a chemical cocktail that can leave you with a serious hangover at the other end of married life.

That feeling of profound connection  triggered by a potent potion of happy hormones, which are generously disbursed when we  encounter the one we have longed for all that time, may in fact hold a secret by-product:  familiarity - as in "It seems like I have known him forever..."

True.  

After all, the person you will fall in love with is likely to combine the best and the worst of your parent-child moments.  

It may not be at all obvious at first or even after twenty years, but marriage will reveal - to the ones who dare look - the entire list of hopes and disappointments we had buried in the depth of some mental drawer while growing up.  

Marriage will provide the time to open it up again and to take a good long look inside.

On the bright side, falling in love means that we connect with someone, because somehow we feel that we have found the closest expression of our first love relationship - just better - or so we hope!  

On the murkier side, we may never find what we are looking for and generously distribute blame in all directions.  Drawer shut, key tossed.

At the best, however, marriage is a joint plunge into the entrails of childhood hopes, frustrations and coping mechanism.  After some soul searching it may very well provide some clues to why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do and also why we chose each other.  At least that's what I am working on.  

My advice: have your parachute ready and 
don´t worry to take the leap.  After all, working it out together can be good fun!

Guilty by Association

Why is it that even in yet another report (by Der Spiegel) about the most horrendous crimes committed by men against women and girls there is the seemingly unavoidable caveat “men are not the only ones who do evil.”  

Clearly not, but why blur the line between perpetrators with accomplices?  Why suggest that looking is the same as doing?  Or does anyone seriously suggest, that there would be no child pornography, no forced prostitution, no bride burning, no rape if only women weren´t allowing it to happen? 

Hi again!

Thoughts are like family.  They stick around and sometimes you wonder why.

Pools

I spent the afternoon with Jules at the village pool, a large basin of spring fed water surrounded by ancient walls and green.  I love that place not just because it is so darn cute with its white and blue wooden changing rooms and its delicious array of baked goods on sale.  I love it, because it is a place of giggles and laughter.  

I usually am wary of crowds, but there I watch them.  That bubbly conviviality is a fun thing to take in.  I never get bored, never feel tempted to pick up my book.  The splashes, the toes turned skywards.  The furtive smiles of fourteen year olds by the edge of the water, the galloping stampedes of children in ecstatic anticipation of the prickly cold on their skins.  Bodies of all shapes and ages.  Lives of all kind brought together in the baking heat of a blissful afternoon.

Yawn !

People are all different, but their denial patterns are all the same!

Don't Look

In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up, kids enjoyed summers roaming the fields and woods, meeting friends on the street and riding their bikes around town.

Today, that has become a scarce good in a world littered with roads and suburban infrastructure. I would say that in hindsight, it was one of the greatest achievements of humanities:  Children growing up healthy and free in communities that were inhabited by neighbours not by cars and play stations. 

There is not one day that I don’t fret about my computer and curse the time I waste trying to download one thing or upload another.  There is no way of turning back the wheel of  human development, but what sort of development is this and are we really headed the right direction?  Truly, the internet is quite a mind boggling thing with all that it does and all the gates it opens.  But mostly it has added speed to our world and made it smaller - in many ways.

Along with it came major incursions into our privacy.  In a way, we were dragged out of the shadow of our private lives into the virtual market place of humanity where everything can be bought and sold at the sound of a “click.”     

With that, however, we have entrusted our existences to something we don’t understand, control or even manage very well. 

Remembering our passwords or deciding when and whether to download an upgrade is the extent of my expertise.  I am probably pretty much average when it comes to cyber problem solving.   Most of the time, the friendly Apple guy (99% are guys!) at the other end, has a lot of advice but not really a solution either. 

Despite that ongoing frustration, we carry on in a world that is not only dominated by alienating processes and hair raising transaction speeds, but we have accepted it as normal.  We don’t question it anymore.

In the meantime, landscapes become littered with all the products we might want to acquire at a mouse click.  The energy to power our newly acquired gusto for high tech stuff  is becoming scarce at the same speed that our dependency on it grows.  In parts of the world it is now being sourced in perilous depths, endangering fresh water supplies and contributing to our greatest foe: climate change. 

Maybe because of all that we prefer to celebrate childood in a 2D format nowadays, instead of taking a look outside.

I feel for you

I have always argued for human beings to develop their empathetic abilities.  Indeed, I do believe that some of us, mostly men, would do well spending a little time&energy training that frontal lobe area.  

But empathy, per se, does not guarantee that we will act any more humane than apes.  In fact, apes to possess empathetic ability which is not surprising given our close ancestral link.  What monkeys, however, do less well than us further advanced representatives is to use that skill to make each other feel one way or another.    

Whereas they may try to deceive each other and anticipate one another’s reactions, we go further.  Humans have the formidable ability to empathise potential pain and suffering that result from their actions and they may very well choose to use that ability for personal gratification.  

In fact, we do it all the time from the little scathing remark to the silent treatment.  But worse even, in the upper ranks of a given formal or informal hierarchy it is often being done  because they know that they can get away with it.  Examples abound.  From schoolyard bullies to terrorising dictators.  

The power of empathy can have a very dark side.