Time to Say Goodbye

The train station was empty, sitting peacefully in the sun, pretending it was part of nature.

I knew he was there before I saw him… I learnt to feel him coming, it was easier that way. I slowly turned my head and measured him curiously. The greyish smoky form of a man was sitting right next to me looking into the distance. His features were losing the battle against afternoon sun. He looked weak and tired.

We sat there, next to each other, waiting for the other to say something… The silence became stern with tension. I sighed and looked up at the sky. I could not remember last time it was so blue… The day was too perfect for a goodbye.

I was thinking of a best way to start when spring breeze whizzed through the platform rearranging the positions of forgotten candy wraps and cigarette butts on the floor. For a split second I froze with worry that it will disperse him into nothingness before the train arrives.

He laughed.

‘Look at you… Isn’t this ironic?’

I smiled and nodded. ‘I suppose… but I could not help it.’

‘I see… hmm… perhaps you need me a little more than you admit.’ He murmured quietly.

‘Listen…’ I turned to him, ignoring the shadowy resemblance of a face and pinning my eyes to the darkest cloud of smoke in his chest which I assumed was his heart.

‘I know this is hard for you, and though you don’t believe me, it is hard for me, too. You have always been there for me… all those years! You did everything in your power to protect me, to keep me from getting hurt. I appreciate it and I know you always meant well but… I just don’t think that getting hurt is such a bad thing anymore. Sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes that is the best way to learn. It’s not pleasant but it’s not that bad…’

He tried to seem oblivious but his smoky existence swirled a little faster.

‘Do you remember a few years ago, when you begged me not to do it? Not to go? And first I thought you were right. It was too crazy, too dangerous but then I couldn’t obey, I couldn’t listen because I just did not want to let the chance pass me by again…’

‘That wasn’t the first time you didn’t listen to me…’

‘I know, I know… but it was the first time…. The first time something happened… something changed inside me. I was happy, despite the fact that not everything was so great and I knew I will have to work really hard to get what I wanted. But I could see it… I could see myself getting there and everything just fell into place! Being there was not so important anymore because getting there itself was just so fascinatingly satisfactory in itself… I knew I might get hurt along the way but that didn’t matter because trying it just seemed….’

‘…so much more important than me…’ he finished.

I didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m sorry…’ I mumbled.

‘Please believe me, I’ve never meant to disappoint you… I’ve never wanted our relationship to end up like this. You know very well how hard I tried to make you part of it all! But you didn’t want to… you started to get weak and grew sicker and sicker every day! I can’t watch you suffer like this anymore! You need help… you need change!’

‘I’m fine where I am… I can’t change… I can’t change my nature, don’t you understand that?! I will die!’

‘No! No, you won’t! It is true that we can no longer be together… If we do, one of us is going to destroy the other. Neither of us wants that… but if you take the train… the journey… the journey will transform you!’

Another gust of wind swirled past us and I saw him shiver from the effort to keep himself together. He turned his face away from me and looked up to the west end of the railway tracks that disappeared behind the trees half a mile from the station.

‘Do you really believe that?’ he asked in a low, tired voice.

‘Yes… I do!’ I replied softly and watched him fade a little more.

‘You are killing me darling…’ he said with a sad smile.

‘I’m sorry…’

‘I know… if it really is so important to you, I will go…’

‘Really?’

‘Really…’

I wanted to tell him how much that meant to me but before I could say a word the railway vibrated with promise of an approaching train and soon several wagons with a glorious old steam locomotive at the front rolled their way to the station.

‘Right…’ he said and stood up, ‘time to go!’

‘Wait!’ I stopped him, ‘I have something for you! It’s nothing much but I wanted you to have it.’

I reached down and pulled a small red suitcase from under the bench.

‘What is it?’ he asked a little surprised.

‘Can’t you feel it? It’s full of our memories!  I don’t want you to forget me where ever you are going…’

He gently brushed my arm: ‘I will never forget you… how could I? We grew up together, you don’t remember but when you were little there were moments I felt we were one…  without the memories, will you remember me?’

‘I can’t keep any part of you with me, you know that. But how could I ever forget? Every time I will need to be brave and strong, I will think of you because without you I would have never known I was any of those things...’

‘But… you… you have to be strong all the time… It’s very tough out there. ’ he watched me with sincere worry.

‘Exactly…’ I smiled at him. ‘So event though, you won’t be with me anymore I will think of you every day. I am not alone, you are leaving me protected… you taught me well! Perhaps not in a way you intended, but nevertheless, you did a great job!… Thank you!’ I said at last and offered him the red suitcase again.

He hesitated for one more moment, and then grabbed the handle: ‘Thank you…’

I watched the suitcase burst out of its material existence and cuddle around his heart in a form of red dense smoke. For a second he seemed to become his old self and in that moment we both knew that this was the right thing to do. There was no place for ‘us’ here anymore. He gave me a last quiet nod and boarded the train.

He did not find a seat but stopped and stood in an open window right next to me. We stood there in silence again. Neither of us liked goodbyes very much.

I looked up to him… So weak and fragile again, fighting the whims of breeze and daylight...

‘Goodbye…’ I murmured.

‘Goodbye, my darling…’ quietly said my Fear. 

EUREKA! We can do it all!

In my previous blog I tried to pin down my personal philosophy of life, which I think I managed to a certain extent but since then I have thought of many more ideas that should be (and soon will be) added to that list. Though, not today. However, if you have read it you might have noticed a reoccurring pattern of emphasis on self-understanding because the relationship we have about ourselves (the perception/opinion we hold) underlines pretty much everything that goes in our lives.

I don’t remember how deeply I explained (if at all) how I arrived to this conclusion but I am sure I did not mention that the part of this understanding, or actually the main and the most important point, of this understanding lies in believing that nothing about you is set in stone… that you can always improve, that you can do everything you want… that there is no such thing as genetic predisposition standing in your way… there is no such thing as ‘not being smart enough’, ‘not being fast enough’, ‘not being talented enough’ … if there is… well it is your own belief that makes it so…

I am not saying that you were born and a little baby you said to himself/herself:  ‘Gee, I am dumb…’ maybe there were failures, or things that others have said, labels you have been given that made you believe such nonsense as that there is nothing you can do about how smart/talented you are. It is that belief that is stopping you, not your genetic makeup.

I know, all this seems very theoretical and a bit of cliché but please bear with me! It is one of my utmost desires to make as many of you see and believe that this is the truth and it’s universal…

The reason I am getting back to it is because I am reading a book from Dr Carol Dweck on mindset and with every sentence I read, every page I turn, my mind is shouting YES! YES!!! YEEEEEEEEES!…. Jumping up and down like an overexcited squirrel because what is happening to me cannot be described as anything else but a pure intellectual orgasm. It is so nice to find scientific evidence of one’s convictions, I tell you!

Just to give you a little background, Dweck is a psychologist… a researcher actually and hell of a good one while we are at it. She recognised two types of mindsets: Fixed and Growth mindset. A fixed mindset basically means believing that your qualities are carved in stone; that you only have certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality and a certain moral character… and sadly many of us are brought up in this kind of mindset. The growth mindset is the very opposite… nothing is set in stone… we can learn and improve… you must agree that person with this approach handles problems that come their way much more effectively. Dwek’s entire research is based on the premise that the view you adopt about yourself deeply affects the way you lead your life.

I know… all theory again… so, to be more specific, her ‘Eureka!’ moment came when she was doing a research on how people cope with failures. However, she was then under a preconception that we either do cope with them well or don’t. Therefore, she was quite puzzled when some kids in the experiment got excited about failure of solving difficult puzzles and were delighted about the challenge it presented for them. And that is what got her interested into that kind of approach (mindset) that can turn initial failure into an opportunity. As she pointed out the question of whether our abilities are set or can be cultivated over time is an old issue… but her research (the new issue) is about how THAT belief (whichever one you hold) affects your life.

And it does… so profoundly it is scary… Why do you think religion (no matter which one) is and always has been so powerful and influential?

It matters to me because I had my ‘Eureka!’ moment as well… only mine was stretched over several years. Now I can say that when I was little I did indeed have a fixed mindset. I have always perceived myself as not very good at anything and also not very smart. Don’t worry, no one ever called me stupid. However, as a child I always ‘knew’ I wasn’t very smart. Firstly, because I have a very smart sister only one year older than me who was the kind of child who got straight A’s with absolutely minimal effort… but me I never liked school much, my parents always had to watch over me painfully doing my homework because I just simply did not want to do it… I wanted to play and watch TV and things much more interesting than that… I just know that I have always struggled but I don’t know why exactly because now that I think about it I wasn’t that bad at all it was just that I didn’t want to spend any time with it… I wanted to be left alone, doing my thing… Though I suspect, I might have been afraid not to be very good at it which would be terrible for me as I was quite self-conscious and shy when I was little.

Which brings me to my other non-skill: social awkwardness! I have always been scared of other people... very shy and very easily ashamed. I was terrified of standing in front of the entire class or speak when everybody was looking at me. I mean I had a lot of friends I wasn’t a loner… everything was OK once strangers became my friends but I did not mind being alone… sometimes I even craved it because that way I could just make up stories in my head. That was what I loved… playing out different stories in my head and watching TV where there were more stories… reading was too connected with school for me to enjoy it because school was connected to things I did not like to do!

Just to set things straight, my parents or my sister never did or said anything that would make me feel inadequate, my family is a very open minded bunch… The point is… I had a fixed mindset… not because someone told me you are not as smart and that is how it will be for the rest of your life… but I was not told otherwise was I? It was the 90’s in Slovakia, no one was being told that being smart was not a fixed trait… I don’t think the subject was much discussed… Frankly, I don’t know but I think that in general the opposite was being implied.

Simply put, I saw that I wasn’t as smart as my sister or plenty other kids  and I never thought I would be because so many things were difficult for me plus the thought of not knowing something and embarrassing myself paralysed me… oh I was just the worst combination of opinions about self ever!

The truth is I was average... even below average sometimes… not that it bothered me... I don’t remember feeling that... I remember thinking I wasn’t as smart as other kids but really it did not trouble me (not when I was little) because I was quite well off inside my own head.

Oh, I also remember thinking whether I was normal! It is quite funny actually… I remember my child-self thinking if I am not normal because so many things in real life just weren’t interesting to me at all. I would really just like to sit and make up stories (where I would be the super-awesome heroine, of course), watch TV or play. Actually, I also remember deciding to keep it a secret so people don’t think there is something wrong with me (I might have been 5- 7). I remember thinking with an absolutist passion that only a child can feel that no one would ever understand my stories and why they were so much greater than anything else I could be doing with my time. This was my life before I was 8 years old.

Of course I grew up and I had friends and interests... but still I did not like school at all. I wasn’t really good in anything and stuck to my 3 favourite things being TV, playing and story-telling in my head… until one day when I was around 12 I believe,  I came across a book and started reading… yes that book was Harry Potter but that doesn’t matter now… what matters is that when I saw that book I knew it would take me forever to read it because I was  a very slow reader! I was done with it in 2 days! 2 Days! And that is when it started… forget TV!!! So many possibilities! I started reading everything and I read almost all the time. What startled me was how the hell did I become so good at reading? How?? When??  

In any case, through books I started to be interested in history and literature and I started to excel in those subjects… by the 9^th grade I was pretty much a straight A’s student because becoming good in those two made me believe I could become better in the others as well, even though they did not interest me that much… and honestly, for the first time in my life, I was considered smart and I loved it… I loved school.

Also I found out about myself (as a result of an epiphany that occurred to me one fine day) that I was not that shy but made myself shy as implication of my older sister’s natural social skill… I mean, we were almost the same age and thus together almost all the time… entering most of the new social groups together as well… She was always excellent with people and became amazingly popular in no time… so I set back and let her do all the work… oh, what a lazy ass I was!!! Though, once I realised my shyness is not some personal curse cast over me for the rest of my life… it slowly but surely became arbitrary… all that stress, all that nonsense! Also, for the first time I started to look at people as persons with their own stories and insecurities. I stopped feeling inferior and promised myself never to feel or act superior to anyone.  Of course I did not become prodigy in social interaction over night, but that phantom that I am not as good at this as everybody else was not there anymore and I simply became better at it as I did in everything.

Before all the reading I also majorly sucked at foreign languages… including English. That is what I was always telling to people: I am not a language type! Yeah, right… once I found a motivation it was like magic (I realised I needed to learn English because I really, really longed to go study abroad... it was time to take some of my stories outside into the real world!). I told myself, that it did not matter that I was not good at languages because I have done it before, I became good at something I thought I was really bad at… I believed that if I do it long enough I must learn it one day! So, for a year, I took evening English courses, 6 hours a week, painstakingly… even though it meant waking up at 6 am for school and staying in town till 9pm till the class was over! And I did it! I learned as much as I could, was successful and spent a year in the US high school to nail… and that my darlings was the first time the word ‘talent’ showed up in conversations!

Suddenly, people were talking about me as not only smart but talented even gifted especially linguistically (HA-HA-HA)!  

Wow…. I tell you, no one was more surprised at me!! I still don’t believe I am gifted but I believe I can do ANYTHING I set my mind on because I have done it! Multiple times! I also realise that it might not be easy… frankly, it never was, but easy is not what I am after now… I stopped wanting that long time ago… In past 5 years I have thrown myself in situations that terrified me… make myself face things I thought I never could! I want difficult and I want a challenge I want to keep trying, keep challenging myself to see HOW FAR I can go… and lately I am starting to think that there is no limit… that as long as I keep going.

I do not like the word gifted… it seems like something has been bestowed on people from a higher power. And hell no!!! I definitely won’t let anyone steal the credit for I have achieved!!  :-D

But can you see what I see?? The moment I started to realise I might not be sharpest tool in the shad but I sure can do something about it… the world fell to my feet. The belief that you can develop and improve the aspects of yourself is the ultimate fuel to learning. Just find that thing that makes you passionate and go for it!

EUREKA!!

I am not saying that everybody can become a genius or prodigy. We all have different desires, paths and different aspirations that should be valued and respected no matter their size.  But as Dweck says, our true potential is unknown and therefore it is impossible to see what we can achieve with devotion, passion, and appropriate training. Every time you learn your brain creates a new connection, the more you learn, the stronger are the connections! The stronger the connections, the smarter you become. A simple as that…

The more you believe this, the more you are likely to breathe through the (di)stress and confront the challenges, take risks, keep working and learn!

We all have a potential… IQ is not set either, that is a very common belief and the biggest absurdity of all! Nothing about us or our life is set. Going back to what I was saying in the piece on my philosophy of life: You have to learn to understand yourself... Accept yourself! Because ‘why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you??? The passion of stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.’ (Dweck, from her book Mindset, 2006)

Fate

'To be  mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.'

Immortality by Milan Kundera 

I finally finished reading Fate. The book by R.L. Fredericks I bought couple of months ago. Boy that was a long journey! Not in a bad sense though… literally! Lord Damory drew me deeper and deeper into his peculiar alchemy-entwined story of chasing immortality. Was it a story of decadence or virtue? I honestly don’t know… it is true that for the most part of the book you will find yourself drowning in decadence and death with dear Mr Damory…however, despite all that there is a golden line of virtue and perhaps love that stays strangely persistent throughout the story.

I enjoyed the book; it surprised me because it wasn't what I expected- not in a better/worse sense but rather… I don’t know how to say it. Usually we like books because we can associate ourselves with the hero, we either wish to be the hero or we admire him/her… in any case one must have relationship with the main character otherwise one would not care what happens to him or her. Damory is not really that kind of  ‘hero’. I cannot say I could associate myself with him or that I really liked him or always liked how he handled things that came his way but he gave me a new perspective… well the author gave me an entirely new perspective… I might have not agreed but I saw why… and I could understand the despair and will with which he continued chasing immortality because without it life did not give him pleasure or sense…  I wouldn't do that… not for immortality. But I do believe each of us have that thing… the thing that drives us… drives us up and down and most of the time completely mad! 

Fate is a story about fate (no surprise there :) ) and immortality… about obsession, strong-will and never ending series of events that I did not think possible to fit into one life time (as the book is mostly account of what happened before he made himself immortal, I still consider it a ‘lifetime’). The paradox is that although Francis Damory tamed immortality he did not get from it what he wanted (this is not a spoiler because he starts telling the story 200 years after he was born so one figures he succeeded) … so one can argue that, ultimately, immortality was what he sought all his life. The story, however, has an open ending and open ending means there are still lessons to be learned.

Frankly, I do not believe that any person ever truly wanted to be immortal. 

Immortality is a myth with which our minds simply love to play.Oh, it opens up so many possibilities!!!

However, I sometimes I doubt people truly realise what immortality is. Let’s say you contemplate about it… you imagine yourself living 100 or 200 years from now… not really 3000 years later! If you do, you imagine your present self living in that distant future that has a long road to go before coming to being. If you ever lived so long wouldn't your present self be just a distant if even existent memory of another life… of another person? In that sense, I suspect that the ‘I’ that longed to be immortal would be long dead. It’s a bit of catch 22.

The story got me thinking though, whether I would accept or not if by miracle I would be presented with the elixir of life. I weighted my options carefully… and came to the conclusion that pretty much everything about immortality sucks with the exception of having enough time to read and learn everything I want! Imagine the terror of watching all the people you love die... one by one… imagine that you would have to leave home because the fact that you look well too young for being hundred years old is getting a little suspicious… you would have to leave everything behind… Imagine that you have the whole eternity and that fact completely changes who you are… the eternity makes it impossible for you to be understood by any other person in the world… You are alone… and you are trapped because you no longer have the choice of dying… the pain of it all would be insufferable.

But there is so much in the world that fascinates me and so many things I want to know and the more I read the more I realise I know less then I knew before because I have discovered a whole new dimension of knowledge… it’s paralysing… it does not happen very often but when it does it’s devastating. I am paralysed by the insignificance and limitations of my own being… but then I start to breathe again and remind myself that it’s OK… just keep breathing… just keep going…  I can work with that little I know and maybe one day I will end up with a very big pile of ‘little’. Plus the things I choose to know because I can't know it all make me who I am... if I had no time limit, I would have never made many decisions that shaped me... which would be a pity because I kind of like who I am and where I am. 

However, I loathe that feeling because it makes me genuinely scared and, most of all, it makes me want to have more time… but more time is very different from immortality. Frankly, I do not understand why they call it the elixir of life… because if it makes you immortal it takes you outside the circle of life… and perhaps you would not be dead per se but you would not be part of life either. Isn’t the essence of life the fact that it cannot be preserved? Is that the essence of us? I do not want to go too deep into a philosophical discourse but to me people… our souls are not something static but something that is constantly evolving… in a sense we spend our life constructing ourselves… the necessity, the urge to learn is in our very core.

Life is a (r)evolution!

Therefore, I believe that immortality is a particularly cruel kind of death sentence. It’s like voluntarily freezing yourself in one of the initial phases of a computer game while watching everyone else progress to higher levels… I do not know what comes after death but anything is better than being buried alive by immortality, getting stuck in the purgatory because... I guess that will come a time in life of every hypothetical immortal man when he/she realises that life is not only about time… it is not about the absence of death…

What people actually crave is not immortality but longevity. We wish to stay young longer and live longer… which I guess is understandable. The thing is… we don’t even know how much we’ve got and we are already asking for more. We are afraid to run out of time but do we actually make good use of it??? ‘Cause being afraid about not having enough does not seem like a wise way to spend it…

People worry too much and don’t dance enough…

Oh well, in any case, Fate is a good book especially if you are the adventurous quest/journey type…  and if you like alchemy, mystery a wee bit of magic as well as enjoy historical themes (it gives you a great account of the society in the 18^th century across Europe, a bit of Africa and bit of Asia…I am truly impressed by the research the author must have made for this book to work)…