What does strength really mean? And what about vulnerability? And how can we be strong in hard times, and at the same time feel our emotions and let them be present?
Emotional, Vulnerable, and still Strong?
Challenges of Self-Quarantine
... This included keeping my distance from everyone, not touching door knobs, not taking part in the dinner ritual of sending my bowl, and also not cooking at the same time as the others and not cooking for the community.
food for your thoughts
Climate change is a very talked about subject. What can we do? What should we stop doing? Many people have all kinds of lists as an answer to “stop” or rather slow down the process. But almost everyone thinks that humans can and have to do this alone, because we’re the most intelligent (and maybe also because we caused most of it). I want to share two videos that show in a simple way, that the intelligence of the brain might not be relevant in helping the cause, that it might even be counterproductive:
The Great Turning
A few weeks ago I travelled to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. where I happened upon a community fair by students of Antioch University Seattle. It was the final project of their class that is called The Great Turning, based on topics covered in a book by Joanna Macy called Coming Back to Life. I had heard of the fair only a week before, after talking to Michael Withey from Micro Community Concepts in Portland, Oregon. Eventhough I didn’t know it before, this place was right where I needed to be.
connecting the dots
A while ago a friend of mine told me about an interesting method of raising children that was developed by the Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler. One of the main principles is to not “help” the child to get into positions or places that it couldn’t reach on its own. So for example if you put a baby in a sitting position before it can get there on its own, it will feel insecure and won’t know how to get out of that position and probably experience stress. But if you find the patience to wait until it gets there on its own, it will be much more stable and also feel pride to have accepted the challenge and succeeded.
Swimming against the tide
I recently listened to a song by Milow that is called "Against the tide" and had an interesting revelation. To swim against the tide as used in the english language means "to do something that is in opposition to the general movement of things" or "to not follow what everyone else is doing". But the way I see it now - viewing the tide as a river - there are not two but at least three different ways of doing something or living your life in general.
letting go
This concept of letting go is a really fascinating one. It is said that by letting go and not holding on to something or someone, you gain much more than you had before. This requires a certain amount of trust in something outside yourself – depending on the situation, that trust is easier or harder to accept. But as long as the whole thing stays a concept – just a theory, attaining that trust is really hard. Even if you experienced it a few times – and were positively surprised that it actually worked – that trust doesn’t come naturally. Is that something that we never had or has our current way of living and the way we and our parents and grandparents trained each new generation to see the world forced us to unlearn that trust?