Letter from a Solo Traveller in India: Perfection is not a Requirement for Happiness

Dear Friend,

It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. I have sat down many times at my desk with a sincere intent to do it, but somehow my paper stayed empty.

I am currently in India. The heat and the loud honks of the market below make it impossible for me to sleep. Poverty has found in this country a place to rule and people are struggling to make it till the end of the day. Useless to say that it was a culture shock and on my very first day I had the impression that the black plague had hit houses, animals, streets but spared the heart of the people. Londoners have looked more miserable to me lately.

People smile and help each other. Not even death looks as terrifying anymore: tombs are the most beautiful attractions and they are built as a promise of eternal love.

My dear friend, I hear your pain: your instinct is unplacable and your anger is unexplainable. However, we do what we do because in the end we all seek happiness.

“You’re happy, I’m happy” you hear often merchants and tuc-tuc drivers saying this when negotiating price services or goods. Isn’t happiness a negotiation after all? Believe me when I say I know what it is like to feel mostly alone in a relationship. Then you finally find the courage within to end things by telling that you are only giving yourself another chance to be happy and do not want to set for anything less. All or nothing.

Then why do we feel so crap? Maybe because we are not able to identify what it is that we really want, we say to ourselves that we recognise our worth, but sometimes that comes with such high price that we won’t allow anyone to make a mistake.

Only yesterday in the desert a 17 years old boy told me that perfection is not a requirement for love. He called himself “The Camel driver”, he has no house, no parents and has to leave his hometown and the people he loved to make money and learn the language of the desert. “I like camels,” He smiled. “They are great listeners”. He is waiting for his sisters to finish school so he can attend English classes, that way he can speak to the desert while listening to the tourists’ stories and adventures. English is his passport to the world.

“You’re happy, I’m happy,” he said once more in the hope to get some extra tips. After carefully looking at his worn face and skinny body I handed him an apple and asked, “Are you really happy?”

He said yes. No hesitation. He felt lucky in many ways.

You may think that these people are happy because they don’t know any better, but do we?  We keep chasing new experiences because we feel troubled by constant dissatisfaction. We engage in disruptive dialogues with ourselves creating a storyline in our minds supported by unrealistic expectations, we ourselves would not be able to fulfil.

Do not get me wrong, I am not suggesting settling in the wrong situations, but don’t focus all your energies on getting away from it; reflect and learn upon it. It’s a bit like polishing a mirror through which we look at ourselves: if we can’t see ourselves clearly, we won’t be able to see others for what they really are. We tend to project ideas on how a person or even a relationship should be and the romantic expectations we throw out there are enough to push us over the edge.

So do go and set yourself free, travel alone from time to time and you may also come across a young camel driver who will teach you not to look any further than yourself because understanding yourself and people is already a free pass to the world. Perfection is not a requirement for love nor happiness.

With Love,

Mely

 

Sunny Afternoon in Florence: The Painter Who Never Runs out of Colours

Walking down the ancient streets of Florence I once met a painter. He only had one arm, with his long mustaches and his brown beret looked like he had come out of a painting himself! His work was different from all the other artists’: he was not interested in drawing landscapes or portraits he would only paint beautiful castles made of ice, stones, marble or flowers. And in order to make people believe those castles were real he would include furniture of all époques and a full floor plan of course. Observing him from the side he seemed like the type of person that, regardless of his misfortune, would never run out of colours.

“Castles, I sell castles,” He would shout every now and then to the crowd of tourists around him before painting his silent notes and thoughts back on canvas. Isn’t what art is all about? Depicting yourself raw and sour?

“Wish such palace did exist,” I whispered

“It does!” He exclaimed. “I built it! I can built more sequoia and a marble fountain in the middle of the garden if you like…it would be the envy of all the world.”

“No, thank you” I chuckled amused. “You have built an imaginary castle.”

“Isn’t it all we have sometimes?”

“Maybe,” I looked down. “Sometimes is just the image in our mind of how things are supposed to go or be.”

“Signorina, somebody once said that only reality must prove itself again and again to questioners,” He said without never taking his eyes off his canvas. “It is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself (…)”

And it’s in a day like this where I feel the need to lock myself out in a magic bubble that looking back to the sunny afternoon in Florence I could not agree the most. And now thanks to the painter who never runs out of colours I can lock myself out in my beautiful castle with sequoia all around and a marble fountain in the middle of the garden. I picked the finest Cantonese desk and chair made of Rosewood inlaid with mother of pearl. There’s a big Renaissance fresco decorating the ceiling and a small marble fireplace with a gold detail cornice warming my thoughts as they pour down like silent notes of colours on this white paper.

And I do not feel the need to justify myself anymore, I do not feel the need to explain the reason why…

“To sleep, to die…” And the city is a silent ash of fog

It was a cold night. One of those nights where the ice steams up the windows’ cars while your body heats up and the city is a silent ash of fog. He was waiting for sleep to fall heavy on his eyelids: “To sleep, to die. No, no how did that damn poet say?” He thought out loud before blowing the last cigarette’s smoke. “To die, to sleep… come my sweet death so I can get another glance of her.”

He wasn’t sure whether it was love, obsession or simple folly he was wary of her like the poison and yet he needed her like water that quenches a man lost in the desert. Suddenly it came clear to him: falling in love was a bit like falling asleep, slowly and deeply. He blamed the stars for that; he cursed the full face of the moon that every night with her charm and mystery could turn a man into a beast.

Then sleep came and so did she with her black gown that fell to her bare feet. The soft, deep plunge of her dress allowed a glimpse of her round breast half hidden by her long hair provocatively parted over the shoulders. A shudder passed through his body as she sat beside him: “Maybe I’m the one dreaming,” she whispered softly in his ear. And then she enticed him, she clasped him with passion and strength as afraid to let go of that dream and its ephemeral pleasure.

As they both sunk into the love pleasure, the moon laughed at their fate getting dressed, behind a cloud, of a poker shape. The loud tick of the clock made it impossible for her to sleep. She put her black gown on and looked outside the blurry window. “To sleep, to die… No, how did that damn poet say?” She laughed out loud before blowing the last cigarette’s smoke.

And the city was a silent ash of fog…

A Strange Encounter in Madrid: The Man Who Carries Time

Isn’t it funny how sometimes all we need it’s a plane ticket, a walk in the city and a friendly word from a stranger to realize how we really feel. A few weeks ago I finally got to visit Barrio De Las Letras  (Literary Quarter) a famous neighborhood where some of the greatest Spanish authors have once lived and written. Through those narrow streets of Madrid you could breathe art, history and taste some of the best “Chocolate and Churros” in town. Well, I can assure you they were some of the best because I did try them and sip some of that delicious chocolate in a sunny spot in Plaza San Ana.

“Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go,” A young charming man sitting in front of me at the cafe said out loud interrupting my reading.

“Excuse me?” I asked unsure whether he was talking to me or not.

“Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go,” He repeated letting out a hint of Portuguese accent. “Your postcard, I’m just reading what your postcard says.”

“Ohh this is a little reminder to myself,” I chuckled embarrassed. “I actually use this postcard as…as bookmark.”

“I see,” He smiles

“Talking about visitors, are you also visiting Madrid?” I asked noticing a small hand luggage next to him.

“Well, I actually live here. I carry my luggage with me every day.”

“You must carry something really precious in there.” The thought of a man carrying around a luggage with him every day both scared and intrigued me.

“You have no idea…”

As already mentioned in “My letter From a Solo Traveler in Peru’” when you travel alone your instinct is more acute and please do listen to it if it says someone is to trust. That little voice inside my head was telling me that man, other than carrying a hand luggage with him, was also carrying a message for me. So I allowed him to be my Cicerone for the afternoon and discovered not just interested places that I would have never being able to see if I was alone, most importantly, I discovered something new about myself.

See, I went to Madrid with one question in mind: why this continue urge to pack my bag and travel? There must be something I’m looking for, something I want to change as so far life hasn’t turned how the way I planned it to be. Let’s face it, life sometimes totally sucks!  It’s a continue battle between the mind and the soul. It’s a war against procrastination, because, paraphrasing Burkeman’s words, too often we perfectionists are secretly proud of our affliction: we’re convinced that this time, finally, if we pulled out all the stops, we might get things exactly right. The bracing Gnostic response is: forget it. Creation is imperfect by definition; when we are young we tend to run towards time, we embrace life fully and we’re aware that in order “to bring something into being is unavoidably to screw it up.” Nothing can stop us. We’re invincible. As we get older we often prefer to make stops on the way to reflect and ponder on our decisions and mistakes and the only thing remained running is time.

“Time???You’re carrying in there time?”

“It’s a metaphor,” The Portuguese man laughed. “Time is number one humans’ enemy: we rush into our decisions because we fear we don’t have enough time or we wait for something to happen because we feel everything will come at the right time and so on. We are the creators of this terrible invention and the only way for us to live our life fully is to pack away our fear of the past and the future and take full control over it.”

“I don’t understand,” I chuckled amused. “Isn’t it haunting walking side by side with Time?”

“No, I’ve finally made peace with Time: I’m not chasing it, I’m not running away from it. I’m actually learning a lot about Him. Think about it: we tend to idealize or escape from something when we don’t actually know it. It’s a bit like your postcard, the luggage is a reminder to myself that time doesn’t exist and I should not be afraid of it. Regardless your destination, life is the journey and we should enjoy it all the way; instead, contrary to what people think, happiness is not a destiny .”

The next day, on my way to the station, I saw the same man with the luggage sitting at the “Chocolate and Churros” bar in plaza San Ana, I waved to get his attention.

“I see you’re ready to set on your journey,” The young man said out loud from across the street.

“I am! And I’ve packed away time, it’s coming with me,” I smiled

“Good for you! Well, what can I say, visitors are just like feelings: they come and go”

 

 

Happy New Year Fellow Bloggers!!!

Why do We Need Another Half?

I was looking outside the window when he reached for my hand.

“Can I ask you something?” He said. “Why does he make you so nervous thinking that we are not alike?”
“No, it doesn’t. I just feel it’s nice to have something in common,” I replied freeing my hand and turned around to face him.

I could perhaps lie to him but I could not lie to myself: as much as I tried the thought of us not having much to share did make me nervous. This popular concept that our attraction to our opposite is a subconscious way to face our weaker aspects and become a more complete individual is nonsense. Why do we need “another half” to make up for something that is missing?

Something was missing though. My soul had got lost somewhere in that dark loft lighten by a weak patch of sunlight on a cloudy afternoon. I got up and went looking for it and there it was: I spotted it sitting in the corner facing the wall like an offended person who turns the other way; like a child grounded by an irrational mind.

A Place to Inspire Her

• The idea of writing a book always stayed at the back of her mind, but “who would be interested in reading it?” she thought. Even her mum was finding hard to keep up with that busy and congested world of thoughts inside her head. She would visit the library, she would go to the park, she would sit in cozy coffee shops with no result. Where on earth was this inspirational place? “Perhaps was not on earth,” suddenly dawned on her. So she looked at the sky and said: “I’ll only start writing if I receive a sign.” The only possible sign was to find somewhere a white desk in front of a window.

  After a few weeks her mother asked the girl to go and find an antique vase in the loft. That old room had been locked in years: no one in the family had ever dared to enter it after a fortune teller had told them that the room was haunted. The girl was not afraid of ghosts, she was more afraid of spiders that were hanging from the dusty corners of the wooden ceiling; she half expected them to show their big teeth every time she would look at them even though she wasn’t sure whether spiders had got teeth.

  It was also a cold place to be: the fresh breeze of March would blow through the drought hidden behind the curtains eaten by moths. All those books, broken furniture and carton boxes scattered all over the floor spoke to her about abandonment and long forgotten times. She pulled the curtain on one side and let the weak patch of sun coming through the opaque glass and, in her great surprise, there it was: a large white desk positioned in front of the adjacent window made wobbly by the heavy chairs placed on top of it.

  How long was this desk kept here? How much time she had lost to look for the perfect place to inspire her.She grabbed an old notebook, a pen and started writing. Yes perhaps the room was cold and dusty, perhaps spirits would gather there at night, “Well be it!” She exclaimed out loud. She would listen to their stories and write tales of far lands and ancient castles where kings and knights once lived. No more time to waste. This was now her own secret place, the kind of place where only writers and their imagination go to.

   

She was his Supreme Work of Art…

It had been pleasant and had had meaning as long she was by his side. How quickly everything withered and faded and now that it was over a tormented feeling of impermanence engulfed him.

What to do? He began to draw unloading all the last images of her body from his mind: that perfectly shaped mouth, her dark dreamy eyes that, from time to time, would drift to somewhere in the clouds. How to forget those long, thin fingers that comfort him at night and the smell of lavender of her long wavy hair provocatively parted over one shoulder. The thought of her class and elegance overwhelmed him. It was the way she carried herself on those black high heels and her red dress that first caught his attention – she hated to lose control, she hated to give away any little glint of emotion secretly kept in the deep well of her soul. She was mystery.

“Isn’t what art is all about?” He pondered. “Beauty and mystery.”

So perhaps he would never be able to draw a concrete image of her, perhaps she would always remain dream, idea and fantasy. All he knew he was bound to her body and that beautiful mind – she was his supreme work of art.

Isn’t It Just Faith?

As if in disharmony with the grey weather I get up in a great mood to meet my Chinese friend Yan who have been asking me in days to go with her to the Buddhist temple.

As we get there we find out that the temple is closed on week days. We knock on the door of a little wood house where apparently monks gather to meditate. The door slips open and in the room in front of the narrow hall a monk, a man with shaved head wearing an orange coloured robe, is sitting on the floor in a profound state of meditation. He stays stood there in silence observing us. He blinks several times, as if focusing and trying to read inside us. I feel uneasy. I leave before he could read too much of me and let Yan do the talk. That image of him meditating stirs up something in me that have been dormant for a long time: faith.

It could be routine, it could be apathy. “What am I doing in front of a Buddhist temple? I thought. Although I haven’t attended services in years, I’ve always considered myself Christian. Why do we even need to give things name? In the end, isn’t it just faith?

Suddenly hit me what Rodney Smith once explained. Naming occurs because of our attachment to knowing, our fear of not knowing or our desire to know. We are afraid of the terrible implications of the unknown and we feel the need to protect us and to always have an answer. What we don’t understand is that our world becomes narrowed around what we think and by doing so we creating dualism and divisionism. When left wordless, all things assume their natural order and open beyond themselves into an inexplicable force and union. Even some of the greater thinkers and philosophers such as K. Marx and A. Schopenauer were ready to admit that perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning.

I take a look at the garden, scattered along dead leaves we find miniature of sacred statues representing diverse religions: Chinese, Hindu and Buddhism. Under a slim tree Buddha is sitting in his favourite position with his torso upright and his legs crossed. He’s wearing a crucifix necklace. Somebody must have put it around his neck. I shiver. I half expect him to open his eyes and smile at me, showing his big white teeth.

 “We should see the unity, not the differences,” says my friend. “Humans are funny and contradictory creatures: they gather together either to make war or peace.”

Along the wet and mouldy path back to the gate a sign catches my attention: “Though one may conquer a thousand men in a battle, the one who conquer himself is the greater warrior.”

Narcissus & Goldmund: The Illusion Of Completness

Have you ever felt like there are two souls inside you? The sun and the moon; the sea and the land. But there’s still only one world and nature needs its opposite to follow its cycle.

“It’s the mind and the heart arguing inside the one beautiful body,” he said once provocatively.

But then why couldn’t we be one? I thought. We shared the laughs, the bed, thoughts, books and experiences, but there was something missing, something didn’t feel right.

Perhaps it’s because, as James Redfield once wrote, we are all walking around like a circle half complete, like the letter C. We are all wandering through life waiting for a person, some other circle half complete, to join us in our emptiness and giving us a burst of love and energy along with an illusion of completeness. This one whole person though, this O, we think we have reached has two heads, two hearts and too much ego to survive. It’s a power struggle, it’s a beautiful obsession, it’s a fairy tale with no happy ending.

“Who would want to settle these days anyway?” I said out loud lying in a whisper.

We shutter at life’s instability and we escape into lust or platonic relationships. Some types of romantic encounters have a way of attaching themselves, but they are not to be taken seriously. So we find another way to run away and we set out in journeys around the world searching for treasures and answers because this is what makes life interesting: searching for meaning hoping to make one dream last.

So we escape. Right. But do we ever really come back?

Hernann Hesse tells the story of two characters, Narcissus and Goldmund, with opposite personalities whose lives are interdependent. Narcissus is a scholar who searches for meaning in abstractions, whereas Goldmund is a sensualist who seeks meaning in the world of the senses.

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land.” says Narcissus to Goldmund. “It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.”  

Do you believe in the other half? He asked interrupping my thoughts.

I hesitated. I was intended to stay still feeling the grass, the warm sun, inhaling the fresh breeze while listening to the waving sound of the river. I recognized all of them. See, you don’t always have to choose: make a circle on your own and go find another circle to share life with.

“No,” I replied noticing he was lying on the grass beside me with his eyes fixed in the sky.

I smiled and remained still. Then I simply reached for his hand.

Letter to a Friend: New Paths to Run On

Dear Friend,

I hear that same voice in my head too. It whispers always the same thing “No, I cannot carry on like this…”

It usually happens when I lie to myself, when I pretend that I’m 100% satisfied with my job, when I tell myself that things are actually not too bad with him.

“No, I cannot carry on like this…”I heard it say again this morning. So in order to clear my mind I went jogging in the park. It was warm outside, but I felt cold inside. I stopped running for a few minutes to catch my breath. What I needed though was not oxygen, but a bigger vision, a goal, an real aim to run to. I took a look around and I saw the trees, the bushes, the houses, the same old cafe. I spotted John sitting outside the cafe drinking his American coffee: he was there again at the exact same time. In brief, I saw that little angle of world where I live and I feel comfortable in. Too comfortable I guess.

One of the books by S. Beckett tells the story of a character who decides to make a journey on a bicycle. He had read somewhere that when somebody gets lost in a wood he thinks he’s going straight, but he’s actually walking in circle. So he decides to walk in circle, hoping to go straight.

Does that work? Mmmh…I’m not so sure, but trust me when I say I do understand Mr. Molloy’s bizarre idea.  See most people think that the all point in life is to prevent bad things from happening.  We get so obsessed in controlling events and avoid changes and then we hide behind the excuse that we are just doing it in order to feel safe.

I’m not afraid of change – it’s part of life- I’m more scared of the unknown, of uncertainty.Perhaps we should all try to do something different every day: instead of your usual latte, get a hazelnut latte, wear blue instead of black, change route on your way back home.

Paulo Coelho once said: “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal.” By routine, he does not mean a 9-5 job or having a regular life; he means getting caught up in certain habits and ways of thinking that make us miss new things that could actually enrich our life. So I decided to change route: this morning I did not run across the park in order to reach the tennis field, I run up the hill all the way down and across the small bridge where I discovered a river and a new cafe. I ordered hazelnut latte and sat on the grass. I loved the warm sun touching my skin. I felt free. So my friend I suggest you do the same: every time you hear that voice inside your head, put your trainers on and go out: find new paths to run on. With Love, Melania (Thanks to my friend Giuseppe for inspiring this post)