Dear friends,
in the second half of last year, I had experiences that, in their number, impact and simultaneity, triggered the entire range of my most important life themes:
from family-personal to general-interpersonal to social geo-political.
Some of these were profanely soberingly disillusioning, others hurt me in substance, and in some cases shook the very foundations of my deepest attitudes and beliefs.
All in all, they left me stunned, helpless and speechless in a deep spiritual valley,
in a state of blockade from inner restlessness and outer powerlessness.
“Know your why and you can endure almost any how” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
It took a lot of time to be able to stop the avalanche of thoughts, to let them be. Then the individual parts came to the surface piece by piece. It was easier to be able to look at them from an increasing distance instead of being hopelessly entangled in them.
This process reaches into the present and will keep me busy for a long time.
1-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-?
At some point I remembered that there are certain life cycles that, in their amazingly precise time intervals, have shaped my life and always given it a new direction.
A friend wrote me this: “Every stage of life has its own magic. The individual phases are always coordinated with new levels of consciousness. In the upheaval, things stir up. Not always in a gentle way. Sometimes even as an inner storm. But generally always as necessary for one. preparatory. Some falls and goes. Or dissolves. Some remains. Light shines into areas previously hidden in darkness”.
Every human existence constantly asks itself the question of meaning, especially in phases in which certain biographical events show it in a new form the limits that exist in the relationship between one’s own wishes/demands/expectations, one’s own possibilities or impossibilities and of reality as it is.
At certain times, which I call “personal turning points”, events seem to intensify and can severely shake one’s view of oneself and of the world.
Built-up certainties, hopes, cherished interpretations, patterns of action and arrangements, things that we have developed over the years to the existing point lose their coherence, which for a de facto highly sensitive personality structure is (survival) necessary.
From a certain (temporal and spatial) distance, one can understand this concentration of events as an invitation, as a painful but valuable indication to prepare for a new phase of life. Pause, reflect in order to be able to set the basic course for the next (in my case last) big stage. In the back of our minds the extremely elementary sentence: “We can only perceive what we have learned”
So my current leitmotif could be:
What have I learned so far? – How would I like to continue living in the future?
On a personal level, this leads to questions such as:
What elementary insights was I allowed to gain from my experiences?
What works? What remains?
What would I like to receive or keep, take with me?
What should I let go of?
What do I have to say goodbye to? (Expectations, hopes, categories of thought, certainties, values, principles that have turned out to be illusions).
On which fields am I cheating myself? What am I saying to myself?
But also: which expectations, hopes, categories of thought, certainties, values, principles (which could very well be illusions) do I not want to be taken away from me at any price? (“of nothing and nobody”). And why?
What consequences should or can I draw from this?
What losses do I want to accept?
Can new inner freedoms and possibilities arise from this?
What inner blockages do I perceive in and about myself?
Why do I obsessively want to be “better” than I am?
Which (shadow) parts of myself, which inner children do I keep under lock and key?
Which unresolved aspects in me trigger my negative feelings towards others?
Where are my longings?
Are there new?
Or longings that have been neglected in my life up to now?
What am I afraid of?
On the other hand, there are the burning questions about the major, worsening central socio-cultural, socio-economic, socio-political and socio-ecological problems of the world in which we live:
(global) social (in)justice, geopolitics & world peace, saving the ecological system earth.
In what places can I be useful to the world?
What can I share?
If so: in what way?
Am I taking myself too seriously?
Where should I better stand out, take back, keep my distance,
Which things and areas should I pay more attention to?
I have to say it clearly: If all the “good”, “right”, “reasonable”, “necessary” and “desirable” things that our western-modern lifestyle produces lead to the destruction of the planet’s livelihoods, then that’s it NO “achievements”. Following on from this, the civilizational-moral sense of superiority over all other cultures is all the more monstrous for me; and with it the hypocrisy of explicitly selling one’s own interests to the non-western rest of the world as humanistic, goodwilling acts – always with the overwhelmingly large economic, financial and military power in the back.
Global political action strikes me as (green, recently olive-green capitalist) cosmetic surgery on a terminally ill cancer patient. The system question is not discussed. Not even asked. What’s going on here??? How to deal with it as an individual fate???
How much tolerance for ambiguity is necessary to remain healthy and life-affirming in a world that, in my perception, has irrevocably and irreversibly gotten out of joint and is hitting a wall in every conceivable issue at the same time?
How can we succeed in living a true relationship with the world in integration with a life that is true and as fulfilling as possible, content, lively, open, self-determined, meaningful in peace and unity with nature? That’s the big question.
In the coming months I will publish some of the thoughts that I have thought about in detail and put on paper on my website. The Facebook page will then announce the relevant links.
Best wishes
Harald