The happiness of pursuit

I met someone.

This is a funny scentence... :) You meet many people in your life. But when you say "I met someone" it's just different. Well, I did.

I've been having a full life. Lots of good experiences, wonderful people, beautiful places... But when you meet someone it's always special. It looks like all your life can be reduced to that tiny moment. It's like being ran over by a car (believe me, I know what I'm talking about). You rapidly rewind your all life in a couple of seconds to then wake up and feel terribly happy just because you're still there. And it feels so good! (Don't go triyng to be run over by cars now, reader! I am talking about falling in love.) Because it is the most sublime way to taste life. You meet lots of people in your life. Even fall in love with many. But there are only a certain few with the gift to make you feel alive, with the gift to touch you without hurting.

My life has been full, all right. Full of love. From my lovely looney family to my dear friends and all the either wonderful or goofy lovers I might have had, I've been having a happy life. There are often times when I think "If I die now, I die happy!". This might be a very extreme dramatic thought (here I go being dramatic...). It is a very relaxing quiet one too and I hope I'll have it often throughout life. It reminds me things like being sitted at the top of this huge tall ship's mast, looking down to the large calm waves passing beneath the boat and feeling the swinging sunset on my face. As someone really important once told me, happiness is not a state, it's a process. Being happy is, above all, being yourself and enjoying it. "Porque una es más auténtica cuanto más se parece a lo que ha soñado de si misma" (Agrado, Todo Sobre Mi Madre, 1999).

Today, friends were having dinner chez moi. I look at the table and see lots of glasses, dirty dishes, empty bottles... God, it feels good! Finally home. Finally back to life, to me. Some human disappointments have recently occured in my life. My latest love experiences were not so lovable... I was so scared of loosing myself on the deception, of loosing my faith in life and in love. But then this salty breeze swept my path, leaving a clear trail of hope and understanding behind. How can a total stranger change your life so completely in just a few hours?! How can you be so happy just for falling in love? Then I realized, it wasn't him, this stranger... It's me. What I could see in/ through him because of all the beautiful people I carry with me, from which he is now part too. I recovered my faith, my inspiration, my will. I recovered my life for he had the gift to put it right in front of my eyes! (Or I had the gift to put him right in front of my eyes! Which was not difficult...) I am eternally grateful for that. That man is now part of my home too. And yet, he came in and out of my life like that fresh salty breeze early on a summer foggy morning.

So friends were here, willing to listen, willing to speak, willing to care and be cared about. New friends, old friends, people I love and respect and trust. People who are part of me and whose life affects mine in every way. There we were eating my Carbonara, drinking rose and smoking cigarretes while I would moan about my new state of grace. I sigh, they smile, I laugh, they smile, I cry, they smile again... And I get by with a little help from my friends.

I realized all I want is salty breeze people, really. People who stay around even when they're not there, people who guide you whithout even understanding they do, people who take time to listen to your nonsenses and are not affraid to tell you when you're being stupid, people you like to listen to, people who become part of your own personality, people who you admire secretly to find out one day they admire you too! Above all, we are the people we meet. And the only thing we can control in life is the importance we give to each and every one of them, those we should absorb and those we should ignore.

All I wish is to continue persuing that salty breeze that keeps me sailing through life.

Let's give it another try...

Well, well... Here I am are again.

After killing FishandHips I, due to censorship = wise advise reasons (I really just wanted to be polemic on my very first blog scentence!), I've decided to give it another try.

This blog should be about the Life. My life on FishandHips II. Which my friends would say could be a hell of a movie script. I'll leave it posted then, from now on. Maybe Tarantino passes by... Or Tim Burton!!! Alice in Wonderland remake, even before Alice in Wonderland comes out! :)

More than a mere diary, I aim to raise some contemporary questions about life. Some mine, some from my circle of friends and family and pets (this could be read as ex-boyfriends... kidding, guys! :D).

I am officialy embracing at last this lousy "modern woman" label I seem to carry in the recent years of my life. I am single, live alone at my own appartment, have a 24/7 job, lots of gay friends and an exquisite taste for wine and food. Oh, and I carry a laptop on my backpack instead of a baby wrapped around my wrist. To complete the picture and finally recognize this unavoidable reality, here I am BLOGGING!

Modern times made me this so-called modern woman. I never thought it would be so, though. Not that I had the prince charming riding on a horse to come and pick me up at twelve (I find the picture quite gay, really...) or the KingKong version riding a building instead of the horse (which would be a bit more manly). Or am I being again a product of our times and affraid of recognizing the hard reality of my wishes and fantasies? Well, for the current purpose, it really doesn't matter. That's too personal. Mind your own business, reader! ;)

Anyway, being a modern-woman is not something I've always wished for. Actually, I had never even consider it at all. And it's hard for me to believe that anyone does... But it's possible, of course.

"Life is hard", says psychiatrist Scott Peck at the very beggining of his book The Road Less Traveled, a summary on ways people find (or hide) to face relationships and life. He also states that, once you recognize this absolute truth, things immediately get easier. I've read his book some eight years ago and this first scentence got stuck in my mind ever since. I had recongized the truth! Tuririruriruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu (read under XFiles tune).

Maybe as Peck, I believe the essence of each one's life is the people. As a definition of ourselves, at some course I did once, we were asked to draw something that would identify us. I made the typical stickman and presented it as it follows: "This is a person because I am a person and, above all, I like people." I guess this pretty much defines me and the way I see life. So the modern-woman stereotype doesn't really fit, once it demands an overdose of selfishness and other self-centered personality skills.

Given my lifetime experience - which is not that much in terms of time but it is some in terms of relationships, considering them as the utmost life experiences - I believe Romeo and Juliet families' disapproval has been replaced by air fares and conflicting job and social schedules. Today, social status frontiers over relationships are not as obvious as for Romeo and Juliet. Eventually, everything is possible. As long as you can afford it or have the time for it! So instead of facing social constraints (I am generalizing, of course) we now face distances, schedules, carreer stages, relationships' historicals, long distance friends' visits... We have everything at our feet. Our life can be distributed all around the globe! Either because you were trevelling or because you met someone from another place. You want it, you can have it. But then again, can you really? Is it selfishness to question wether you should buy a new couch or go visit your boyfriend in Africa? Is it really futile to buy an iPhone instead of a romantic flower bouquet to your beloved? Is it that promiscuous to jump into bed with someone you really liked just because he or she is leaving the very next day? No. They say tradition is not what it used to be. I'd say morality is not what it used to be. And I'm not trying to preach anything. And here I go excusing myself because actually, today, even just pronouncing the word "morality" has become a tabu. As Oscar Wilde stated, I too believe "Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace". I just believe morality (like art) has dramatically changed - and keeps changing. Accepting and "organizing" the new morality - that's the challenge.

When you come from a mediterranean traditional catholic "garden planted by the sea" (said Camões) like I do, or any other place with similar social structures (so virtually every country), these issues can become real problems. Specially, because not everyone is actually willing to face them. Status quo has worked so far. Why changing it? And when it comes to a time when you have to face them, you just pretend they don't exist and the option you took was the sole one. Nobody decides nothing. It is always the circumstances, which where I come from, you would call it "God". God, I hate irresponsibility!

The amount of people and places we meet represent huge opportunity costs with which no relationship can compete. The alternatives to stick to a partner are not only all the other "experiences" you can have with other people but also all the trips, courses, social programmes, carreer progress, etc. People take time. Committing to someone is to be certain you want to dedicate time to that person. Studying the Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida, I read this interesting Paul Romer's arguement about time:

“even when we are not actually pressed for time, we may perceive that we are because our time is literally worth more than it used to be. In advanced nations, Romer explains, the long-term trend is for average real income to increase. (...) This ought to make us feel pretty good about the returns we’re getting on our time. (...) Instead, we assign an ever-increasing cost to every minute that we spend outside work – and thus worry constantly about minutes slipping away. It is, says Romer, an unavoidable side effect of our economy.” (Florida, 2002)

So this is it! It all comes down to Time. (I know this is a very economic perspective of it but, guess what, I'm an economist!)

Once, when I was writing my MA dissertation in my 14 square meter messy room at Willen House, London, I had this inspiring thunder light burning my brains and ran to my front neighbour's room yelling "TIME DOESN'T EXIST!". I'll explain this later... Anyway, this discovery made things harder (or easier) for me.

We are living faster than our own lives. The average lifetime we have as human beings is not enough given the huge amount of opportunities we have ahead of us. We live under this common anxiety, excitment, depression, expectation... And it is something affecting most people in my generation. Everything is possible, yes, in an progressively faster, more ephemeral range of time. How the hell sould we not get confused? It's like as if we belong to this bipolar generation, rapidly shifting from extremely happy to deeply sad.

This leads to a growing sense of emotional insecurity. And we try to transform it into excessive social confidence, through the amount of people we know, places we visit or cutting-edge experiences we accumulate.

Even our concept of home has changed. Either we are complete nomads, moving from place to place, according to the jobs we get, the relationships we're in; or we are partially nomad, having a base-place where to live but moving once in a while, for longer or shorter periods of time, around the world to gather those so-called experiences. Even if we do not adopt any of these nomadic/ mid-nomadic behaviours, we have a totally changed concept of nest: it is no longer the place you call home but a show-case refuge. You decorate it to show your friends how good you feel with yourself and you hide there whenever you want to burst and cry without anybody understanding that, sometimes, you're just not happy or feel lonely. You can also live with your parents... But that's just always a bad option, I think. Of course, again, I am generalizing what is my perspective of things. Thankfully I know plenty of people living happily in their homes. Yet, I do believe what I've described is a very common feeling.

On top of all this, you have digital. You're life can be multiplied as many times as you wish, in practically every aspect of it. Social networking allows you to invent as many personalities and lives you would like to have, gather an enormous amount of people around you, travel around the world, be infinitely informed about virtualy everything! Virtual reality is potentially the ultimate theatrical experience by exactly its opposite. When you do theatre you embrace someone else, you actually live through someone else and you recall your deepest emotions or those of other you've watched carefully or had extreme empathy for and expose them on stage, exercising your feelings to the edge of them. This is because you have people all around you: people acting with you, people lightning you, people covering you with music, people watching you. Everyone, in that slow deep sweet moment, cares for you and what you are doing. On the other hand, once you go digital all this vanishes. There's nobody. For as much as you are communicating, interacting, exchanging with people, you are alone. You can't feel others warm breath, their smell, their subtle movements, their life! Just the bright light (go Gremlins!) of your screen and the hard touch of the keyboard... I'm being drammatic, I know. Abd of course I recognize all the enormous advantages of digital media and embrace them as much as I can. I'm blogging, remember? But, guess what, I'm also an actress! ;)

Given all this, which is mainly what I believe this blog will be prowling through, makes me wonder why the hell did we left caves where we lived happily alltogether, nitpicking each other. And then again, even with all these concerns in our heads (instead of lice!), we do manage to be happy...

I love people! :)

By the way, did I mention I'm trying to take over the world?