Rudderless

SIIIIIGHHHH

I feel at quite a loss. I have been struggling to get some work done on my PhD research for the last month but I find myself totally without motivation on most days. I am beginning to be anxious about all the time I am wasting and being afraid that I may end up paying a very heavy price for this procrastination! I thought I was more self driven than this but alas! A friend of mine told me once that one of the most valuable lessons she picked up during her own PhD study was the ability to drive herself, and I am must say she is one of the most self driven people I know.

I am aware that every difficulty in our lives is meant to teach us a valuable lesson and make us stronger, if only we can embrace the lesson. In my particular case, things are made worse by the feeling that I have somehow bungled a very promising relationship. I met this guy through an online dating service, and over a period of four or five days we spent hours and hours writing to one another, building up to our first meeting which we both highly anticipated, if with trepidation and uncertainty. Out of the blue though, he suddenly cut off ALL communication, and it has been almost a week since he was last in touch. Although we were in touch for less than a week, he and I got along so well and seemed so compatible, and both admitted to having developed quite strong feelings over that short period, that his sudden silence really hit me hard! I have since achieved a semblance of calm and resignation, but still experience sudden moments of piercing longing and regret, and over all cannot get back my groove pre-meeting him, a groove that was decidedly precarious to begin with.

Over the weekend though, I watched a documentary on Quantum Mechanics and what it means for our daily life, and one of the most profound messages it had for me was the notion that we are all essentially a mass of energy, and that as such have complete control over the state of our bodies and emotions (I had heard of a similar idea in "The Secret"). The film makers postulated that the very idea of being "helplessly" in love with a specific person was quite preposterous, and was rather only evidence of the addiction to the feeling one comes to associate with the loved one's presence; apparently, at any time one may wean oneself off this person simply by mastering this addiction. Given the emotional attachment that had been engendered through the intensive contact with this guy over the previous few days, this notion certainly gave me hope of a quick recovery; indeed, I felt as if God Himself was speaking directly to me an dmy situation.

Today is Tuesday, and although I have had bursts of productivity since the work week begun, I am yet to fully recover my usual steam. Yesterday I erased all our previous contact and contact information because I was making myself crazy continously scanning it to see where it went well wrong. This made me feel really sad, and today I seem to still be going through withdrawal. Given the intensity of our contact however, a part of me is convinced that he only got cold feet (rather than lost interest) and will get back in touch when he makes up his mind to go for it after all. I wonder if I will have the courage to give it another go; A part of me tells me he is not to be trusted and I shoul dnever speak to him again, another tells me that he really may have genuinely freaked out and decided to take the time to give the whole thing furhter thought. At any rate, all that has nothing to do with me until he actually gets back in touch, so in the meantime, I occupy myself with other suitors, and try to really turn towards them and engage with them. Who knows? I might develop an attachment to one of them in the process, and find decide that I have found "the one" (another apparently ridiculous concept) after all.

Graffiti City

My feet are killing me.

A seasoned tourist like myself will tell you that trying to take in all the sites in a new city is never a good idea, but somehow this knowledge goes out the window every time I enter a new city!!!

BERLIN! :-D

First stop this morning, naturally was the Berlin wall, or what's left of it anyway. Interesting enough but rather underwhelming; to be fair though, most of it was torn down so there's not much left to see. I hear it is such a tourist favourite that parts of the old wall are being rebuilt again... Yeah, I know: crazy! After the token photos on both sides of the wall, I rushed off the catch the last remaining movie of the Berlin Film Festival, but due to having to make so many changes on the underground and over ground public transport I was 15 minutes late and I could not get in. Boy was I disappointed!! Being directed by Ralph Fiennes and featuring him and Butler-what's-his-name, I had hoped to spot, and maybe get an autograph but well... I walked back down the street towards the metro again so dejected my shoulders were actually drooping; the fierce windy cold only added to my misery :-(

I finally managed to pick myself up again and move on to the other attraction on the agenda: The Jewish Museum. More changes of trains and things and out I came of the underground at the specified station, and sure enough there was a sign saying "Jüdische Museum Berlin: 550m". After a few minutes another sign: 450m; then 300m. On I walked. Bitter cold. My cheeks and forehead are burning despite pulling down my hat almost over my eyes. My feet are freezing as well and I feel as if they are literally contracting within the shoes because the shoes begin to feel a little loose. Up ahead I see the distinctive "U" sign indicating another metro station, and with a sinking feeling realise I walked all this way when I could have come out one station further. Ah well. I walk past it and keep looking around. I am thinking that surely I should have arrived by now so I stop and look back down the street I just walked up. I imagine, being such a big attraction, it would surely have been easy to spot; I think of asking a local but they all do not look too inviting... Finally I spy another one of those forked sign posts and walking up to it I find that it says the Jewish Museum was 750m the other way!!! What? Did I read the other sign wrong? Had all that walking been for nothing? Sighing but still determined to press on, I made a half hearted attempt to begin walking back but my painful feet had other ideas: I found myself back in the underground and headed back to the hotel before you could say Yom Kipuur!! The Museum would have to wait.

After resting a little and getting some lunch, I felt revived enough to head out again about three hours later to join a pre-organised tour of the historical section of the city. I have to say that although it was even colder by now (-11° accounting for wind chill), this tour more than made up for my earlier frustrations; I came away with tons of information about the history of the city and saw some magnificent old and new buildings. Nevertheless, my most enduring memory of Berlin, probably because I spent so much time in metro stations and looking out of the train windows, will be the graffiti on practically every available wall space. The inhabitants of this city certainly have a lot to say that they simply cannot put into words, and considering their hard history (from World War I, to Hitler, to the Berlin Wall), I do not wonder.

Time to cut the apron strings

My baby sister was born when I was ten years old. It often fell to me, as the oldest child, to decode the mysteries of life to her, and my strongest memories of her childhood was being bombarded with "why this" and "why that" and "why, why, why!"; that and "please take me to so-and-so's to play" Looking back, I cannot have been more than 13 or 14 at the time I had the power over whether or not she could go down the road to play with her neighbourhood friends.

Fast-forward 20 years: she is a young lady, recently graduated from her Masters, widely acknowledged as stylish, poised and responsible. All agree that under her family's combined tutorage, she cannot set a foot wrong; her future is all but assured. Sure, she has had the odd mis-step, a major heartbreak, and a few bruises, but it would be stretching it to say that she has faced any truly trying moments (except perhaps for the heartbreak - that was pretty rough, how rough we may never know)

I know you hear a "but" coming, and you are right: I find myself unable to relinquish the power that I once held over her going down the road to play with her friends, or provide all the answers to her "why" questions. In short, I am unable to cut the proverbial apron strings. This flash of realisation hit me on the first day of 2011, when for the hundredth time I caught myself bitterly complaining about her choice of boyfriend. In my opinion, and truth be told, many of her friends and family share it, she is totally wasting her time with him. By her own admission, he was the safe choice after her big heartbreak, and she while she can be with him now, she does not see a future with him!

Believe me when I tell you that I have examined myself concerning my motives regarding this matter, especially being the unmarried older sister for whom apparently no one has ever been good enough. Maybe I have no business imposing my impossible standards on her, or more precisely, imposing MY standards at all. After all, when I pressed her recently to tell me what really drives her to continue in this relationship she told me that the man makes her happy. Now really, what else do I want to hear? Nevertheless, I pressed further:

"Happy?" I asked "Why? How?"

"Well, he likes me; he is good to me; he, I mean..." she trailed off.

"Chick, so what if he likes you? That is irrelevant if you do not feel the same!"

"Yeah, I know, but - well, he likes me! He is nice to me. He has been there for me... Given all this, I recently decided to give it a chance, and date him properly"

"Date him properly?" I exclaimed, "What, out of gratitude? How can you say you see no future and then in the same breath decide to 'date him properly'? Both those statements cannot be true: one has got to be a lie."

Sighing, she admitted that this was indeed true. Before I could ask her to tell me which it was, her phone rang and she told me she had to go, he was at the gate and they had to go.

It was at that point that I decided to simply stay out of it in future; I mean really! The girl could not be helped. Starting with the new year, I would keep all my opinions to myself, and would ask her also to simply keep mention of him to me to a minimum. Discussing this resolution with an aunt of ours a few days later, she advised me to indeed keep out of it, but that rather than forbid her from mentioning her boyfriend to me, I should endeavour to keep our lines of communication open, and assure my sister that I would respect her choice henceforth. This way, she would know that I would still be there for her whatever happened, and not force her to choose between him and I.

"After all," she reasoned, " we have all made mistakes in our lives, and we survived; not only that, we were even stronger and wiser for it"

Truer words were never spoken, and this is what finally cut through my blind obsession with this issue: I too had made some spectacularly bad decisions in my life, and I was infinitely better for the experiences that followed! I just had to trust that she would be o.k. too, and that I ought to quit trying to control and manipulate her (which was the essence of my threatened ultimatum concerning mentioning her boyfriend to me). Boy, was that a severe wake up call: who would have guessed that all my efforts were aimed at trying to control her and keeping her under my thumb? I certainly couldn't. Not a sweet pill to swallow, but hey, I guess I too still have a thing or too to learn!