i am blogging from lausanne at the start of a new enterprise and listening to Mahler's 5th. it is may 12, and i am at this point too lazy to hack around with my colleague's adsl and connect to the web. this post will be uploaded sometime later when i either got over my laziness or have wlan access again.
these days it is my bones that feel those words spoken to me by a senior faculty member when i was in my early twenties, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the university, half asleep, half awake, full of dreams and possibility and not daring while trying to be bold. but how can one not dare while trying to be bold?
it could be that i never tried to be bold, it could be that i was innocent and naive enough to not think of the so called "probability of success" that my dreams had. during a discussion with that senior faculty member about my motivation to do graduate work in physics, at one point he looks at me straight in the eye, and declares "you are too good to be true." i never quite understood these words, i tried to have him explain, and although i could get the gist of it, i never quite got what it had to do with me. still, this is a recurring scene in my life. during my training in communication, this happened at least thrice with different words, same angle. i never got it.
there are days when i could not care less about the world of blogging, news or communication: it is one of those days.
but finally i got what the man was trying to tell me, i mean the senior faculty member. i got it last week when another tells me to be careful with my defense. it was a precious moment. he delivered merciless straight punches at me in a rapid sequence that had i not deviated them, he had had me flat on the floor, and then he tells me to be careful with my defense! in the instant i tried to make sense of it, i decided that to be on the safe side i would take that as a warning, not as a complaint of my hard and equally merciless defense, immediately i proceeded to another defense technique which was softer on him. he ended up very pleased with my flexibility. if i had never seen somebody fall flat on their face in such a situation, i could have discounted it all as yet another senseless dialogue during practice. these are rather controlled situations, but a fight is a fight, when a person is in front of another and the idea is to fight, forget the fact that you are a light weight woman and that your opponent is 30 kilos heavier and 20 centimeters taller than you, it is irrelevant.
a friend of mine would at this point accuse me of being a damned writer who always keeps you hanging and looking out for the punch line.
no, i am not bragging, far from it. it took me over twenty years to figure out something that someone told me while i was a graduate student, that, in spite of the fact that the same message had been delivered to me at regular intervals whenever i was searching for answers to those questions that nobody can ever answer! it is quiet here on the hills above lausanne on the edge of some village in a house in a cul-de-sac and i have the company of my musings, a green eyed mutt of a cat, and a few birds whose names elude me. i have nothing to brag about, like i have nothing to be proud of, or ashamed of. strangely enough this is all about amour propre. that, and something else that goes beyond self-confidence and has the feel of surrender to the self and the own needs.
while here i have been having a few midnight discussions with my friend, colleague, host and associate on all sorts of subjects from finance, innovation, intellectual property, to personal relationships and family, and always centered around our shared passion, the business of counseling entrepreneurs in strategic matters where very specialized knowledge is necessary. while the writing is always going slower than i want it to go, is perhaps worthwhile to consider the fact that somehow all the pieces of the puzzle are falling together at the right rate, and that i am doing exactly what needs to be done. why would i doubt myself? after all, in the fuzzy logic of it all, that is what the senior faculty member was trying to tell me. still communication is an odd undertaking to which we are rarely tuned to. i don't know if i am all too aloof or that i just resist the immediately evident. what matters now is that i am starting to develop a new relationship to the all that is immediate and evident.
some weeks ago i had hoped that i would now be in strasbourg and that the manuscript of "schemata" would be finished in its rough draft. instead i am in lausanne and the parts of the manuscript that are already written have received an heavy hand of editing. "but it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble" or so says leper in the film "braveheart" while my friend in lausanne keeps on citing him and i kept on disagreeing until we compared notes on what is meant by such a statement and how we interpret it. then last night between a beer and a late dinner we came to an agreement on the meaning of what compromises are and are not.
meanwhile the geeks are at work and the birds are chirping away on a sunny afternoon... while my powerbook display keeps on flickering. just get the mechanics right, will you!
