last summer he and i started on what became a six month project of reciprocal moral support. yes, moral support, we both needed exactly that at the time we were both restricting out expenses, so there was no money available to pay expensive personal coaches or assistants; we took the matter into our own hands. i can say that i was in good hands; he is a clear thinking jurist with a training in mediation. i am a fuzzy thinking physicist with a training in high-impact-delivery coaching.
we sat down in my office to a pot of tea one day in july and formulated the goals of our individual projects. together we created a support structure that involved weekly to do lists and meetings either in person or on the phone. on the weekly meetings we took turns in reporting on the progress on the to do list, the barriers encountered, and on what the hell we were feeling at the time. often we cried, but mostly we listened to each other and asked critical questions. mostly, i repeat, we listened.
both our projects came to yield results that neither of us would have expected, and that have surpassed our expectations. my own project brought me to milestones in what is a much longer project and it also uncovered a few parts of my life that were totally dysfunctional. it was painful to discover the dysfunctionalities and it is necessary to deal with them if i am to see my dreams turn into reality.
yesterday he shared what is one of the feedbacks on the result of his project. his project was to write a doctoral dissertation in a rather esoteric aspect of our legal system. his thesis advisor has now read the opus and he has been showered with abundant praise on the quality of his dissertation.
this legal friend of mine is brilliant, like most of my friends. however anybody who tried and found a good excuse knows exactly how easy it is to give up on completing a doctoral dissertation once you have entered the workforce and are gainfully employed somewhere. he took an unpaid sabbatical to write his doctoral thesis, and he knew that he was up against windmills of all sorts and projections. my project was no less challenging given its nature. alone and left to our devices, we both knew that we did not stand much of a chance to see it to the end without finding an exilient and seductive excuse for abandoning the enterprise at hand.
i know for my part that there was one moment when the idea of jumping off a bridge was a plausibility. i also know myself well enough to know that such fleeting thoughts are the social ether that we unconscientiosuly breathe, and i being a iota aware do catch such thoughts as uninvited guests and can distinguish these as not being the product of disciplined thinking. he also went through ups and downs of all sorts from an attractive job offer from another firm to having his girlfriend pass the message that she was his ex-girlfriend via one of his best friends.
last night we sat for a good round of conversation, a glass of wine and a simple meal. we ended discussing some aspects of the workings within his present employer (a very well-known swiss company) and there was a lot of ranting and comparing notes. i pointed him to the old wisdom of sun tzu the art of war and he was not thrilled. i know, it never thrilled me to think that we humans, animals of superior intelligence, interact by playing games with each other and basically screwing whoever gets in the way of our plots and machinations. it is a game indeed, and indeed some of us end up walking that moral hight ground that i know much too well, and will categorically say that we will not play the game. yeah, i have been there and i have been taking some time out to think about it. for me it is rather simple: i am not particularly interested in somebody else's game, much less in the rules of the game. i just want to win my game. this is the starting point for all: we want to win our game.
come to think of it, it is not even the rules of the game that disturb me much. it so happen that the game is laden with pitfalls. one of the first pitfalls that most succumb to is to fall for the belief that to win, all others must loose. wrong, this is not a problem with the rules, this is problem with the attitude.
i am discovering that i like this subject far too much, and that this post is getting much too long, and the day much too short.
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