on friday evening aikido practice attendance showed all the results of the world cup, we were exactly two people. in itself it was fantastic, but also demanding given the heat and the fact that when there are only two people training, one goes from one technique to the next without a pause to watch the demonstration. then i joined my round table colleagues at a local restaurant near the university and we watched as the swiss team sent the koreans back home empty handed. riding the bike through town after this gave me new hope about the state of mind of the swiss population: they are alive after all and capable of showing emotion and joy. for once downtown was alive, and it was not with another demonstration of some sort about something or other that rarely makes the headlines of the local papers.
on saturday afternoon i sat in the garden and had a good chat with my dear legal-brains friend who is in the process of studying for an executive public administration degree while fighting some addictive behaviour. we had a sincere and frank exchange. somehow when friends are blunt with each other, it always hurts on both sides; it is not easy saying it, and it is not easy listening.
on sunday afternoon, i sat in a café while the rain poured and once more had another sincere and frank exchange with another friend. this time my friend wouldn't and couldn't be arsed about any public administration degree and somehow once again addictive behaviour is involved.
in all of this what kept returning to my mind was the incidents of a few many summers ago in nîmes and avignon when my travel companion and i one day had passionate arguments, loved each other in all the madness of carnal desire in nîmes, and then on the next day in avignon all the emotion had cleared and i was a calm cool collected being like i have rarely known myself to be. between nîmes and avignon i had decided that for all the love, passion and respect in the world and between us, i needed a change in this relationship. i put this relationship in a new context by calling it off. i gave up. i was not going to move to paris, he was not going to move to berne, and for better or worse we were geographically stuck and a long distance relationship gets to be exhausting after a few years. i have often questioned the wisdom of this decision that i took in nîmes then in that so memorable day. when i changed the context of this relationship, i also separated from one of the most wonderful men who ever shared in my life. he is attentive and respectful, well educated and polite, handsome and virile, in short, wonderful. i had a man like this in my life, and i told him to go. he went and he has come back in the middle of a marital crisis, but then it was not like he was gone all these years for we have remained intimate friends without the thrills and frills of sexual intercourse. when i thought that i was leaving this man back then between nîmes and avignon, little did i know what dimension i was adding to our continuing friendship. it makes me wonder.
in particular i wonder what all of this now has to do with me, and why it is that these days i find myself in such a wealth of relationships.
addiction is one hell of a bitch. i think of this one aikidoka whom i suspect being addicted to something that i can not identify. each time that i see him, the man is a mess; he has either injured himself, wrecked his car, or is in the middle of some existential crisis or another. as far as aikido goes, the man is a solid rock of technique and i am always very humbled each time that i train with him and feel like the lowest of all beginners on such occasions. when it comes to life outside of the tatami this man is one kind and pitiful mess that is not based on my conjectures about his state of being but rather on the discussions that we have had.
somewhere along the line yesterday when i started to feel the exhaustion of my friend's drama - yes, there is something called transference here - i uttered something about trusting the wisdom of the universe. i do. my access to it is by asking myself if i am being honest with myself. anything else does not matter.
so, it is time to return to whores and samurai!
PS: when i opened up the editor to write this post i was thinking of writing about "cybling" and somehow never quite got the curve to it...
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