”Recently, I went with a colleague of mine at the Little Paris Museum in Bucharest. Some might say it’s nothing, that it can be tiring. Maybe. But for me, the hour spent there was an opportunity to make a foray into another world, one in which elegance, self-respect and world, art, attention to every detail of the day, were a way of life.
I was fascinated by lace clothes, fans, umbrellas, perfume bottles, mirrors, hats, each seemed like a piece of jewelry.
I imagined how people related, how they walked, how they took care of themselves, what mattered to them. With so much elegance, coquetry, I would suspect that the quality of the interactions was commensurate.
I keep thinking about this and how we behave today.
The zeitgeist of the present is, if we watch TV, a rather negative, aggressive one, sprinkled with hatred, arrogance, many grammatical mistakes, bottomless forms, rubble.
A friend told me that he has a boy who doesn’t really know when to use one i or two in some words, and he doesn’t know how to help him. I’m not surprised that a child, a being in training, is confused. When on serious TV stations you see every day bad writing when on social media people don’t know if ‘your pretty’ or ‘you’re pretty’, it’s understandable that we are beginning to have doubts.
Moreover, if you express a point of view on social media, you risk being ‘congratulated’ with all sorts of words, insults that the paper would not bare (or so I learned in school) unless you are Ion Creangă or another great writer (which is not the case for most of these social platforms).
Therefore, I wonder, like the poet Francois Villon, ‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ (Where are the snows of old?); where are the times when there was an elegance not only in fashion but also an elegance of relationships, of the way of interacting, in which we carefully chose our words?
In the name of speed, of lack of time, we ended up leaving each other on ‘seen’, responding to a message on Whatsapp after a day or more, forgetting about those who were with us when it was hard, we no longer care about anything or anyone, we parade through the world with our dark side, as if we were making a title of glory out of rudeness, vulgarity, rudeness, hatred.
In fact, how would it be if we were not at war with the world, not seeing enemies, opponents everywhere, listening in order to understand, integrating others, not dominating them, accepting other perspectives, instead of reducing to silence the other through labels inappropriate to a conversation.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is tied to a mast on his boat; All around, the mermaids try to seduce him with all sorts of delights, vain promises, but he resists strongly.
Every day, we can ask ourselves who we are paying attention to, who we are listening to, and why we are listening:
the inner voice that sows fear, distrust, hatred, that pulls us down, the everyday ‘sirens’ that draw us into a game of hatred, division, distrust, unjustified competition;
or our good voice, of light, sprinkled with love, care, empathy, compassion, trust, generosity, altruism, elegance.
Kirkegaard says that Adam and Eve were innocent because they had nothing against whom to fight. It does not mean that humans should become amorphous, but rather that it is good to be aware of the danger of wasting our time fighting imaginary enemies. We see this aspect in interpersonal relationships in social media, in companies, in private life.
People forget what brought them together, what bought them there in the first place, and end up competing with each other, attacking each other, talking inappropriately, being dual in approach. Of course, in companies, the culture of the organization matters, the tone set by its leader matters, just as, at a concert, the rhythm imposed by the conductor matters. The same symphony may sound different in the performance of conductors such as Mutti, Karajan, Celibidache, Kleiber or Bernstein. The same company may look different under different leaders. But they are not everything. The orchestra is also important. Each instrument plays its exceptional, moderate or inappropriate role (less often, I hope). The people in the team also have a say, if they take on the role and interpret it, it manifests itself accordingly. The merits for success are for each individual, as well as when the result is below expectations.
How would things look like if we were to reposition the way we see relationships and considering them the luxury of our lives, behaving in a relationship, be it of a personal, professional nature, as if it were a luxury object, expensive, the most precious on who do we have in this life? Or like a cactus. The cactus is a plant that survives without much attention, much water, care. It can hurt us if we are careless. So is a relationship with a human, it can hurt us if we are not careful, we do not own a good behaviour. Have you ever seen a cactus flower? It’s a little rarer, but it fully deserves attention and expectation. It is of a rare beauty and delicacy. So are interpersonal relationships. If we take care of them, we behave with elegance, discretion, empathy, we will have the luxury of being surprised and seduced, as we were, my colleague and I, seduced by the elegance of the interwar period.”
via: Forbes