Row Your Boat

Arrgh! Blogger just erased a half-a-page comment I had made on three topics: “House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende, a reinterpreted Communist time play I saw on Saturday evening and the necessity to acknowledge oneself as an active player in a turbulent world and not a mere “row-row-row-your boat”-er.

So I’ll just say it with a song:

Talking about a Revolution
While we're standing in the welfare line
Crying in the doorstep of those armies of Salvation
Wasting time, in the unemployment line
Sitting around, waiting for a promotion
(Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution)

The invisible touch of life

Tonight I met some of the people from an intellectual community (link in Romanian) that will probably shape the way Romania will look like in a few year's time. I wrote about meeting them in a previous post. It is always a pleasure and an mind-refreshing experiene to see them and to talk to them. So much more than the average experience one gets to every day when dealing with clients and colleagues.

I remember my participation in the SDV - Summer School in 2002 as being one of the signposts of my student and adult life. In brief, a student association brings together in Bucharest 30 students from all over the country for a fortnight. They meet with personalities from the political, economic and social environment and ask them some of the most inconvenient of questions. In the end, they edit a sort of "Declaration" of the event, in line with the respective summer school's theme.

The evenings and nights were our favourite time of the day - they were meant for discussions, talking, dancing and laughing a lot. It gave us a sense of unity and of participation that each of us then took back to their lives. Be it careers in IT, management, public sector or academia we then chose, the sense of contribution was sed in each of us.

I am sure that we have already started changing the world, because we were so changed by this experience.

My preconceived ideas about love

If being with one another is not based on an overwhelming belief that the one who is near you is the most extraordinary person in the world, that even the little fights and the fact that s/he likes to eat fish with garlic and you totally hate that bring sunshine to your day, a relationship is little (if at all) worth upholding.

Below some of the wonderful things I think it's worth waking up to:

- love the way s/he blushes after making a public blunder (even it's hard seeing it due to the beard);

- seeing her without make up and with a wild hairdo you consider making worse;

- can't help laughing dead when he burns the steak he'd been meaning to make as a special anniversary gift and then both go to a junk food restaurant and forget the unhealthy food over making fun of the waiters;

- cooking together;

- dancing in front of the TV with one of you sick and a bottle of gin in one hand;

- running through the rain with a watermelon and holding hands;

- waking up early in the morning only to see him enter with a bunch of flowers;

- making plans for the future holidays;

- getting burned in the sun together and then creaming each other's nose with aftersun lotion;

- watching tv with the head in his/her lap.


Mood of the day: Cinerama - Because I'm Beautiful:

And that's exactly why I love you
That's why I can't get enough of you
You're unconventional it's not intentional and that's the greatest thing about you
You're a premium bohemian and I couldn't live one day without you

I love Apple

Did I tell you that I have just become a life-long Apple-fan? "Tonight, tonight..." :-)

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2007/tc20070110_535914.htm?link_position=link1

Believe in the resolute urgency of now

I am in process of preparing one of the workshops I care most about for a company: Mission Vision Values. They have a very good team – only it is a team of “storming” individuals and not one of those teams that work in full unity to achieve one goal. While having performed the training several times in the past, I found myself wondering about the practical utility of it. The practice of leadership is only slowly finding its way in Romania. Simply discussing the issue of adult teaching and adult development in the sense of adherence to values and governance following a vision is a strain – one either gets laughed at or gets ignored altogether.

Yesterday I spoke to a well-respected trainer who told me leadership was all about common sense, about knowing and following oneself first – before trying to get others to follow you. Now, maybe I am idealistic and a bit overgrown in a culture of quantification, but you cannot measure common sense. That makes training a tricky business – not being able to demonstrate a graspable ROI to the client. What you can do is to repeat training at definite intervals as part of an integral package and try to measure a correlation between financial results, sales outcome, company market valuation and the SMART training objectives. That might work in showing just how much a Mission-oriented training approach has worked.

We'll crucify the insincere tonight

We'll make things right, we'll feel it all tonight

We'll find a way to offer up the night tonight

The indescribable moments of your life tonight

The impossible is possible tonight

Believe in me as I believe in you, tonight

(Smashing Pumpkins, Tonight)

Ziua vrajitoarelor

Last Friday we had a girls' night out. Look at the photo - aren't we a bunch of good-looking ladies? :-)

Common sense, movies and owning an iPod

Sometime in the past days I read an article which also involved a definition for common sense. It was "the ability to correctly perceive the reality around you". To most people in Romania today, this is a skill that needs no cultivation, given its little perceived value. Common sense is more to me than just to perceive the relationships around me correctly and acting accordingly. Or plainly politely responding to my counterparts' gestures or words. It is a state of mind that spells purity and understanding. I engage in conversations with people with openness, never setting a definite expectation. My nature is rather sponge-like, meaning that I often remember the most fine details about persons and situation. However, I try never to use negative aspects of my relationship with that person in conversing or dealing with them. It would be an extra burden to carry aroud and it would result in a flawed idea exchange, whereas this is not my intention. Instead, I prefer having them talk about subjects they like and pick on past conversations to make them feel comfortable. Similarly, I try to avoid unnatural gestures or attitudes.

The interpretation of common sense is of course subject to every personality flavour. However, it would be great if more people would start practicing it, making the surroundings - be it at the office or in a cafe, with friends, much more pleasurable.

Speaking of which, I might be the last on Earth to have seen Love Actually, a romantic Christmas comedy which can help enlighten one evening. I have enjoyed myself very much - the music was lovely and entertaining (Hugh Grant as a Prime Minister dancing to "Jump!" makes you laugh tons). Highly recommendable for a hot chocolate night with your sweetheart.

Tonight my friends and I are going to the last Mel Gibson film - Apocalypto. Given Mel Gibson's appetite for raw flesh, blood and cruelty, I think I'll be better off having a drink before.

Owning an iPod is my last subject for today. A colleague told be last week that my appetite for new technology is rather scary and that I am lost for the "normal world" (what is normal anyway?). The most fantastic feature I am experiencing are the podcasts, of which I would mention Stanford's literature lectures and most management podcasts you can find online (David Maister, The Invisible Hand etc).

Cheers!

New Year's Resolutions

I've always liked to make plans. Of course not all of them worked, but that did nothing to cut down on the thrill I felt when displaying them on the walls. It was reassuring to have them there, and my eyes were gleaming each time they rested on the particular plan. There was one named "Fram", when a friend and I decided to investigate alien life outside our block some 12 years ago. There were plans about carreer, family life and nature trips, about calling friends, helping your parents and achieving in study.

At some point, someone told me that he'd quit drafting plans, as they didn't work anyway, and had started simply acting out things instead. Things cannot always work out good for everyone - and understanding this fact and acting instead of endlessly pondering does wonders.

It's funny actually that we are constantly run into trouble steering our busy lives, given that instruments such as Outlook calendars, Blackberrys and the like were invented. The answer must lie in the ability to finally reach a decision and follow-up on it.

Have a Happy New Year and don't forget to act on all the promises you made to the sky or to yourself on New Year's day!

You might as well surrender now
You'll never hold that stance
With all my wordsI can't find one
To help you understand
It's not too late
Take up the cup
Put down your weapons and choose
But you say," life's so unfair"
All you say is "life's so unfair."
Oh you can ill afford to hold to these views
Oh you need something to blame
But it's you, yes it's you
It's your truth
(James, Alaskan Pipeline)