Diary of a wavering idealist, part 1
“Life is something wonderful and great. We must build a whole new world later on – and we must counter every further crime, every further cruelty with another piece of love and kindness that we must conquer within ourselves,” wrote Etty Hillesum in a transit camp during the Second World War. But what does it mean to conquer kindness within ourselves? How do we do that, and how can we tell if it is working?
Elisa Gratias sees herself as a peacemaker in everyday life. We are surrounded by people. And yet it seems as if we all live in different worlds, even though our bodies walk the same streets. Was geht in all den anderen vor? Das wird sie in den meisten Fällen niemals erfahren. Dafür teilt sie, was in ihr vorgeht, und beschreibt, wie sie ihre innere Friedensarbeit inmitten der Konsumgesellschaft gestaltet.
Rita
Your feet are swollen and dry. They stick out of her shoes. Does she have pain? The woman must be in pain after all. I don’t dare to approach her. I sit next to her at a distance of one metre away from her on the long bench in the bus station. Again and again I look in her direction. She is fat and her clothes seem clean. Also her hands and fingernails. Nevertheless she gives the impression that she is homeless. Her grey, shoulder-length hair is also clean. Her facial expression is somehow different. At her feet are two large shopping bags full of stuff, on top of one lies a folded newspaper page.
When I look back at her, she says something, but I can hardly understand her. She points her head towards the bus. An advertisement. “The moment is now,” it says. Is she an angel like in the novel “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”? She says something again. Grape.
Grapes? I see a man and two children on the bus poster. A girl is sitting on the table. Then the woman next to me takes a carton of white wine out of her bag and points to the light-coloured grapes. Only now do I see that the girl in the advertisement has a small plate in front of her with a single grape on it, which I hadn’t noticed before.
The woman next to me laughs. “She stole the grape.” I don’t understand what she means, but I laugh along briefly. We strike up a conversation. She asks if I live in Palma, and I reply that I live in Andratx. When I ask her where she lives, she says “nowhere.” So my impression was correct.
I’m getting nervous. I think I should offer to take her home with me, but I don’t dare. She scares me. And what would my flatmates say? What if she’s crazy? Suddenly, I jump up because my bus is about to leave. I interrupt her story, quickly ask her name, tell her mine and say goodbye.
Agitated I take I a3> in the bus seat and turn myself once more towards her. Behind the window she waves a16> me with two white handkerchiefs. I wave back and smile, while tears come to my eyes. Am I really crying because of her or because of all the other things in my life? My broken car, my ex-boyfriend, my constant feelings of guilt, which always cause extreme stress in me a52> trigger?
I don’t know.
Out of reflex, I pull my mobile phone out of my pocket. A message from my friend Henry. I tell him what’s going on and he writes: Feel the world-weariness. It is universal and personal and therefore also not separable.”
I want to believe in a world where we don’t let anyone live like that. How can I believe in this other world if I myself am unable to live according to it?
I try not to drift into the drama of self-flagellation. After all. I let the tears just flow. I sobs. I briefly wonder whether this is bothering the other passengers. But finally I don’t care what others think, and so this thought also quickly flies away.
I feel like a little pile of misery. Like a freezing child, who longs for to to be cradled in warming arms to become warm. Oh, this vulnerability. I feel ashamed of myself, feel it, to bear the spectacle and then to nothing about the circumstances. a35> then nothing can be done to change the circumstances in the world.
Halt.
In “The Work,” Byron Katie asks her famous question: “Is that really true?” So before I drift back into self-reproach, almost without noticing, I ask myself whether it is really true that my vulnerability does nothing to change the circumstances in the world. Rita waved at me so cheerfully, so wonderfully theatrically, with her handkerchiefs. She opened my heart, and perhaps I was also able to give her a little human warmth by talking to her, at least briefly?
Given everything we hear in the news and witness around us in everyday life, how can we believe in peace and a humane world? What can we do when this belief begins to crumble?
Here, too, Henry helps me and asks me the same question:
What kind of alternative to belief in a human world do we have? And what would it look like?”
Dark, definitely, says my first thought. Like a dreamless sleep, ideally. In my heart, I know there is no alternative. That’s right. A hint of a smile on my tear-stained face and the thought: “Damn, I have no alternative anyway,” which lovingly guides me out of the drama today.
I waver again and again between doubt and confidence. The doubts disappear to the extent that as I myself live in peace. Above all of all also towards myself myself myself. And so today I practise gratitude for the fact that my heart is open and remains so, even when it thereby allows many things to approach it itself, which weighs heavily on him he.
In our everyday reality, we isolate ourselves from both sides, both from the truth of the victim and from the side of the perpetrator, and immediately impose our worldview on it. The main thing is that our worldview is correct. That is our protection against real contact. It is only because we are already so closed off that we can bear to watch the news at all. We are relieved when we can distinguish between the good and the bad.
Then we live a well-groomed everyday life, and if we go somewhere a social aspect into our lives built in, we consider ourselves to be good people. In this way arises the creeping fascism of our time: indifference. (Sabine Lichtenfels – Grace).
So I now see it as peace training for everyday life: let us allow ourselves to be touched, especially when it hurts, when powerlessness and self-reproach are already waiting to rage inside us. Let us observe them and make sure we keep coming back to our feelings so that our hearts remain open. As individuals, we may not be able to free the homeless from their dire situation, but we can look them in the eye and see them as human beings.
Hunger for life, hunger for love, hunger for trust and home, hunger for recognition, hunger for being seen and understood to be. This hunger is independent of every culture. It is simply there, in every human being, so true he still human remained is” (Sabine Lichtenfels – Grace).