I have been in Cuzco a few days now, waiting for the trek....relaxing and seeing nothing in particular. It is morning and I am at a small cafe with Inca walls taking a breakfast of pancake and coffee.
There was a parade in the Plaza this morning to celebrate the city and the public workers. There were two kids riding by on bicycles while they were playing the Peruvian national anthem. A police officer stopped them, lectured them on being disrespectful, and made them stop, salute, and pay respects until the song was over.
Last night I had very strange dreams and this morning I have a low mood and feel almost invisible; just my pen, coffee, and the low yellow light of the cafe. It is very bright and clear ouside...a beautiful day.
I am not saddened or frustrated by my sadness. I do not wish away this mood. I am happy to be sad and lonely.
It is only now, far away from my life, that I am allowed to be sad. Traveling gives me permission to feel however I like and thus allows me to feel at all...I also have the liberty to allow the mood to run its course...to let it wash away whatever it is here to do.
At home I cannot afford ill moods. I cannot allow the moods that make up my emotional dialogue to run their course...and so they don't. Whatever they are trying to tell me is instantly lost when I snap myself back in line in the name of professionalism, productivity and work ethic.
At work I am expected to be tireless, mistake-free, ever smiling, ever constructive, a team player and a self-starter, a leader and collaborative...all things to all people all the time...with nothing outside work to distract me from maximum output. I am expected to be a robot...and so that is what I become.
There is little room and no need for sadness at work...yet without sadness how can there be happiness?
Productivity is not a mood...it is related to the efficiency of tasks. Am I, as a Man, measured by this efficiency? Do the number of hours a week I am able to keep up this non-mood make me more or less human?
Machines perform tasks; they are always in an efficient mood. Computers store information; be you the greatest expert on the planet, all the insight in your head can, with some effort, be recorded and regurgitated.
It is surely not the efficiency or knowledge that serves our humanity for the they can be easily replaced.
It is surely the depth of your passions, the clarity of that internal emotional dialogue, that makes us human. Where is the humanity in an endless string of tasks?
If the vicissitudes of our moods show us the way to our humanity, yet we are not well served by allowing their ebb and flow...then we are being robbed of our humanity by this ceaseless toil. What room is there for sadness in our lives?
By allowing life to happen and my moods to instruct me accordingly...I am allowed to be me. I am allowed to connect myself through my emotions to the normal flow of events, giving them meaning.
Work, with its inflexibility, its constant demand of some perfect, unwavering state conducive to productivity...its inability to identify that people get tired and low...has no room for my quiet place of lonely sadness.
Without that connection my life becomes simply a string of disconnected events....a list of accomplishments a mile long...devoid of feeling. It ceases to tell my story.
When I walked into Cafe Vayaroc it was just me and La Dueña. She looked sad and was reading the paper. "La Papa se muriò," (The Pope died) she said. I replied without thinking, "Que lastima, un buen hombre" (A pity, a good man).
She nodded and I walked to my table. At that instant I gave a thought to the Pope and his life. It is true that life can be a list of accomplishments, an amount of work...it can be reduced to a commentary.
Those facts caused me realize the sadness of the death of the Pope.
But I actually shed a tear for the Pope as I walked to my table, wiping it away in surprise. At that moment I did not realize the sadness of the death of the Pope...I felt it.
That is not possible at home...where my moods are derailed from the events of my life. I am not allowed to feel what I should...I am only allowed to feel "productive".
Emotions are the soundtrack of your life. The Pope died and a sad song came on the radio of my life at exactly the right moment. At home...the same song is playing all the time.
Posted by kellio99 at April 9, 2005 10:34 PM