The Eesthetic Of A Black And White Confession
Be the discovery of what you mean in a life whose length seems impossible to judge impartially.
I would like to talk to you about that day when it seemed to me that the whole world is mine. I was taking my baccalaureate in the evening. You never knew what a tough climb every day of school meant for me, every year, what obstacle course with ever increasing obstacles I have overcome, taking my “maturity exam”. We knew nothing of each other.
I was listening to the roar of the sea. I knew that I would always collapse upon life, like the sea collapses over the rocks, that I would carry within me all of its nostalgia and an eternal longing for freedom. Not even the sea is free, I tried to comfort myself. It is enclosed by shores. Maybe she’s angry that she’s lost her freedom. It is as if she slams her head to a wall, hitting the rocks and frothing at the mouth !
- Sure, writes Andre Maurois in his Memoirs, it is a great madness and almost always punished for you to come back and want to experience at forty everything you loved or enjoyed at twenty.
I have long gone beyond maturity and I do not want to relive everything I’ve ever loved. It would be a punishment. But to understand what I loved, what I experienced, and especially to understand myself…
Are you caught up in a timeless problem that will only untangle itself through a change of vision of yourself, adjacent to the feeling that you can belong to a reality that exists beyond what you think your limitations are?
Do you fall in an uncertain dimension, filled with unpredictable? Does the frustrating feeling of the inexplicable surround you with a bitter layer of fragility and helplessness? Is your incontestable individuality accentuated by your contact to a new way of self-knowledge? Are you lost in a maze of clues and interconnections with other ways of life? Are your limits given by the lack of understanding of how you have to pay your debts to the values of life: sincerity and maturity?
Often leadership is like an unfinished creation, but with the power to bring new extremely important light on a certain stage of your evolution, when you start to revolve around your axis, in the alternation between the two situations: "to be the messenger of a wandering past" and "to be the echo of immortal story". The only art that leaves you speechless at a close look is a way to capture you in a hypostasis of total abandonment in a reality that gives you little or nothing of what you dream about. Often art is the privilege of a captive mind in a reality that has become stuck in its own limits.
Completely confused because of the circumstances you're going through, you no longer know if you're anchored or not in reality that fulfills you. You become completely motionless, without the strength to react, trapped in an unsure game of dualities and asphyxiated by the amalgam of elements that act around an only denominator: nostalgia. Like when you look at a beautiful painting and try to feel in the given landscape, but it creates your image of the world, the house, yourself. You are rushing to leave the form of the insular character of a humanized art, but with a very careful focus on details, with a stress on man “in his loneliness and intimacy”.
Can you leave behind the footprint of a destiny that pushes you terribly, making you exclaim with an innocent wonder: “I am the negation of this existence ! ”
Do you manifest your melancholy through isolation from the rest of the world that has all the inconvenience of a war with yourself? Are you determined to relive certain moments in life at the price of a perfection that would have been sterile, or at the price of that humiliation that gives up pride and revenge, choosing love, miracle and goodwill?
Out of the actions that make you less efficient, compared with each other, isolation remains the most representative "monument" because it perpetuates the state of melancholy, the sensation of sensitivity followed by pressure and pain. Full abandonment in an incoherent universe that characterizes you more impetuously, induces a state of inner torment, an unpleasant sensation of belonging to something new, limitless. Is everything in you suddenly supported by a continuous curiosity of finding the truth: "Who really am I?"
Do you avoid the danger of entering the “Sentimentalism” area throughout the functioning of your own consciousness, about what keeps you prisoner at a ZERO time faithfully reproduced by your mind in the way of fulfillment?
The expert in matters of leadership, John C. Maxwell advised: "Prepare yourself for the key moments in the future and choose daily the appropriate attitudes." A kind of warning, I would say, that signals the confrontation with ourselves that has to be overcome. Channeling the uncertainty state that takes over us at a certain moment in life towards a direction in agreement to your own values, in a better harmony with the truth of what really defines us.
Your entry into the “Sentimentalism” area is similar to the emergence of nostalgia for lost privileges in the search for the meaning of life, not only because you are subject to a reality that surpasses you and you cannot escape it, but because you are not ready to recognize your shadow, suffering and its meanings, and to bear the consequences.
And being a prisoner in a ZERO time reproduced by your mind in the way of fulfillment means to remain faithful to those memories that cause your suffering and do not let you propel yourself to the main dimensions of the meaning of life (spiritual and social). The recollection of deeply sensitive and afflictive moments, or disappointing experiences, would mean a double suffering: the one lived through the essence of self-ending and Proustian remembrance, with the deletion of any ties to previous engagements.
Are you committed to claiming an identity that you cannot cope with, based on a life experience very close to materializing through a strong test of character that urges you to become more tolerant of yourself?
I think that for every man, the moment of reflection usually comes later, when he is already a prisoner of this transition state, that instantly produces an unimagined, unwanted, uncomprehending curiosity in such an atypical context. You begin to see yourself from the point of view of a painter who transposes the images created by a poet on the canvas, dare to redesign his whole life after communion altogether, not only in the light of the things he considers important, but through the passing pains that he cannot ignore.
And if the man doesn't truly analyze these states, processes and momentarily situations, leaving himself at their will, without any doubt it will remain in the "Sentimentalism" area. It'll turn to stone in a defensive position, instead of attacking, which will be reflected in a misunderstanding of his role and responsibility towards his own identity.
Your decisive insight is produced when you feel too isolated in a continuous status quo, when you spend time looking into yourself and judging your reactions. It's a clear sign that something eludes you.
Insight is a look at the essence of your nature that has been forgotten for too long in oblivion. It can be a mark of your divine calling from which you create a new reason to be. But it can also be a negative nuance of the self-evaluation process experienced by a mixture of affective or moral constraint. Insight is a truth about yourself that you only reach through revelation, aesthetics of self-discovery, and understanding of the inner world by finding a way to experience that greatness of soul that you will not find in anyone other than yourself.
The identity that leads you to success or failure occurs as a result of reliving an emotional event in the past that has not been suppressed to the present moment. It is the ascension that you must follow after you have judged with the thought of defeating yourself.
It's like you received a bunch of rejections from well-known people and you isolate yourself from fear of encountering new ones. But the curiosity of being a part of the mystery of life, the desire to revolt against the thoughts that almost crushing you, the necessity to stand against your of latency still have roots within you. Everything becomes extremely crowded in you. Until everything that you don't know melts in an anemic curiosity. Then it suddenly bursts out in a correct understanding of the way you should adopt.
As someone said: "the more we delay the confrontation with ourselves, the more we lose precious time that we could have used living at full speed." Often, the identity of man seems to be similar to the delicacy of a painter who captures in his creation a peculiar landscape of special significance, trying to convey to the viewer his mood experienced by contact with a reality in which it is very difficult for you to integrate, because it is philosophically rebellious and it symbolically sends its meaning to the ZERO point.
And I underline here. In leadership, a single, freely-conceived and personalized "product" is used: individual identity. It can inspire trust as the man changes his views and behavior through a certain decoding of feelings, through a revealing of life experiences accumulated over time,by extrapolation of some actual states.
It can be up to denying the self, which means assuming an identity that is no longer his, an identity that he no longer belongs to or that he can no longer deal with when he can no longer master the demons of the past, the spirit of truth behind his convictions, when he fails to put aside the veil of the illusion of being perfect in an imperfect world.
Thus, the individual is lost in a labyrinth of psychological games and uncertainty, in a dazzling vortex of backstage plays that enhance mistrust and the confusion between known and unknown. The efficiency of leadership mostly depends on the powerful will of a man to keep his flexibility and on a superior resistance to "corrosion and erosion", to the state of uncertainty.
The strongest test of character that makes you become more alert to what is happening around you and more tolerant towards yourself is to admit your suffering as a lesson of life as a necessary condition to increase your faith in a new beginning.
The Aesthetic Of A Black And White Confession highlights that stage of maturity when you can get new clues about yourself with an overview of things that have already happened, which you lack, which stimulates your affectivity and challenges you to reconsider your self-image.
Even if you feel saddened by grief, the hardships of the times, the nostalgia for a resignation that implicitly places you in the sphere of worlds long past, remember that famous Star Wars quote: “The brightest light casts the darkest shadow."
* Note: Serghi, Cella - On The Spider's Thread of Memory, Polirom Publishing House, 2013.
