Category: Life Thoughts

Here, always on the road

More than a year has passed since my last article on this blog and an infinite number of things have happened in the world and in my life, always on the theme “Road is life” and I’m glad to continue to note is that life is always a psychological and experiential journey in which it is necessary to remain alert, proactive, humble, curious and if possible …. calm.
For this reason, the image above represents a serene landscape, captured at sunset during a recent Tuscany trip this winter.

Professional experience teaches me that fortunes come and go and, no matter how hard you try, you are unable to control them, no matter how much you plan everything, sooner or later something happens that forces you to reconsider everything.
So I think we must always be confident and proactive, not be overwhelmed by adversity and be always ready to review plans, negotiating solutions always with a collaborative approach.

The financial situation can also suddenly change therefore, while it’s normal to raise our standard of living when things are going well, we must always be on the alert of possible failures and be ready to face moments of difficulty with optimism and even a good dose of courage, like an investor who bets on a good project in times of difficulty on the market.

Even the evaluation of historical and political events must be removed from all the extreme accents that lead to excessive trust or extreme desperation in ourselves or in our own country. We must get away from both the nationalist and populist drifts of these years and the eas readings of history as studied (unfortunately superficially) at school.

Flexibility, adaptability and optimism were the qualities that allowed the human race to evolve in history anyway, which allow companies to grow and overcome difficulties and these virtues must allow each individual to move forward in adversity, without being pleased with results obtained but without even breaking down in the face of the obstacles that life poses.simbolo

As exemplified in the concept of Yin and Yang, good and bad always mix, both in the history of peoples and in the individual history of each.
Just as life sometimes seems hard but then leaves space to recover colors and joy, so I think we must maintain a balance in evaluating ourselves, others and the events in which we live in our history.

Any of our guilt from the past can be compensated for by the good deeds we do in the present, just as we must not delude ourselves that people close to us are immune to defects or from committing mistakes and then realizing one day that we had overestimated them. We are all a mixture of positive qualities and defects, but if everyone is aware of it, it is easier to maintain a more objective judgment.

See you next time!
Paul

IMG_0031Lake Brugneto, Liguria, Italy

Surprises beyond the horizon

The horizon has always been synonymous with the unknown. In the middle ages when people did not have the geographic knowledge of today they even believed that beyond it there was nothing but the border of the Earth as flat as a coin!

Beyond the horizon, however, there were peoples with incomprehensible languages ​​and different habits, climatic conditions completely unknown. Even civilisation as ambition and as invincible in their time as the Roman Empire or the Napoleonic Empire failed to govern for a long time as they conquered by force expanding beyond of their natural environment. Neither the “commercial” expansion granted the British Empire a lasting dominion but a false expectation of being able to control the majority of the countries of the known world until the nineteenth century with the largest colonial system that was the Commonwealth. And then history reduced its ambitions.
Human ambitions to dominate what is beyond their natural horizon have always failed in the long run because their approach has always been to forcibly bend the less developed peoples to their own cultural models.

I do not intend to take any position in favor of or against imperialistic economic policies, because they have also had positive effects from a cultural or civil point of view, but I would simply demonstrate that, also if the world has evolved making distances much  shorter  and traveling much faster, people is today objectively much more mentally isolated as it’s much more attracted by the routines of life within local communities where rules are known and in general has ensured comfort (at least mental).

The habits consolidated for generations, the comfort of the linguistic habits, the proximity to the original “family cores” are all elements that favor remaining anchored to their communities and live lives as within “mental prisons” boundaries even without realising it how limited these lives can turn into.

The concept of traveling most people have seems to be to “rest” from the stress of everyday life, “exploiting” the natural beauty of remote places that are visited for the sole purpose of escaping from the routine, in order to capture a moment of that feeling of discovering the unknown beyond the “mental horizon” allows.
Something similar as the feeling of spectators going back home after a very engaging movies that took them of the routine for a couple of hours the theatre.

Yet the horizon as a “mental concept” opens up the possibility of having new opportunities for life, work, experience, knowledge, being in contact with new people, routines, realities different from the usual ones and being able to rediscover the pleasure of the almost endless new opportunities the world offers.

Mental horizon can therefore also be only one’s own city or local community, whose limited opportunities are satisfied, but also the circle of people around us, limiting their possibilities to be fully realized as individuals. Or the social rules created by generations of cultural models that have imposed extended families as “clans” almost impermeable to external influences.
The nationalist political movements that are taking root particularly in Europe and in the USA are nothing more than the defensive response of this “looking-backward” scheme that should protect against the fear of the unknown.

But if we really open your minds and hearts to what positive can be beyond the horizon we might really reborn and improve our little world and leave a mark through a life that is so short that it makes no sense to protect our own comfort which is as short as the blink of the eyes in the economy of History.

The best period of my life is  the one I have been living since I expanded my mental horizons thanks to a very stimulating job that allows me to test on my skin on a daily basis the benefits of these increased exchanges of experiences with the world, and which I am sure are enriching both myself and the people I meet.

I wish you could also find the strength to break the mental barriers and to open up to discover the surprises that await beyond the horizon.

Paolo

IMG_6034.JPG

Are all our efforts worth? Yes

In a life full of personal and professional commitments like my life and that of millions of people in the world, it often happen to feel lost in the apparent disorientation of a negative answer to the question in the subject.

Yet everything we do brings consequences in the people around us. Consequences positive or negative, but anyway we leave a mark even if we do not think about it. Often we do not understand that that extra word or that smile left on the face at that moment has brought positive consequences to the people who we were close that day.

Of course we can affect people’s lives also in the negative but, apart from rare cases where we really have responsibilities, I believe that anything negative can be compensated when we leave a positive mark such as mentioned above.

When we find ourselves overloaded with responsibilities, deadlines and commitments it seems that everything around us is negative but it is enough just to pass the moment of difficulty and then things improve. As in a scale, the plate sometimes hangs from one side sometimes from the other but you can easily find a way to balance it.

In my life I experience this condition of despair sometimes but I realize that I have to just look a bit further to find all the elements that can show me that there are so many good gifts around me.

The family, understood as those ties carried forward in good and evil by a life and that anyway represent the testimony that we can go on and overcome every negative moment.

The world around us, understood as the nature and the people we can observe everywhere we turn and we should always thank Life every day for. We take for granted the act of having all this around us every day just because we have not experienced losing ourselves in the desert or at sea and risking not to see it again.

The positive gestures of people towards us. Maybe we think that they are due but we should appreciate them more without considering them due. It would be like making a positive recharge!

The health. Sometimes taken from the frenzy of life we forget how incredibly important a gift is the health that is given to us every day. Around us people get sick, even our dearest loved ones, and we can not but take advantage of what we have more than them, trying to balance the moments of despair thinking that things could also go (much) worse should we been ill.

In general, from my experience of the last 5 years I must say that I thank Life for what it has brought me, either positive and (perceived) negative experiences, ,as they have shaped my character making it probably more aware, open to new and able to not give up in front of negative moments.

In the future I will talk about my experience with religion and how this also contributes to the flow of thoughts referred to in these reflections of mine.

In conclusion, therefore, in answer to the question of the title, Yes, I really believe that Life, with all the difficulties and efforts that we must profuse every day, it is worthwhile to always be lived enjoying every moment.

Paolo

IMG_4555
London City view from northern suburbs

First blog post – RoadIsLife.blog

Genoa, August 11th, 2018 , 03:30 CET

Dear friends,

I decided to take inspiration for the title of my first Blog from a brief quote by Jack Kerouak, “the road is life“, who seemed to long for the journey as an essential part of life. “Road” understood metaphorically, as a practical reality of the journey. Air travel, in my case, but always travel.

The journey has been and is for me more a professional need that mystical as Kerouak, but I understand that its frequency is directly proportional to the knowledge of the world and of itself that you are brought to do during its development.

In just a few hours an air journey allowed me to drastically change landscapes and cultures and made me always unprepared to what I previously believed. And every new discovery made me open a little more to the next one and its loads of new Experiences and benefits.

My life in the last 5 years of travel has changed radically and I decided to describe in this Blog these changes to get some ideas of life that corroborate with my experiences of life lived after forty years the theoretical principles to which I had inspired the life of the first forty.

In these 5 years I have gone without really wanting it from a routine life based on the solid points of reference of a solid family with concrete objectives and life projects, to a life in which the only constant are the values ​​that as a father I brought inside and that have been tested by the Experiences.

I guarantee the genuineness of the contents of this space in respect of the confidentiality of those involved and I hope that the visitors with whom I will share these experiences will find a point for reflection in whatever state of their life they are.

As told by ancient Romans to say goodbye, “Ave atque Vale”.

Paolo