Category: Blog

Today I was angry, not that I wanted to, but I felt very frustrated because I couldn’t be effective in helping someone do his job.

It’s sad I know, but in this whole process I tried my best to stay true to my values, to treat people accordingly with all the good I can, to explain my reasoning and never be aggressive.

It’s easy to be aggressive, to shout. It’s the shortcut. And sometimes it works perfectly, which leads you to the conclusion that it’s an effective method.

But it’s a risk, a gamble.

Few days ago I was talking to a dear friend about emotions and feelings. He thought that being angry was ok, that there was nothing wrong with it because it’s part of the range of emotions that you have, so you should express it, he said.

I, on the contrary, believe that negative emotions shouldn’t be expressed because they reinforce their behaviour.

He told me that love was in the same league, but I couldn’t explain why not.
Thinking, few days later, I realized that he was right on the last part.
Love, anger, etc, are all in the same league.
They are changing emotions.
The more time you give to them, the more you let them influence you.

That’s why expressing rage it’s a risk, a gamble. Because it changes you in a subtle way, and you might not even recognize yourself in a few years.

The more you give to it, the more you change.
I did my best to stay calm and understand the situation. When I got home I realized I was really stressed out and I needed to pause and reflect.

If something’s not working the best thing you can do is always to pause and look at the situation from a different angle. Approach the problem from a different perspective.
You enter in the “What if” world, where you consider each and every one of the possible “what if” until you hit the right one.

the price you pay for being angry is often too much to handle.
The problem lies in the fact that it’s always too late when you realize how much you’ve paid for it.

These days in italy there were elections.
I once had very strong opinions about what I wanted to vote and so on. But after some time I became much more benevolent to other’s people opinion.

The main reason for this is that I now recognize how much useless is spending time convincing other people of your opinion.
Everyone has an opinion on politics and if we only take sides like in sports (mine is good, yours is bad) we can hardly escape the cage. We will always fight to see who’s “right” and who’s “wrong”.
Even if only time will tell.

There is no right or wrong, there are people trusting people, hoping they will do a good work in their interest or the interest of the country, but there is no right.
Right, wrong, are decided after the govern has done its job, after 5 years you can say “Ok, this was a good/bad choice”.
And we’re still not talking about “right”/”wrong”, because there is no such thing.
There might be a good choice if they followed your expectations or surpassed it, or they might be a bad choice if they didn’t.
And btw: they can’t please everyone.

Taking sides makes all this politic much more of a game, much more like sports. But what’s the gain if we reduce everything to a game where we take sides? How can we expect a cultural change if all we want is to crush the opposition and change the mind of the people that think in a way we don’t even conceive?

If all we do is fighting, even in this context, how can we expect a culture of peace to grow?

We’re in a world of crazy people. We all are.
And it’s quite hard to identify who’s really crazy and who’s not.
Who lives in a dream, and who in the real life.

Sometimes we find that the successful have lot to teach us, but we forget that they might be quite far from us in term of how they respect the people around them and so on.
We identify with single thoughts, words, as if they’re the whole concept of life, while life is instead a complex sum of many variables.

You can’t define life with one aphorism, although you might try.
You can use an aphorism to try and express a view that you have on life, on a single side of life itself, but it wouldn’t be sufficient if you think about choosing what to do.

When you have to decide, you must choose, and the choice is often hard, difficult, something that cannot be obtained without effort.

We often look at the successful because (I think) we feel that’s our end result.
We feel like we deserve the same outcome.
And in this way of thinking we forget the small ones. The people that are everywhere and around us and that makes the difference every single day.

Those are the ones we can learn from too.

I watched “Chef’s Table” and one of the things that I noticed right away was how Massimo Bottura was very sensible to what was around him.

I would not call him a workaholic but instead I would say that he was very creative and that creativity was always with him.

He was the one that saw the world through his eyes and didn’t want to waste a thing of what he saw.

We should be like him, finding the beauty in every little thing, not giving up, giving second chances, interpreting the world and loving it. It’s a very romantic view, but nonetheless it’s something that can enrich the way we see the world.

If we only look at the world and don’t try to interpret it or read it, then we’re passive listeners. But what if every image, sound, thought that comes through us can lead to a deep thought, and idea, a spark of creativity?

We’re the one that should allow this in the first place, that’s why it’s important for us to regain conscience of “the child within us”, the eyes that see the world for the first time.