Back to School

I was recently asked by a couple of concerned friends why I am continuously unavailable on line, why I have been a stranger for quite some time now, why I haven’t returned phone calls and haven’t written emails. I would therefore like to apologise for having been silent for so long and I hope that I have not alienated (all) my friends. What have I been doing lately? Well, not much really, apart from travelling like mad around Europe (the UK, France and Romania, since the beginning of the year). For work. Mais oui, what else. And the travel plan for the rest of the year looks even crazier. Eh, I guess I have to survive.

SO: no, I am not upset, I am not precious or self–sufficient. I have just been busy – I know it is a truism but, unfortunately, it is true. And something else is true too – sometimes I just need some time for myself. Some time when I reduce the conversations with friends, even with family, to a minimum. A time reserved for introspection, staring at the ceiling and hard thinking. I know it’s dangerous, I know I might get lost in the woods but this is something which I really need to do from time to time.

In the meantime, I have felt the need to study. My brain has been underused for way too long. I have been toying with the idea of an executive MBA for some time but have decided to postpone that a bit. Just a tiny bit, until I get my CIA degree. The books arrived while I was away but today (my first day back in the office) I took them home J. This is a qualification which I don’t exactly need – meaning that I can do my job extremely well without having passed these exams (and I have another, more meaningful / powerful qualification already). But CIA is related to my job and it’s a way to keep occupied. So, it’s back to school for me, I guess.

I hope I succeeded to reassure everybody and convince them that I am alive and kicking. Just feel the need to be invisible for a while. Relax, I will resurface soon. But, for now, I say goodbye and retreat to my shell.

Every once in a while I get to thinking about relationships …

I am lying in bed, in a hotel room in Lyon, thinking about relationships. Why are they such hard work? Why are we not always able to reach a compromise, why do we keep measuring our and our partners’ commitment? Are we afraid of getting bruised? Is love enough to make a relationship work?

When we move in together with our partner, are we really prepared to let go of our life as singles? Even when we find what we’ve been looking for, some of us are reluctant to let go of our single selves. Is this necessarily bad? Are we allowed to come into a relationship with single people behaviour? Can we hold on to our old habits without being perceived as either weird or selfish? Or can we continue to keep our space, spend time on our own, ‘do our thing’ AND have a perfectly healthy relationship? At what point do separate interests become separate bedrooms and, ultimately, separate lives?

Lately, I have also been thinking about babies … Why are we so different in this respect – some people have made it their number one objective to have them, whereas others simply couldn’t care less. Does the biological clock function differently from one person to another? Both men and women are challenged in this respect even though I guess it’s the women who are more pressurised. Can’t we be happy in pairs? Do we necessarily need babies to round up a relationship and make it complete? On a personal level, I have often wondered if I would really be good at this … How much would that change in my life and would I still be myself.

Maybe we should stop searching for a perfect relationship and settle for a satisfactory one and, when we are about to throw in the towel, we should be aware of the fact that no relationship is perfect and that good relationships are hard to find.