Chronic Dissatisfaction Syndrome

 

Do You Suffer Chronic Dissatisfaction?

I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. 

Oscar Wilde

Chronic Dissatisfaction (let’s just call it CD) stalked me for years.

Do you know CD?

The symptoms include restlessness, needing more of something indefinable and always shifting, feeling like you’re not there yet (but wondering where the hell there is.) CD pushed and nagged me that I was made for more, to be more and express more until I bled.

I seethed at myself when I felt it coming, gnawing chronic dissatisfaction. I judged myself for letting it invade me as a host again. I was furious that I felt so powerless to mollify or sate that slavering devourer of happiness.

Sometimes it turned me in knots of anxiety, sometimes it got me feeling so flat I didn’t want to move. Dissatisfaction with something, or everything, is a player in depression. It’s also there in anxiety, in the indeterminate dread that something’s not right and may at some point shockingly emerge and ambush you.

Recognise any of this yourself?

I felt it worst in my twenties. It’s a common time for CD to first show itself, during what’s sometimes called The Quarter-Life Crisis – an early 20’s existential angst period where we crave deeper meaning and purpose, in ourselves and in the world. Once CD has its hooks in you, it’s often a travelling companion on and off throughout life. Our celebrity-adoring, curated-life culture feeds CD, teasing us about whether we measure up, creating conditions that can keep us constantly doubting ourselves. Chronic Dissatisfaction is a close relative of that other perennial mind-stalker Fear of Failure to Fulfil Potential which also tends to rise up around the same time.

Years later, despite being more satisfied in my life than I’ve ever been, I’m still able to time warp right back into the feelings of dissatisfaction I had as a teenager and twenty-something, if I let myself.

I have everything I need, no reason for life or death struggles in my day to day, no reason for sadness, no reason for yearning or such blatant aching need. My life is full and rich. Yet there it is, writhing on home again through my veins like a parasite that sucks my lifeforce. CD is a feeling I recognise from long ago.

Sure, we have wins, but most of us never feel that CD’s completely solved – that’s the chronic in it – because as we grow and achieve a goal, always another deeper level or a higher standard to reach emerges. There’s always something greater, always something more just out ahead.

It’s healthy and adaptive to seek more, reach further, wonder what more we have in us, right? It’s a normal, self-actualising part of human growth, albeit not always a relaxing or very comfortable part. Dissatisfaction can be a great motivating force in life. The trouble is that it can also be disheartening, panic-inducing and exhausting.

Physical yoga practice, some exercise, used to see me through while I was doing it, but then…hello old friend…Now I’m much stronger with it. The years have taught me how to swim with it rather than sink.

Writing offers me huge solace in the catharsis of self-expression when I feel dissatisfaction trying to worm its way to the surface of my skin, infiltrating my words with self-doubt, whispering edits to try to suck the goodness out of easy pleasure. I tell it

“No, all is well”.

The difference between then and now is that I used to fear CD so much more. I was too afraid to speak to it directly, to look it in the face. Now I know it’s just a part of me that the rest of me isn’t entirely comfortable with, but I need to live with anyway. I take it in my stride when it shows up and check to see if it has anything useful to contribute today. 

Sometimes it’s there to tell you that you need to make a change, other times it’s rattling the pressure tin. The secret is having the patience and courage to see which of those emerges this time.

You can learn to work with your chronic dissatisfaction too. In fact, I recommend it for your mental health. Because, ugly as it is on first meeting, CD isn’t essentially a bad guy. These days I even feel safe enough with it to perversely enjoy its pressure sometimes when it lunges at me, because it helps me stay focused on living a life that has meaning for me. It stops me from wasting precious time on stuff that doesn’t matter, warns me off mediocrity and whispers

“What more, what more is possible?”

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough. 

Alain de Botton

Am I Normal to Often Feel Dissatisfied?

You’ll probably recognise it: Restlessness, needing more of something indefinable, feeling like you’re not there yet (but wondering where the hell there is), episodes of yearning for something you can’t quite name, wondering if there’s more to this life than what you’re currently living …

CD used to commandeer my ship all the time, but experience has now taught me to channel CD’s intensity, and smile at my nagging, fickle and distracted mind, rather than being bullied by obsessive striving. It wasn’t always that way. 

Dissatisfaction can and will work against you if you let it push you around. It can turn you against yourself with self-criticism and anxiety, or paralyse you into fear of failure if you believe the ‘nothing’s ever good enough’ hype and take it as a personal attack on you.

• If you believe its pitch, CD can keep you stuck and seething in frustration that everything sucks, no matter how hard you run against the wind to make life great. 
• It can make self-doubt the norm rather than a temporary lapse of confidence or a prompt for pause and reflection. 
• At its most acute, CD can spiral into self-loathing or self-pity, or gradually morph into a general state of anxiety or depression. 

Unexamined or misinterpreted as something entirely abnormal, dissatisfaction can become dangerous to emotional wellbeing. I’ve come to realise that CD is not in fact, abnormal. It’s commonplace.

Dissatisfaction manifests differently for everyone but the core feeling is a common experience. I got to know my CD intimately from very early because I wasn’t like other members of my small family. I felt dissatisfied with much of what they saw as unquestionably normal, which caused a lot of self-doubt. Since I was the odd one out, everyone, including me, assumed that I must have something wrong with me to think life as I found it should be queried. I saw so much in the world that made little sense emotionally or didn’t seem just, but nobody around me seemed to feel strongly about it so I assumed I must have faulty ideas.

Apparently, according to multiple family sources, I thought too much. I was called overly-sensitive. I was irritatingly, inconveniently hard to please. I was sulky. I just didn’t fit in. That was the feedback I got for wanting more than what I saw as the mindless, suburban drudge that seemingly lay inevitably ahead.

Once I grew out of my family box and joined the wider world it was abundantly clear that I wasn’t alone after all. Time revealed to me that I did fit in and many people thought as much or more than I did about life, the universe and questioning the status quo. My younger cousins as they grew up, were very much like me. I see now we were part of a generational shift in values, awareness, and expectations about life. We were becoming more connected to a wider world and we felt empowered to think critically and make a difference to the state of things than many of our parents or grandparents had.

Unfortunately, by the time it dawned on me that I was not an outsider in the world, I’d already grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who did life wrong. My brain ran a background program of CD with myself most of the time. ‘Not good enough’ was like a Velcro backdrop, on which hung a bunch of negative assumptions about myself. 

That sort of deep, old programming can take a bit of unpacking and dismantling as it seeps into all sorts of areas. It can often manifest as perfectionism.

In fact, CD and perfectionism have many of the same family traits – the good ones, like striving to excel and the bad ones, like being painfully hard on yourself. It’s a scary opponent to deal with when it bluffs you into fear or anxiety like an internal stand-over guy. However, you can make CD an ally in your life and benefit enormously from its energy, when you know how. In fact, it can be rocket fuel for achievement when you know how to handle it, without blowing yourself up.

The first thing to do, if you suffer with CD, is to put it into perspective by understanding that you are so normal to feel it. There is a rich and varied history of CD throughout the ages, and across cultures. In fact, CD is part of the human condition that’s gone by many names over the centuries.

Let’s break it down a little.

K.D. Lang called it ‘constant craving that’s always been.’ In its variously nuanced manifestations CD has been called ‘Ennui’ – a restless, uncomfortable kind of boredom; or it might be called ‘Existential Angst’ when CD is experienced as flat musing over life, death and a fear that the whole shebang might be meaningless.

Then, I’ve read about Weltschmerz – a German term, said to describe times when CD is focused on the state of the world and characterised by a sense of powerlessness and world-weariness – perhaps the way many of us feel about world politics and some leaders.

When it hangs around for a long time, flat and bereft of much energy, CD can sit dangerously close to the edge of depression and like depression; it may carry a good measure of anger at its core.

Call it by any name, here’s the thing I’ve learned:

Fighting CD is a waste of energy.

You must run with it. Turn it into a personal battery for insight into yourself and for fueling your growth – a battery that’s probably never going to run completely dry!

Add to your CD the power of your frustration, even anger, about it in ways that don’t hurt you or anybody else, and your growth can be turbo charged.

It’s possible and in fact, it’s vital, that we turn CD around from imprisoning misery into a force for motivation, direction and insight. Dissatisfaction can become a voice that unearths and empowers your passions and desires – instead of keeping you lost, empty, howling for the moon, but it takes a little understanding and self-awareness.

Before we look more deeply in coming posts at resolving dissatisfaction into a tool for your evolution, it’s important to define what success would look like to you. It’s difficult to get to a better place if we haven’t defined where that is.

Would it be called satisfaction?

Satisfaction can come across as a kind of lukewarm word, unlike passion, excitement, or excellence.

Do we tend to see satisfaction as an insipid state we don’t care for much, as a culture?

Could an unappealing cultural definition of satisfaction, on top of all our personal stuff, helps to keep us stuck in bouts of CD?

I suspect that increasingly unrealistic cultural values around wealth, looks, sexiness, fame and the other common extrinsic goals that apparently constitute success, have paved a multi-lane, highway straight to Dissatisfaction City. Wherever you’re travelling from, it’s hard to miss the turnoff to that all-pervasive town. No wonder its population is ever increasing as more global citizens are awestruck from afar by the riches their brothers and sisters in other towns take for granted.

In cultures largely motivated by striving and craving to be rich, famous, be seen, be beautiful, have the most, win and be a ‘success’, is it just too uncool to say that you’re satisfied with your life?

Is that one of the reasons so many of us suffer from bouts of CD – because satisfaction is culturally regarded as a lazy, complacent, cop-out?

Do You Need To Be Dissatisfied to be Motivated?

1. Do you need to be dissatisfied in life to be driven to succeed? 
2. Is satisfaction a lame, insipid word to you that means giving up, and just settling for mediocre when we should be going for bigger, faster, better, stronger, harder? 
3. In fact, does satisfaction even exist, or do we always want for more? 
4. And, are these key reasons so many of us suffer from bouts of Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) – because satisfaction is equated with stopping half way up the mountain, lazy, complacent, a cop-out?

Let’s get truthful – if you achieved all your dreams today would you even want to declare to the world

“I am satisfied!”

Or would that seem like a declaration of giving up on getting something better, something more.

Choreographer Martha Graham suggested that for artists at least, satisfaction isn’t even ‘a thing’. She asserted that artists need to feel dissatisfied to be driven to create:

"There is no satisfaction. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction. A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

Also, putting it rather strongly, playwright George Bernard Shaw famously wrote:

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

Wow, right? You can’t get a better reason for staying steadfastly dissatisfied than to see satisfaction as emotional death! Of course, Shaw’s talking about the emotional and creative side of life. He’s suggesting it’s not a rewarding artistic life if you tell the Muse “Piss off, I’ve done enough!” Art would cease, although life would go on, but it would be a pale life without any art.

I question however, how much we must suffer to be artistically blissful and in flow. I’m proof that I am a happier person, and a better artist, when I relinquish artistic ‘suffering’. Dissatisfaction lurks in the background during every artistic endeavour and in every editing process. However, it’s no longer the underpinning emotional state of my world. Now it’s more often a cause for consideration and a tool of reflection. I use it as a guide to where I am. I don’t let dissatisfaction hold too much power over my mood. When I do, I find that my productivity and flow suffer.

To enjoy expanding our experiences, to try new things and overcome anxieties, we must put perfectionism and dissatisfaction aside. It’s natural to feel dissatisfied with your efforts at times. It’s particularly tough at first, but we don’t improve unless we push on through, at least for a while. We must see how we progress and whether we find some flow or not. It takes time to see if you’re developing any ability and enjoyment in a field.

Ira Glass wrote that when we begin a creative pursuit we have a dream vision and high taste for it. We follow our creative bent, but because we’re a beginner our efforts generally aren’t amazing. That means it’s very easy to decide you’re no good and stop out of dissatisfaction, before you get going. This is the dark potential of dissatisfaction – it can paralyse you and steal your joy, creative vision, energy, and excitement.

Glass noted that a beginner’s skills usually cannot match their good taste for the thing they love. It is through developing a body of work that our abilities catch up to our vision and taste. From this perspective, periods of dissatisfaction are normal stages of personal and professional development. We must tolerate dissatisfaction rather than be smashed by it. Otherwise, we will give up too soon.

It seems that one problem with satisfaction lays in the fact that satisfaction has two distinct flavours of meaning. Like most things, what matters is what it means to you.

Definitions of satisfaction include 

‘A state of being pleased, well-pleased, proud, happy and content’. Great. However , there’s the shadow-side – satisfaction can also mean – ‘a state of being smug, pleased with oneself, complacent, settling for’.

Hmm…sounds undesirable…

Clearly in some contexts satisfaction is perceived as downright dull, too pleased with itself and even lazy. It’s associated with settling for mediocrity. It’s sometimes seen as being too lazy or scared to strive on.

Is the word ‘satisfaction’ just too insipid, lukewarm, and anti-passionate to be desirable to you?

I’m not so sure it’s shameful or mediocre to say ‘I’m satisfied and I’m proud to be satisfied’ but I know many success-driven individuals disagree vehemently with that. Dissatisfaction is frequently couched as bleakly romantic, full of desire, reaching and…suffering nobly for more, more, more. The idea of ‘no gain without pain’ essentially means that insatiable desire for more must be accompanied or even driven by unrelenting suffering.

Do not doubt it – CD can be a motivating force. Notably, dissatisfaction can mean we always have something to do. We are not meaningless because dissatisfaction delivers us from the fear of being purposeless – gives us an all-consuming, never-ending battle to fight – a reason to strive, fight on, a reason to be. CD can give you something to live for. So long as the misery and frustration of CD motivates you, rather than paralysing you in misery, it can be useful.

But would it not be more powerful, more motivating, and ultimately peaceful, to start from a base of freedom and acceptance of ourselves? To start from full ownership of our strengths and gifts then reach for more, motivated to work, to do better, to grow for the joy of our own experience and from the expression of our souls, rather than to fill an aching unfillable hole?

Can you note CD and harness it to other more powerful, pleasurable forces, to propel you forward in ways that aren’t all about romancing stress and suffering? 

Ultimately, the question is – Can dissatisfaction, passionate motivation and peace in your soul authentically coexist?

I know they can because I live with them every day. We can face CD head-on, listen to its messages, gain insight into ourselves and our choices and enrol its help and energy for growth, instead of becoming bitter in cycles of perfectionism, low self-esteem, and exhaustion. I’ve never seen anyone truly thrive in the long-term by only focussing on how unsatisfactory their world is, how faulty or no-good they think they are, or how little they have. Always, the growth, the joy, the passion come out of finding what you love, what matters most, and focussing on the pull of the vision, of your desires.

What if rather than satisfaction, our goal was passionate acceptance of ourselves and of life – a paradoxical state where passionate action, inspiration and peak experiences culminate in deep contentment and internal quiet?

Ultimately, contentment and peace won’t come from focussing on the pain of dissatisfaction, self-judgment, or anger at what you don’t have. Those emotions may be an impetus for forward movement – that’s a great and powerful use of feelings – but they are not life-sustaining emotions. Anger and dissatisfaction will never be at the culmination of our self-awareness because they generate resentment, and resentment is a sticking place. Finding deep pleasure, self-acceptance, connection, and flow are more powerful motivators than obsessive dissatisfaction can ever be.

So, motivating force, warning mechanism and/or vicious inner critical voice – dissatisfaction can rise up in many guises and for many reasons. How do you know when your satisfaction is serving you and when it’s nothing but paralysing self-doubt and fear?

Getting to know your own personal brand of dissatisfaction, being able to interpret its messages is a self-awareness skill. Sometimes CD has an important message for you, telling you you’re off track and out of alignment with your desires. At other times, when you’re being so hard on yourself you’re getting paralysed by fear, CD is talking out of place, telling you the same old tired, self-defeating stories that serve nothing. It takes self-awareness, mindfulness, and practice to know the difference.

It’s a life skill to get to know and accept CD as an uncomfortable companion, because even for the most Zen amongst us, it’s a part of ourselves we’ll face and need to deal with sometime. You don’t have to like your CD, but you may as well accept it exists and get on with being a human.

Knowing the reasons behind your CD is not always straight forward, it can be quite elusive and can shape-shift with different circumstances. If you can feel into what your CD might be trying to tell you, you have great information to help you turn it around to work for you, instead of against you.

Why Am I Chronically Dissatisfied?

Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) is that feeling of yearning, wishing for something more but not even knowing what it is…CD can be an ever-present hum in the background of your life or it can show up sporadically. It can even evolve with you and show up in different guises throughout life. Through reflecting on CD when it visits you, you can let go of it more easily as a problem and accept it as part of the human condition. CD also often carries lessons within it and understood,  it can be more friend than foe.

There are some self-supportive reasons, and some self-defeating reasons why we find ourselves in the grip of chronic dissatisfaction. Let’s explore some of the common ‘whys’ of chronic dissatisfaction so you can hold them in mind, and try them on for fit, next time you find yourself in restless, undefined yearning. Maybe one of these reasons will help cast a light on how to turn your CD around into a force for creativity and acceptance rather than paralysis and frustration.

Living life by someone else’s values, beliefs or goals

This is a classic recipe for recurring dissatisfaction. Despite your achievements you feel dissatisfied. Other’s ideas of success are not necessarily the achievements you most value and desire in your heart. We may grow up unwittingly living according to our parents’ goals for us. That can lead to ongoing dissatisfaction over time, if our values and desires differ from theirs.

Angela, an old school friend, went into marketing for a decade rather than studying her passion, science, because her father was in sales and offered her a great opportunity to earn money within his company. Angela didn’t love the work but she was good at it and she liked the lifestyle the money could buy her. In her thirties when her Dad’s company went through a merger and he retired, Angela found herself deeply dissatisfied in her job. It was a job to her, not a vocation or a meaningful purpose. It had served her well financially, but emotionally, it had largely been in the service of pleasing her dad and feeling more loved by him by doing what he valued.

You can’t be fully happy living according to someone else’s values and desires if it means not applying your strengths and gifts to the things that light you up and enrich your life. When you live to fulfil an image of what a parent, partner, or someone else wants you to be, usually unconsciously, you ultimately serve nobody. You help no one by not expressing your authentic talents and loves freely. You’re not at your best if you’re not accessing and exercising your inherent strengths and passions. In this case, your dissatisfaction may be showing itself as a guide who is trying to tell you that you’re not in the right place, or you’re in a cage, not hearing your soul’s desires.

Happiness Feels Uncool

I know, dumb in retrospect. When I was an actor, a lost but know-it-all twenty-something, I got it into my head that it was chic, serious, cool, and romantic to struggle. Like I was a real artist if I had to half-starve and go without coffee for a week. I didn’t make that idea up. There is an enduring iconic starving artist motif that’s been around for centuries. It was appealing to me as a young actor, to embrace the motif of struggle. The artist, tortured by meaninglessness, against all odds, fiercely talented, not seeking reward, only expression of the art, rises victorious to thunderous applause. There’s a whole underdog, heroic rags-to-riches narrative to tap into as an actor. So, I hung around in an extended teenager-hood for a few years too long, where sadness, poverty and questioning the status quo were just the way to be. A brooding approach to everything was my choice then, a state of constant nagging dissatisfaction, rather than the unguarded joy that I thought was just too uncool?!

Do You Often Feel Like a Victim?

Blaming everyone for all that you think isn’t right with your world will keep you trapped in CD. When you blame somebody else for your life, you’ve created a belief system that disempowers you to change it. There is nothing you can do to improve your own world if you have no responsibility for it. It’s out of your hands. You’re an innocent victim, a bystander to your own life. Paralysing blame and anger are convenient ways to justify delaying doing what it takes to improve your situation.

Of course outside factors exert an influence on our experiences. Things happen to us that are not our choice and not our fault. That’s a given. However, more powerful than any outside influence is our perspective of our own life and self. More important than anything that happens to us is what we choose to do with our experiences. There is always some choice you can make that will improve things for yourself. It’s rarely the best choice to keep floundering in paralysis and blaming powers outside your control.

At times, there may be truth in the idea that others are impeding your progress, goals or desires. Even so, does focusing on what they’ve done and the trouble they’ve caused serve you? I blamed not having a father for my looking for love in all the wrong places as a teenager. I blamed my father for my struggles with creating a loving relationship with a man later in life. My father’s choices did have a huge detrimental impact on my life and development. However, they also provided me with hard-won insights and gifts. When I was able to release my image of myself as a flawed victim, I flourished. Ifound what I’d long been seeking – self-compassion and great, loving relationships. As Brene Brown wrote, I understand now that

We mature through damage, not just through the years. 

 

At some point in all of our lives, completely unfair or plain challenging stuff happens. Your strength of character, wisdom, courage, and indeed your ultimate successes are measured not by the unfair things that happen to you. Your character shows through in how you coped with your experiences. Being the hero of your own life involves welcoming periods of dissatisfaction as a part of our growth. Sometimes CD is our friend, drawing us forward to strive harder for what we desire, and other times it’s a menace that needs understanding and managing into abeyance.

Understanding Your Chronic Dissatisfaction

Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) is that restless feeling of yearning, wishing for something more but not even knowing what it is…CD can be an ever-present hum in the background of your life or it can show up sporadically. Through reflecting on CD when it visits you, you can let go of it more easily as a problem and accept it as part of the human condition. CD also often carries lessons within it and, I’ve realised, it can be more friend than foe.

You can’t always identify the ‘why’ of CD, which is what makes it so challenging and so common, but you can harness the power of it, rather than live in fear of it. And like it or hate it, you might as well learn to live with episodes of amorphous dissatisfaction because for most of us, it’s unavoidable at some points in life.

Let’s define some common reasons why we find ourselves in the grip of chronic dissatisfaction to increase our understanding of how to deal with it:

You think you should be constantly happy

 If you set a belief that you should be happy all the time, you are regularly going to suffer dissatisfaction. Constant, unrelenting happiness is not realistic and not even appropriate.

Instead, set a goal for greater emotional freedom — meaning the freedom to let yourself feel according to the circumstances of the present moment. Aim for the freedom and mindfulness to be able to respond well, rather than being stuck in an ongoing background state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression or anger. Feelings — including happiness, sadness and dissatisfaction are meant to come and go according to what’s happening to us.

You apply unrealistic standards to yourself

 If you’ve set up ‘never-good-enough’ criteria for judging your performance, or set goals that aren’t based on personally realistic standards, you’ve set up a recipe for recurring CD.

We may have learned the belief somewhere that unrealistic standards, constant dissatisfaction and harshness are the only paths to achieving success. Fortunately, we can reprogram such beliefs of the past to be more encouraging, although it can take some time and understanding to change our mindset and corresponding behaviour.

Dissatisfaction is your only form of motivation

 The cost of being endlessly driven by dissatisfaction is being relentlessly smashed by its negative cascades of feeling and thoughts. which to me, outweighs the motivational benefits.

Would you not gain more overall from being pulled forward by love, desire and joy rather than pushing and grinding and forcing a ‘not enough’ attitude uphill everyday?

Focus on what you love and what you’re great at, and let that draw you forward.

You’ve Got Comparisonitis

 We typically compare ourselves to others in all sorts of ways, but it’s not something to allow to run unchecked. Comparison as a way of life is a path to ensuring you will always be dissatisfied with some aspect of yourself, your world or your abilities. It’s a mark of maturity to stop comparing ourselves and to realise that comparing people is a bit like comparing oranges and apples…or peaches…

Performer Dita von Teese is quoted as saying

"You might be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches."

You’re angry

Sometimes dissatisfaction is just a manifestation of being really angry, like you’re carrying raw and glowing embers of rage under your surface. Something might need forgiving somewhere, something feels unfair or outrageous and you’re mentally pacing your insides, looking for change.

It can be quite reasonable to feel that way sometimes. In fact, there’s plenty going on the world to be angry and dissatisfied about.

The best thing to do with anger is to recognise it and look for the positive ways to express it as useful action, a fire that burns to make a difference in things you care about, not to harm them. Anger is powerful life-force, bubbling up and saying fight for something better!

Reflect on the useful places to direct your anger. Never let your anger destroy. Let it drive, let it create, let it direct better outcomes and better ways in the world through finding better ways in you.

Dissatisfaction gets you feeling loved

This is a HUGE reason for CD and it’s usually completely unconscious. For some of us, the way to get the attention of carers as a child was to be DISSATISFIED.

The rest of the time, when we were happy, we were largely left to our own devices. Thus, we learned that the way to get attention was to be sad, cry out in dissatisfaction.

Is this striking a chord in you? Do you regularly find yourself wanting to grizzle, complain, fault find, especially around your intimate others? Could it be that finding something to be dissatisfied with is a way to get their full and complete attention?

If you’re answering “Yes, Yes, YES!” you’ve probably just uncovered a bit of self-knowledge. That gives you the power to change, from needy and dissatisfied to more content. Ask for what you need rather than living in dissatisfaction.

Owning your reality, naming your feelings and getting some insight into why they recur are powerful first steps to getting free of the painful or debilitating manifestations of CD. So, the goal is not to rid yourself of difficult feelings. The goal to be more self-aware, note the feelings, but choose your behaviour.

 

Love is The Cure for Dissatisfaction

I don’t mean love of another person, but love of your own life. 

But how do we get there from feeling lost and unhappy with the way things are?

Through studying yoga, I learned how normal I was to regularly feel dissatisfied in life, in that amorphous, recurring way that I’d come to call CD. In yoga I discovered sophisticated philosophies and rich texts going back centuries, which specifically addressed CD and its corollaries, if by other names. Yoga offered paths to deal with suffering in physical terms, emotional ways, and transcendent terms.

I learned of the concept of Dukkha, which in broadest terms means suffering of all kinds, from emotional dissatisfaction to physical pain, death and all life’s hardships. There is great benefit in recognising the ever-present nature of all kinds of suffering as normal and from that basis, cultivating wisdom and practices to cope with suffering.

Dukkha is neither a thing to be loved nor hated, but a reality to be acknowledged and mindfully accepted as a part of life. That’s a very liberating attitude to suffering, rather than seeing it as paralysing and terrifying. It’s taught that all living creatures must in some way experience and deal with suffering and dissatisfaction – it’s inescapable because we are mortal. We must face challenges, age, and eventually die, as matters of fact. 

Therefore, there is little point wasting our energy trying to run from the great ‘inevitables’ of life and death. Better that we get our heads around our reality with all its good and lousy parts. Better to live fully in the precious time we have, with our eyes wide open, than half-asleep.

When you accept suffering and dissatisfaction as realities of life you are better prepared to face inevitable challenges. That acknowledgement and acceptance of CD is the first part of transforming it into your ally. That perspective takes a great deal of the power out of CD when it starts to rise in you. The second part is enlisting your energies fully in a greater purpose and force within yourself. The force is love.

There is no greater neutraliser for the dissatisfactions of being alive than love. There’s no greater place to find meaning in the randomness of everything, than love. I’m not talking about love in a teddies and hearts, cheesy kind of way. I’m talking about love as a magnetic motivator pulling you forward.  It has such massive power you can throw the weight of your body and soul onto it. You trust it because you know it’s what really matters. Love so strong in all areas of your life that your soul knows it’s invincible. Love that ensures we are utterly kind and compassionate in the values behind all our striving. I’m talking about identifying 360 degrees of love that will pull you forward with powerful energy.

There are three areas of love to focus on in creating a feeling of wholeness and integration in your world. Once identified – these three great loves of your life form a powerful and ever-evolving compass. They will keep you on track and CD in its place. There is no more powerful way to manage CD than to find a sense of deep integration within yourself. Integration comes when your values and desires – your loves – are guiding you. Love transforms dissatisfaction from paralysis to the ultimate motivational rocket fuel. We fall in love with many people and things, but ultimately, there are three great loves of our lives:

• Self-compassion, meaning being self-aware, kind and non-violent to yourself in your words and action, including becoming mindful of self-defeating patterns of thoughts, so you can choose a different focus when they visit you;

• Mindful relationships – nurturing meaningful connections with other beings (animal, mineral, vegetable or spiritual); 

• And Flow, also called Peak Experiences, which means discovering and giving yourself to pursuits or work that you love, in which time dissolves and you merge with the object of your attention.

 

Recognising your three loves, knowing exactly what they are for you, and where you find them, is a key to greater happiness. It’s also the greatest antidote to CD. 

Why wouldn’t it be? 

1. We want to spend more time doing what we love; 
2. being with the beings we love; 
3. feeling good about ourselves. 

So why not prioritise those desires and let the three core loves guide our direction in life? 

Guide us in everything?

In short, these three are the compass to guide you in your internal world. Using them as your guide will organically be reflected in more soul-centred, self-supportive choices. 

The three great loves of our lives – self-compassion, mindful relationships, and flow – are universal – meaning they exist across all the variations of us as unique individuals. Although they are consistent, they take different forms and measures in each of us. Living from them is a map to joy, fulfillment, sense of purpose and grounding in the world.

 

Being motivated by the three loves means knowing yourself better, activating your deepest strengths and eliminating a lot of confusion and stress about your life’s path.  

Living from the three loves means knowing that you’re on track because you’re generally living a life of passionate engagement, and dissatisfaction becomes a sometime assistant, rather than a constant foe.

Debra Campbell

SE

E se ninguém me der força

E se ninguém confiar

E se eu for invisível

E se ninguém me enxergar

E se eu perder a fé

Se eu não ficar de pé

Se eu voltar a cair

Se a lágrima escorrer

Se, por medo de sofrer

eu pensar em desistir.

E se quando eu cair

ninguém me estender a mão.

E se quando eu me perder,

sem rumo, sem direção,

Se eu não achar o caminho

Se eu estiver sozinho

no labirinto da vida.

E se tudo for escuro

Se eu não vir um futuro

na estrada a ser seguida.

E se esse tal futuro

for pior do que o presente

E se for melhor parar

do que caminhar pra frente

E se o amor for dor

E se todo sonhador

não passar de um pobre louco

E se eu desanimar,

Se eu parar de sonhar

queda a queda, pouco a pouco.

E se quem eu mais confio

me ferir, me magoar

E se a ferida for grande

E se não cicatrizar

Se na hora da batalha

minha coragem for falha

Se faltar sabedoria

Se a derrota chegar

E se ninguém me abraçar

na hora da agonia.

E se for tarde demais

E se o tempo passar

E se o relógio da vida

do nada se adiantar

E se eu avistar o fim

chegando perto de mim,

impiedoso e veloz,

sem poder retroceder,

me fazendo perceber

que o SE foi meu algoz.

E se eu pudesse voltar…

Se o SE fosse diferente

Se eu dissesse pra mim mesmo:

Se renove, siga em frente.

Se arrisque, se prepare

E se cair jamais pare

Se levante, se refaça,

Se entenda, se reconheça

E, se chorar, agradeça

cada vez que achou graça.

Se desfaça da preguiça,

do medo, da covardia

Se encante pela chance

de viver um novo dia

Se ame e seja amor

Se apaixone, por favor,

Se queira e queira bem,

Se pegue, se desapegue

Se agite, desassossegue

E se acalme também.

Se olhe, se valorize

E se permita errar

Se dê de presente a chance

de pelo menos tentar

Se o SE for bem usado,

o impossível sonhado

pode se realizar.

 

Bráulio Bessa

Curiosity is a balm for loneliness

 

Alone v. Lonely: 

There’s a difference.

On a recent hike, I spoke with a friend about the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Being alone is often a condition for peaceful solitude and introspection. For parents with young children, a moment alone is so rare, it’s a thing to be savored, even if it’s a few extra minutes in the bathroom. For so many of us, alone time is me time. 

It’s time to read, exercise, lay about, meditate, masturbate, do whatever you want.

Feeling lonely, on the other hand, is an emotional, existential, and social experience that can be profoundly debilitating. In my office, I’ve heard many people talk about loneliness, the kind that is timeless and familiar as well as the kind that seems specific to this era:

• the loneliness of young people who made the difficult choice of going no contact with their parents and the loneliness of parents suffering after losing a relationship with their child.
• the loneliness of new parents shocked by the isolation this new stage of life has thrown them into, precisely at a moment when they need more support.
• the loneliness after breakups, bad dates, extended separations, and stalled family reunions.  
• the loneliness felt when cheated on, the compounding effect of negligence and deception.
• the loneliness of the person who had an affair to offset the loneliness that crept up on them—even while surrounded by a loving spouse, kids, and community.
• the loneliness of not having someone to go home to after a hospital stay, so you stay one more night.
• the loneliness of struggling with your mental health and watching the world outside seemingly continue on without you.
• the loneliness of taking two buses to work, surrounded by others in the same position, but not speaking to anybody.
• the loneliness of being different and trying to act like everybody else.
• the loneliness felt when an important relationship, of any kind, suddenly falls apart over a difference in opinion, values, or politics.

This last one is the most prevalent story of loneliness I hear lately, particularly with teens and college students, though it’s not limited to that group. What causes the hurt is less the consequences of vitriol and high-pitched opposition, than the acute pain of being close one day and not speaking to each other the next.

When is loneliness most painful?

Loneliness is most painful not when we are alone but when we are misunderstood, rejected, ostracized, or ignored by the people around us.

As social creatures, we benefit from exploring the incomprehensible and painful complexities of our world in community, in dialogue and debate. It’s how we learn. As anxious creatures, however, we often give in to our urge to simplify those complexities into binaries with clear rights and wrongs. We allow false certainty to give us a sense of moral clarity. And, from this place, we find ourselves screaming at a parent, partner, friend, or stranger on the internet: How could you possibly think this way?!

My work is about encouraging people to instead ask: “How did you come to think this way?” It communicates a willingness to listen even if you don’t agree. It says you care about them enough to try to understand. It says: Our relationship is worth it. The answers to “How did you come to think this way?” often reveal details about a person’s childhood, fears, losses, and hopes for the world. These are insights you may never have learned had you not asked.

Curiosity is a balm for loneliness.

Every day, there are headlines, posts, and conversations that leave us feeling as if we’d rather be alone than engage with others on such sensitive and divisive topics—whether it's politically-driven, a schism in your family, or one of a million other topics we are collectively fighting about as a society.

My work, in part, is about helping you to disagree without disconnecting. 

It’s about helping you approach the unfamiliar with curiosity even if it scares or enrages you. 

It’s okay to respond to such overwhelm with self-isolation. But I hope you won’t stay there too long. I hope you will emerge and seek connection outside of yourself even if it’s hard, even if it means meeting new people or learning a new skill or going to a place you’ve never been.

Let’s Turn The Lens On You

• Reflect on a joyful experience—past or future—of being alone.
• What stands out to you about it?
• Why is it important to you?
• Reflect on an experience of feeling lonely.
• What helped you transcend it?
• What would it mean to deepen your connection with someone new?
• What about with an old friend with whom you’ve lost touch?
• Describe an experience where your curiosity made you see things differently.
• How might you show up differently in moments of conflict to preserve that connection?
• How might you ask or encourage another person to join you in that?

Esther Perel

Modern Polyamory

 

 Is There Only One Way to Do It?

There are many, and choosing which one suits you depends on a lot of factors: Are you currently in a relationship? If you are, do you want other relationships to take equal priority? Do you want to fall in love with other people or just have sex with them? A non-exhaustive taxonomy.

Open Relationship: In a strictly technical sense, this is when you and your partner can have sexual, but not romantic, relationships with other people.

Swinging: A couple who have sex or dates with other people as a duo.

Hierarchical polyamory: When you and your partner can have relationships — romantic or sexual — with other people but have agreed to remain each other’s primary partner. You might pursue these relationships as a couple or separately.

Nonhierarchical polyamory: There are no primary partners in this scenario — everyone is on an equal footing.

Solo-poly: A single person pursuing multiple intimate or sexual relationships while trying to avoid riding the Relationship Escalator. This means you’re not particularly interested in, say, sharing a home or bank account with any one person.

What Is a ‘Metamour’?

Becoming non-monogamous doesn’t mean you have to join a ten-person polycule or memorize ‘The Ethical Slut.’ Still, there are terms that many non-monogamous people will use while discussing their arrangements, and it’ll make things easier to familiarize yourself with at least a few.

Comet partner: A romantic or sexual partner who might live far away or appears in your life only occasionally. When around, you pick up your tryst, but there are no obligations to one another between these meeting points.

Compersion: The pleasure you derive from your partner enjoying romantic or sexual happiness or success with a person who isn’t you. The opposite of jealousy.

Kitchen-table polyamory: A style in which everybody in a polyamorous network — primary partners, tertiary partners, metamours — is encouraged to form close and friendly relationships with one another (without necessarily being romantically involved) to the point where they can all sit down and have dinner without its being weird.

Monogamish: Often attributed to relationship columnist Dan Savage, this arrangement is at the halfway point of monogamous and open: You and your partner are exclusively committed to each other but allowed purely physical encounters on the side. Think of Cameron and Daphne from White Lotus, season two.

New-relationship energy (NRE): The all-consuming, chemistry-altering high that accompanies the early period of being romantically involved with a new person. NRE, and the chance to experience it many times, is cited as one of the biggest perks of polyamory, but it’s also one of the biggest sources of anxiety when a partner is experiencing it with someone else.

Nesting partners: The partner(s) with whom you live. Not necessarily a primary partner.

One-penis policy (OPP): Probably the most-hated concept in the world of ethical non-monogamy; this is often when a cis straight man only allows his female partner to sleep with another person who doesn’t have a penis.

Polysaturated: When you’ve reached maximum capacity on partners and/or time.

Primary partners: For people who practice hierarchical non-monogamy, this is the relationship that comes above all others in terms of time, commitment, loyalty — sometimes the person you share a home, finances, or children with. If you have a primary partner, you might refer to your other partners as secondary or tertiary.

Relationship escalator: This refers to the way in which monogamous people, by default, “level up” their romantic relationships: how they go from dating to becoming exclusive to living together to getting married to merging finances to having children. A process that many non-monogamous people want to avoid or at least question.

Vee structure: A three-person arrangement in which one person acts as the “hinge,” or point of connection, while the other two don’t have a romantic or physical relationship with one another.

Veto Power: If you’re in a primary partnership, you may grant each other the ability to call for a change in each other’s outside relationships — whether they’re spending too much time with a person or you simply object to them dating that person as a whole. A controversial concept within the poly world.

How Do I Broach This With My Partner?

There are so many ways this conversation could go wrong. So we asked three couples who handled it well — and one who might have handled it better — to tell us how they first proposed it.

Julia told Matt she had a crush.

Ages: 41 and 39

Open for: slightly more than a year

Julia: After we had our child, I went through a few years of lacking sexual interest. It got to the point where it felt like I might never be interested in having sex again and that would be fine. That began to change in May 2022. I started having a crush on someone. I didn’t know if I was even going to tell Matt, but I didn’t want to repress this part of myself. And I didn’t want to cheat on him. Eventually, I told him about this crush, how I was feeling different and vibrant. I said, “I’m feeling more open about my sexuality and more interested in exploring it.” He said, “Are you asking to open the marriage?”

Matt: We talked and cried for hours. But I knew it made no sense to hold her back. I was like, I’m not going to get in your fucking way.

Julia: It was still an unresolved idea, and we sat with it for a week. I never wanted to push it, I wanted to wait for him to be the one to suggest it. Eventually, he said, “I don’t want to hold you back from being yourself.”

Misty reminded Ari of an old conversation.

Ages: 29 and 29

Open for: 3 years

Misty: The conversation happened after Ari came out as nonbinary. I brought up these conversations we had had in college about having threesomes. I used to say, “I would only do it if it was two guys. I’m not gay.” He’d say: “I’d do it if it were two girls. I’m not gay.” So at the time we thought, Okay, well, then we’re never going to do this.

Ari: You had just come out as pansexual. You said, “Maybe we can talk about what it would look like for me to start exploring that part of my sexuality.” I was shocked at my own response because in the past I’ve been very territorial and heavily monogamous. But I was like, “Yeah, let’s start talking about it.”

Misty: You had the moral high ground of, “Oh, my wife is coming out to me. This is me honoring someone’s queerness.” Literally a few months later, at my birthday party, there was a girl there we were really into, and the threesome happened. The next day, we were like, “Wow, that was fun. Should we download Feeld?” I do think the first conversation was deceptively easy.

Steven and Andrew talked about flirting.

Ages: 45 and 39

Open for: 7 years

Steven: Andrew can tell me every single day that I look great, that I look sexy. And of course I want to hear those things, but there’s a difference between your husband telling you that and someone you’re not married to saying it.

Andrew: Every year, we’d go to this Christmas party. It was lots of gay men on Broadway. They were all beautiful, and it was a party full of flirting. I remember one time asking Steven afterward, “How do you feel about me flirting with other people?” Because I felt the same way Steven did — a beautiful man at that party can make me feel sexy in a way that my husband can’t. So we discussed those feelings and talked about how we both thought it was healthy. That was a gateway for us.

Eva gave Tomas an ultimatum.

Ages: 30 and 30

Open for: 8 years

Tomas: I was in Europe, she was in the U.S., and she wasn’t happy with the relationship. We got to a stage where she said, “Either we open it up or we have to break up.”

Eva: I obviously know now that in the literature there’s this idea of non-monogamy by coercion, and that isn’t great. But it was challenging to do long distance. Also, Tomas was my first serious relationship, and I had this fear that I would settle too early. I wanted to date other people.

Tomas: It was not something I ever considered. I always saw myself in a monogamous relationship and married with kids and all that. But we talked about it over a few months, which helped.

Eva: At the beginning, he thought I was trying to find a way to replace him. Over time, when he realized that wasn’t happening, he was more fine with it.

Should We Come Up With Some Rules?

When couples start being non-monogamous, there are, in general, two kinds of rules they tend to set. 

The first is about the structure of the arrangement. Are you seeing new people as a duo, or is it okay to pursue an outside relationship on your own? Are you remaining each other’s primary partners, or are you eliminating the hierarchy entirely? Breaking these kinds of rules can feel like a violation or at least require serious negotiation. A few years ago, Alice and her husband opened their marriage. They knew they wanted to date together and had started seeing another couple but hadn’t set firm rules. One day, the four of them were together at a food festival in Brooklyn. “I had to go off somewhere, and the other husband had to go off somewhere. So my husband and the woman were left at this food festival and ended up going back to our apartment together and then slept together,” she says. “We hadn’t clearly said, ‘No, that’s not allowed.’ It was murky. But I felt really betrayed and devastated, which I think is hard for people outside of the lifestyle to understand.”

The second kind of rules are of the more tactical, logistics-y variety. Keep your wedding ring on always, for example, or no sleepovers at home, or no more than two dates with other people per week. Nearly every couple we spoke to said that these types of rules are more like training wheels: important to set up and follow in the beginning to make everyone feel safe but likely to fall off as people get more comfortable. Brittany and Roy gave each other curfews, which they stuck to in the beginning, until needing to be home at a certain time started to make them feel constrained and they realized they didn’t really care. It became a specific request for specific circumstances, like if one of them was sick. Blake and Paula had the “no sex in the shared bed” rule for a while, “but at a certain point I was like, ‘I personally don’t care anymore whether you have sex with someone else in our bed,’” says Paula. “This does not seem important to me. ‘Go forth and let’s see how it feels.’ And then you did it and I did it. And we were both like, ‘Oh, this is fine. We don’t care.’” Some non-monogamous people are skeptical of rules in general. “I think a path for success for an open couple is to be able to be very present, treat every moment as if it’s unique,” says Robert. His partner, Olivia, adds, “If you had a set of rules, it would almost feel very strict, like monogamy.”

Where Do I Meet People?

Unless you live in Brooklyn or San Francisco (and even if you do), chances are you’re meeting people on the apps. Many default to Feeld, the non-monogamy and kink-friendly dating app, but you could do just as well somewhere like Hinge, matching only with others who label themselves non-monogamous. If you and your partner are dating separately, you might consider acting as each other’s wingman. After Toni opened her marriage, she found that she was having trouble meeting women. “I joined several apps, and nothing was really happening for me,” she says. Her husband, Tom, started matching with people he could potentially set her up with on Feeld. To one woman, Clarissa, he wrote, ‘Hey, my wife would love to speak with you separately without me, are you okay if I connect you?” then put Clarissa and Toni in a group chat. The two of them dated for a few months.

Does My Wife Want to Hear About My Night?

Some couples who date separately follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — this can work well for those who like a little secrecy or just don’t want to talk about everything. But more often, couples like to share at least some details about how their respective love lives are going. Some ways to make those conversations less fraught.

Don’t debrief immediately.

“When we get home from a date with somebody else, that’s not the time to talk about it,” says Ethan, who opened his marriage three years ago. In that moment, he says, the most important thing is to reassure your partner: “Hey, I came home to you, and I want to be with you.” He adds, “Then, after some time has gone by, you can say, ‘How did the date go?’ It’s easier the second day.”

And don’t go into every detail.

Even if you and your partner want to be transparent with each other, it doesn’t necessitate giving a play-by-play. For one thing, too much information could send your partner into a spiral of anxiety or insecurity. Plus it’s not always the most considerate to the partners who aren’t in the room. “It feels a little bad to talk about every little thing you did with somebody, especially if they don’t have the ability to tell their own story,” says Blake, who has been partnered for ten years and poly for seven. “It’s just bad manners.”

But do consider sharing breakthroughs.

The one exception to Blake and his wife Paula’s rule is when they have a sexual first. “The first time I fisted someone, I was like, ‘Oh my God, Blake,’” Paula says. Another time, Blake called her with news. “I was like, ‘I fucked a guy in the butt,’” Blake says. “We celebrated.”

And findings.

“There’s one guy that I was with, and it was just a fabulous experience,” says Emily, who is married to Ethan. “I told him I couldn’t squirt. He said, ‘I am telling you, you can,’ and at the end of a four-hour session with him, I squirted for the first time.” Upon hearing about this, Ethan felt insecure. “But then I said, ‘Okay, what did he do? Let me learn,’” he says. “Now I think we need to send him Christmas cards.”

Should We Sleep With Them on the First Date?

If you’re a couple on a date with another couple, there are things to consider that you don’t have to think about as a single on a date with another single. “We’ve been a lot of couples’ first dates after they’ve opened up their relationship,” says Amelia, who frequently dates other couples with her husband, Chris. Below, the two share some advice.

Amelia: We’ve been together eight years, and it’s exciting to see that charming first-date persona anew in your partner.

Chris: But we often notice that other couples seem unsure of what they want out of the situation. We will say, “What are you guys hoping for?” And they’ll say, “We never really talked about it.” So we’re often putting the brakes on. People will want to go out for drinks, then go back to their place, and it’s like, “No, it would be better if you guys went home, processed your feelings, and then let us know if you’re both interested.” A red flag is when one partner seems overly excited and the other is pulling back. And sometimes two people just clearly want different things. So we try to really communicate — like, we’ll say, “Hey, are you in this pile of eight people because you want to be, or are you in it because you feel like you need to be?”

Amelia: When dating together, we have pretty good game: We’ll tee each other up to be charming. But sometimes we just have more of a connection with only one of the people in the couple: Our current girlfriend and boyfriend both started out as part of other couples. Things didn’t work out with the other partner, but we kept seeing them.

Am I Being Nice Enough to My Boyfriend’s Girlfriend?

If you’re not in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation, you may find yourself getting to know your partner’s partners, otherwise known as your metamours.

Don’t think of them as rivals.

When it comes to her husband’s girlfriends, Ali goes out of her way to avoid acting territorial. “I’m not in competition with these women. It’s not like, I’m more important because I am his wife. I am here to make sure that their needs are being met as well as mine,” she says. In the past, she’s given her phone number to new people her husband is dating in case they’re feeling unsure about him and want to talk. She’ll also intervene to make sure her husband is being a good boyfriend. “He has a girlfriend that he’s been with for two years,” she says. “I know the relationship is important, so sometimes I’ll facilitate. I’ll ask, ‘Have you FaceTimed or seen Daphne lately?’”

It’s okay to say, “Hey, this is our thing.”

Alejandra recently went on a trip upstate with Diego (her primary partner), Ivy (Diego’s partner), and Nathan (Ivy’s partner). It was the first vacation the group had taken together, and Alejandra pulled her metamour, Ivy, aside. “In bed, I refer to Diego a lot as ‘Daddy,’ and the one thing that I asked Ivy not to do in front of me on this trip was call him that because that might make me uncomfortable,” Alejandra said. “Ivy was like, ‘Oh, that’s totally fine. I’ve never called him that in my life.’ I was like, ‘Great.’”

But also, it’s not all on you.

A lot of the responsibility lies with the hinge, or mutual partner, in making sure nobody feels neglected. “When you are the middle person, you need to make sure that you’re giving equal amounts of attention to those two people,” Alejandra says. “It can be mental gymnastics: Okay, I held this person’s hand. So I have to hold this person’s hand. Oh, I gave this person a kiss. Oh, fuck, I want to make sure that everyone feels loved.” On their trip upstate, Diego, the hinge, was openly affectionate with Ivy in front of Alejandra, but later, when Alejandra began feeling insecure, he reassured her. Alejandra describes the situation: “I’m like, I’ve gained about 20 pounds, so I do not feel super-comfortable in my skin, and Ivy’s gorgeous. As soon as I felt that, I just started talking about it in front of everyone, and Diego told me some nice things, that I’m superhot and fuckable, and that’s what I needed. He did a great job. I would love to go on a little trip with them all again.”

But if your metamour is giving you a genuinely bad feeling, don’t ignore it.

Ali recalls a former metamour who grew angry after she and her husband tried to set boundaries. “She told him she had HPV, which is not a scary thing to most people, but I have a family history of cancer,” Ali says. “I said that certain sex acts are off the table, and she ended up exploding on him on his birthday while he was with his family, just keeping him on the phone for hours and hours.” The relationship ended on its own, but if it hadn’t, Ali would’ve intervened. “The language would have been, ‘I noticed so-and-so is treating you in this way, and I feel like you deserve better.’”

How Much Time Does This All Take?

You might be thinking at this point, I have a job, and a partner, and friends, and hobbies. How in the world am I going to make time for dating, and then talking about dating, on top of all of that? Some non-monogamous couples keep shared Google calendars or reserve one night a week for each other. Julia, who is in an open marriage with her husband, Matt, breaks down how they manage their week-to-week and what she’s had to give up to make room.

Matt and I have an agreement about how much time we can spend with another person weekly. Spending a whole evening out once a week, either Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, is totally fine; usually, it’s after we have dinner with our young child, so from 7 p.m. till 1 a.m. And then we’re okay with each other sleeping over somewhere else once every two weeks.

Right now, I feel at capacity with one secondary partner and my husband. If my one secondary partner were way more casual, then maybe I could date two people. In order to keep my nuclear family my priority, the amount of time I put toward this other relationship has a maximum. I’d guess it takes up, or keeps me away from Matt, eight to 12 hours a week, depending on if I stay over at my partner’s or not.

I think I’ve ended up sacrificing my more introverted hobbies. So I’ve done less reading. The gardening and yard work and just a lot of home-improvement stuff I let go to the wayside. I’ve done less crafts. I think Matt has too. I know he’s put aside house projects because he needs time to go on dates. He used to do a lot more woodworking.

Should We Tell Our Kids?

Some poly people prefer not to tell every single person in their lives — it simply seems unnecessary, or they don’t feel like explaining or receiving judgment. Others find it more challenging, logistically and emotionally, to keep it private. (What if someone spots you out and thinks you’re cheating? Or you need to tell work you’re leaving early to pick up your partner’s child?) Writer Molly Roden Winter explains how she navigated talking to her children about her and her husband’s open marriage.

My husband and I never planned to tell our children about our open marriage. But seven years after we took our first fumbling steps toward non-monogamy, I got off a plane to find a series of text messages from my then-13-year-old son, Daniel. “Mom,” he wrote, “are you and Dad in an open marriage?” My husband, Stewart, had left his OKCupid profile open on his laptop, and Daniel had seen it.

I found a spot against the wall of the Houston airport to call him. When Daniel picked up, I began by telling him how happy his father and I were, how we were always honest with each other. But Daniel’s main question surprised me. “I get that Dad has time for it,” he asked. “But when do you do it?” This question brought me relief: Like many mothers with a full-time job, I’d worried that I wasn’t spending enough time with my children, and using precious nonworking hours to go on dates made me feel particularly guilty. Here was proof that, in Daniel’s mind at least, I was around so often he couldn’t fathom my managing to be anywhere else.

Daniel, the eldest of my two boys, had always been eminently reasonable. As an infant, he cried only when he needed something, and in elementary school, Daniel’s teachers often commented on his extraordinary comfort level with adults and his ability to mediate conflicts among his peers. With him, I had always leaned toward honesty: I’d told him about my limited drug use as a teenager, my fraught relationships with eating and body image, and my family’s history of mental illness. But speaking to my son about my sex life felt far more difficult. “I don’t do it very often,” I lied.

Daniel seemed satisfied, but over the next few weeks, once I returned to Brooklyn, he was consumed with curiosity about my whereabouts. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Are you really going to see a friend? Are you sure you’re going to the gym?” Stewart, meanwhile, continued to come and go as he pleased. “Why doesn’t Daniel ask where you’re going?” I asked Stewart one night. “Why doesn’t anyone seem to care if fathers have sex, but every mother is supposed to be the goddamn Virgin Mary?” Stewart offered to speak to Daniel, who afterward apologized to me. “I’m sorry I’ve been asking where you’re going all the time,” he said. “I know it’s private.”

“It’s okay, honey,” I answered. “It’s just that I don’t think you actually want to know if I’m on a date. And sometimes I really am just going out with friends or to the gym.” Daniel nodded. He’d try not to ask, he said, “but if I do, can you just lie if you have a date?” He seemed to agree: My dishonesty was also in his best interest.

While Daniel had always been compliant and even-tempered, his younger brother, Nate, had a penchant for emotional extremes. At the end of our phone call in the Houston airport, I’d asked Daniel to put away his father’s laptop; while he may have been mature enough to handle the truth, I hoped to keep our open marriage hidden from his younger brother as long as possible. But four years after Daniel called me in Houston, I was in my bedroom when I heard a scream from downstairs. Nate burst in with Stewart’s old iPhone in his hand. “Mom!” he shouted. “Dad’s cheating on you!” He had found pictures of Stew with his girlfriend.

Rather than asking questions stoically and matter-of-factly, as Daniel had when he first discovered Stewart’s dating profile, Nate’s eyes were wide, his breathing rapid. “Are you getting a divorce?” he asked. No, I said. He asked me who the woman was. “You don’t need to know who,” I said. “The important thing is I know who she is, and Dad isn’t cheating on me. Cheating means you lie, and Dad and I always tell each other the truth.”

There I was, standing on the same line between boundaries and honesty, exactly where I’d stood with Daniel four years earlier. Yet what I’d learned from Daniel was only halfway applicable. While Daniel was a classic introvert — often cutting discussions short in order to process his feelings alone — Nate was more like me, an extrovert who preferred to talk through complex emotions. Tell Nate too much, and he’d be anxious. Tell him too little, and he’d fill in details with his own worst fears. I checked my mind and my gut for signs of the old shame, but it registered only as a weak flicker. Calmly, I told Nate that his father and I had an open marriage. “Should we FaceTime Dad at his office?” I asked. While Stewart and I had spoken to Daniel separately when he first found out, I’d come to understand the importance of presenting a united front. Stewart and I proceeded to tell Nate our beliefs about open marriage — our commitment to each other, the emphasis on honest communication, the affirmation of each other as our life partners of choice. There was one question Nate came back to over and over again. “Just promise me you guys still really love each other,” he said.

In the months after, additional questions arose. “Are you sleeping with my orthodontist?” he asked. “No,” I responded. “Non-monogamy doesn’t mean you sleep with everyone. And I would never get involved with someone you know.”

“Cool,” he said, relieved. Then, a few days later: “Do you and Dad still like having sex with each other?” I said “yes,” to which Nate replied, “Okay, okay. Don’t say anything more!” Over time, Nate’s questions became less frequent. Stewart and I had always been affectionate with each other in front of the kids, but now I often saw Nate peeking around corners when Stew and I hugged, or jumping between us happily when we held hands on weekend outings or family vacations. And if Stewart and I fought in front of the kids, we tried to make sure they bore witness to our reconciliation as well.

Daniel, who is now an adult, recently confessed that back when he was 13, he’d been more upset about the open marriage than he’d let on. Like Nate, he’d equated open marriage with infidelity, fearing that any arrangement outside the conventions of monogamy was verboten. Would his parents stay together? Would the foundation of our family crumble beneath his feet? “It’s okay, though, Mom,” he said, registering my panic. “I’m fine with it now.” What helped, he said, was that nothing actually did change: My and Stewart’s marriage remained strong. Plus, he said, he grew up. It is tempting to believe that the choices we parents make are helping to shape our kids into confident, secure adults, but our children, ultimately, will become who they will become — maybe thanks to us, maybe in spite of us, and maybe a little bit of both.

And What About My Co-workers?

Katie Coyne, the environmental officer for the city of Austin, suggests being casual about it.

I’m married, and we’ve been poly for about two years. I have a public-facing job. It’s really important for me to feel like I’m not hiding anything about myself or hiding people who are important to me. I have it sort of worked out now. With people I’m closer with, I’ll just slide it in casually. For instance, when I was dating someone who has kids, I was going to soccer games and doing some part-time co-parenting. So at a happy hour with my staff, when someone asked what I was doing over the weekend, I said, “I’m going to my partner’s kid’s soccer game.” He was like, “Oh, I didn’t know you and your wife had kids.” I said, “Oh, we don’t. It’s my partner; I’m polyamorous.” The only person I was afraid to tell was my boss because he’s pretty religious. But the day after another partner and I broke up, we had an all-day executive-team coaching retreat. At the end of the day we were going to happy hour, and I said to him, “Hey, most of the rest of the executive team knows this about me, but I wanted to tell you that I am upset because my girlfriend and I broke up last night. I’m polyamorous.” He didn’t know how to react, but he’s adapted. A few months ago, I even took a date to a fundraiser. One of the organizers was like, “Oh, is this your partner?” And I said “No, actually, we’re on a date!” And my boss was like, “Great to meet you.” Everyone’s kind of rolling with it.

What Can Go Wrong?

More people means more interpersonal dynamics — double or triple the giddiness, maybe, but also double or triple the jealousy, anxiety, abandonment, and painful breakups.

The hierarchy might shift.

For the first five years of our open relationship, Eva and I were each other’s primary relationship. Any outside relationships never got super-serious. I was under the impression that that would always be the case. Then, two years ago, Eva met this other person and they fell in love. She started spending more nights at his house, and the relationship developed to a stage where Eva was very emotionally involved. Now her other boyfriend and I are on an equal footing in terms of the importance in the relationship. We celebrated her birthday together this year. — Tomas

You might become a third wheel.

One time, we met a girl who showed interest primarily in Ethan but said she was also interested in me. We had her over for drinks, and when things carried into the bedroom, it was clear that the focus was really him. It was our first threesome. At one point, we were talking about what we all wanted. So I said to Ethan, “What do you want? I want you to have what you want.” And he said he wanted to fuck the other girl. Then they went off to do their thing and I wasn’t involved. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I left the house. —Emily

Your partner might date someone who wants you gone.

The first time that Blake fell in love with someone else, it felt clear to me that she hoped that she would win him over and that he would leave me for her. When I met her in person, it didn’t feel to me like, Oh, she’s not ready to meet me. It felt like, She’s bummed about me. She was sad. She did not want me in the picture. Since then, I’ve met other women Blake has been in love with and it’s been great. And I’m able to look back and say, “The vibes were really off.” —Paula

They might realize they’d rather be monogamous.

We met on OKCupid and had both set ourselves as non-monogamous. We’d both just gotten out of eight-year relationships. She and her ex had decided to be non-monogamous to try to save their relationship. Over the course of ours, she basically figured out a poly relationship was not really what she wanted. I was encouraging her to date. I thought over time she’d become more comfortable. But she didn’t. She’d get really anxious and have a lot of fear and jealousy when I was trying to date. She’d say, “Hey, please don’t do this. I’m not ready for it.” There was this sense that I was somehow hurting her, and she felt like she was cheating on me when she went on dates with other people. I felt constricted. And then there was the fact that we kind of wanted different things — like, she wanted to have a child very soon. Over time, once we realized this feeling wasn’t going away, we started talking about ending the relationship. We’d do this thing sometimes where we’d lie around and scroll through OKCupid and try to find people for each other. She came across this one guy’s profile one day, and I was like, “Oh my God, you have to, like, go out with him. He’s just like me except better for you than I am.” And she did, and she ended up married to him, and they had children soon after. —Nikhil

You might tire of your secondary status.

I was dating somebody — I’ll call him Michael. And he was in a primary relationship with Michelle.

At the time, they were making a lot of space for loving other people and inviting those lovers or boyfriends into their home and on vacations with them. I was their secondary. I was very connected to them, and I very much fell in love with Michael. Michael very much fell in love with me. I was supporting Michael while he prepared to propose to Michelle. But then I went through a really rough period. I needed more emotional support than he could give me. I was impulsive and broke up with him. I knew Michelle was consoling him for many months afterward. A few years later, Michelle reached out to me. She’d asked seven of his lovers and former lovers to come surprise him for his birthday. We tied him up and throttled him in complete silence. So it was ultimately a happy ending. —Sonya

They might leave you behind.

Seven years ago, I met this woman. I was mostly monogamous and single. She was very up front that she had a boyfriend and they were open. We started dating, and for those two years, I wasn’t dating multiple people — I just was dating her, and she really just wanted one female companion and him. The beginning of the end was when her and her boyfriend’s relationship started to become codified in traditions. He proposed to her, and it threw me. It made the balance beam that I was on feel uneven and one-sided. He invited me to the wedding, but she was like, “Uh, no.” She said she didn’t want to have to explain to her family who I was at the wedding. It felt like she chose him over me, like, “You’re not fully included.” I think I saw her one more time after the wedding, but it was just awkward. —M.J.

You two might drift apart.

A few years after my husband and I opened our marriage, I met this woman. We fell in love really, really fast. One morning, after she slept over, my husband said, “Seeing you this excited about someone else really freaks me out.” But I’d seen him happy with people over the years we’d been open, so he let me give it a shot. Eventually, he even suggested she move in. Now, I live in very separate worlds with them in the same house. He’s a very tidy person. She loves to play music, cook, be messy. He’s reserved; she loves to give attention. My husband and I haven’t had sex in over a year. We love each other, but our connectedness just doesn’t run as deep as mine and hers. —Caroline

Or it might just break your relationship.

My partner and I started dating in college, and we stayed together after. She was always interested in alternative relationship modalities, and over the years she brought it up a couple of times. I’d be like, “Okay, that’s interesting. Let me think about it.” Eventually, when we moved cities, I was like, “Why don’t we give this a shot?” In the beginning, it felt really fun. Then she got more serious with someone and it became more difficult to talk about with each other. She was never anything but transparent about the facts. I would ask her what she was doing one day, and she’d say, “Oh, I’m seeing this person.” At one point, they started taking trips together, so I knew they were getting more serious.

I felt upset and wondered if I should be doing something similar. I started looking around more on Hinge and found somebody I had amazing chemistry with. Eventually, my feelings toward her and hers toward me grew so strong that I was like, I have to make a decision. It’s gotten out of hand, emotionally. The main relationship was suffering. Neither of us was putting the same attention into that that we were into the other relationships.

I ended up breaking things off with my partner. The conversation was consuming. I feel like I’ve never been so focused on something. I walked around the city for days and days thinking, What should I do? At one point, she asked, “Well, would you change your mind if I ended things with the other person?” I said, “Honestly, I don’t know. The cat’s kind of out of the bag.” And she said, “Well, honestly, I don’t know whether I’d be able to do it and hurt the other person in this way.” I don’t know if we’d have stayed together if we’d stayed closed. Or if it would have been the right decision to stay together. —Lucas

in, The Cut

Allison P. Davis, Alistair Kitchen, Alyssa Shelasky, Anya Kamenetz, and Bindu Bansinath

Alcoólicas

 I

É crua a vida. Alça de tripa e metal.

Nela despenco: pedra mórula ferida.

É crua e dura a vida. Como um naco de víbora.

Como-a no livro da língua

Tinta, lavo-te os antebraços, Vida, lavo-me

No estreito-pouco

Do meu corpo, lavo as vigas dos ossos, minha vida

Tua unha púmblea, me casaco rosso

E perambulamos de coturno pela rua

Rubras, góticas, altas de corpo e copos.

A vida é crua. Faminta como o bico dos corvos.

E pode ser tão generosa e mítica: arroio, lágrima

Olho d’água, bebida. A vida é líquida.

II

Também são cruas e duras as palavras e as caras

Antes de nos sentarmos à mesa, tu e eu, Vida

Diante do coruscante ouro da bebida. Aos poucos

Vão se fazendo remansos, lentilhas d’água, diamantes

Sobre os insultos do passado e do agora. Aos poucos

Somos duas senhoras, encharcadas de riso, rosadas

De um amora, um que entrevi no teu hálito, amigo

Quando me permitiste o paraíso. O sinistro das horas

Vai se fazendo olvido. Depois deitadas, a morte

É um rei que nos visita e nos cobre de mirra.

Sussurras: ah, a vida é líquida.

Hilda Hilst 

Entender os Outros

Nós combatemos a nossa superficialidade, a nossa mesquinhez, para tentarmos chegar aos outros sem esperanças utópicas, sem uma carga de preconceitos ou de expectativas ou de arrogância, o mais desarmados possível, sem canhões, sem metralhadoras, sem armaduras de aço com dez centímetros de espessura; aproximamo-nos deles de peito aberto, na ponta dos dez dedos dos pés, em vez de estraçalhar tudo com as nossas pás de catterpillar, aceitamo-los de mente aberta, como iguais, de homem para homem, como se costuma dizer, e, contudo, nunca os percebemos, percebemos tudo ao contrário.

Mais vale ter um cérebro de tanque de guerra. 

Percebemos tudo ao contrário, antes mesmo de estarmos com eles, no momento em que antecipamos o nosso encontro com eles; percebemos tudo ao contrário quando estamos com eles; e, depois, vamos para casa e contamos a outros o nosso encontro e continuamos a perceber tudo ao contrário.

Como, com eles, acontece a mesma coisa em relação a nós, na realidade tudo é uma ilusão sem qualquer perceção, uma espantosa farsa de incompreensão. 

E, contudo, que fazer com esta coisa terrivelmente significativa que são os outros, que é esvaziada do significado que pensamos ter e que, afinal, adquire um significado lúdico; estaremos todos tão mal preparados para conseguirmos ver as ações íntimas e os objetivos secretos de cada um de nós? 

Será que devemos todos fecharmo-nos e mantermo-nos enclausurados como fazem os escritores solitários, numa cela à prova de som, evocando as pessoas através das palavras e, depois, afirmar que essas evocações estão mais próximas da realidade do que as pessoas reais que destroçamos com a nossa ignorância, dia após dia? 

Mantém-se o facto de que o compreender as pessoas não tem nada a ver com a vida. 

O não as compreender é que é a vida, não compreender as pessoas, não as compreender, não as compreender, e depois, depois de muito repensar, voltar a não as compreender. 

É assim que sabemos que estamos vivos: não compreendemos. 

Talvez o melhor fosse não ligar ao facto de nos enganarmos ou não sobre as pessoas e deixar andar. 

Se conseguirem fazer isso - estão com sorte.

Philip Roth

in, 'Pastoral Americana'

Desenho

Alfredo Aquino

Traça a reta e a curva,

a quebrada e a sinuosa

Tudo é preciso.

De tudo viverás.

Cuida com exatidão da perpendicular

e das paralelas perfeitas.

Com apurado rigor.

Sem esquadro, sem nível, sem fio de prumo,

traçarás perspectivas, projetarás estruturas.

Número, ritmo, distância, dimensão.

Tens os teus olhos, o teu pulso, a tua memória.

Construirás os labirintos impermanentes

que sucessivamente habitarás.

Todos os dias estarás refazendo o teu desenho.

Não te fatigues logo. Tens trabalho para toda a vida.

E nem para o teu sepulcro terás a medida certa.

Somos sempre um pouco menos do que pensávamos.

Raramente, um pouco mais.

Cecília Meireles

A insistência é o nosso esforço, a desistência é o prémio

E é inútil procurar encurtar caminho e querer começar já sabendo que a voz diz pouco, já começando por ser despessoal. Pois existe a trajetória, e a trajetória não é apenas um modo de ir. 

A trajetória somos nós mesmos. 

Em matéria de viver, nunca se pode chegar antes. 

A via-crucis não é um descaminho, é a passagem única, não se chega senão através dela e com ela. 

A insistência é o nosso esforço, a desistência é o prêmio. 

A este só se chega quando se experimentou o poder de construir, e, apesar do gosto de poder, prefere-se a desistência.  

A desistência tem que ser uma escolha. 

Desistir é a escolha mais sagrada de uma vida. 

Desistir é o verdadeiro instante humano. 

E só esta, é a glória própria de minha condição. 

A desistência é uma revelação.

Clarice Lispector

in, A Paixão segundo G.H.

Os meus melhores desejos

Que a vida te pareça suportável.

Que a culpa não afogue a esperança.

Que não te rendas nunca.

Que o caminho que sigas seja sempre escolhido 

entre dois pelo menos.

Que te interesse a vida tanto como tu a ela.

Que não apanhes o vício 

de prolongar as despedidas.

E que o peso da terra seja leve

sobre os teus pobres ossos.

Que a tua lembrança ponha lágrimas nos olhos 

de quem nunca te disse que te amava.

Amalia Bautista

Wabi-Sabi...a beleza na imperfeição

 

Conta a lenda que um jovem japonês desejava aprender os complicados rituais da cerimónia do chá com seu grande mestre. Para testá-lo, o mestre pediu que ele varresse o jardim do templo.

Com cuidado, ele limpou cada canto do jardim. Tudo estava perfeito, nenhuma folha caída ou areia fora do lugar... as pedras e plantas também estavam todas organizadas.

Porém, antes de apresentar seu trabalho ao mestre, ele sacudiu o tronco de uma cerejeira, fazendo algumas folhas caírem despretensiosamente pelo chão. O mestre, impressionado, admitiu o jovem no seu mosteiro, pois com essa atitude ele mostrou que existe beleza na imperfeição.

O wabi-sabi é uma filosofia japonesa que encontra beleza naquilo que é imperfeito e incompleto. 

Por um lado, há “wabi”, o que significa harmonia e equilíbrio e, por outro, “sabi”, que significa decadente, degradado e enferrujado. Juntos, referem-se à beleza do imperfeito, irregular ou incompleto. Em suma, subjacente a este conceito está a noção de que nada é perfeito, completo ou permanente.

Literalmente falando, podemos dizer que “wabi” significa simplicidade, rústico... enquanto “sabi” se refere à beleza da idade, desgaste do tempo.

Por ser uma expressão exclusivamente japonesa, não possui uma tradução exata em português nem em outros idiomas.

O termo Wabi surgiu no início do século XV para designar uma nova sensibilidade estética, intimamente relacionada com a cerimónia do chá, um conceito que se referia ao ambiente geral e aos objetos utilizados, à estética elaboradamente simples do Chanoyu. A definição de Wabi remonta à solidão, à melancolia, uma conotação de tristeza por um desejo não realizado. Foi no século XVI que seu significado evoluiu para o que poderíamos chamar de “aceitação” ao que não deu certo. Wabi passou a significar a busca espiritual de descobrir e desfrutar da beleza da simplicidade, da imperfeição e da efemeridade.

O termo Sabi poderia ser explicado como sendo a capacidade de descobrir a beleza em algo que se deteriorou ou envelheceu com o tempo. Sentimos que o objeto possui uma história, uma vida que se reflete em sua aparência atual e que o faz único em sua existência.

Wabi-sabi é portanto, a visão ou pensamento de encontrar beleza em todos os aspectos da imperfeição da natureza. Trata-se da estética das coisas existentes em seu estado natural, das coisas que são “imperfeitas, impermanentes e incompletas”.  Um conceito profundamente influenciado pelos ensinamentos de Buda, interligado com o pensamento budista. É essencialmente um conceito ou ideologia que se desenvolveu como um conceito filosófico por volta do século XVI no Japão, durante o período Muromachi, com bases nos ideais do zen budismo, e que vem do ensinamento budista das três marcas da existência (三法印 sanbōin): 

1. impermanência (Anicca), 
2. insatisfatoriedade e sofrimento (Dukkha) 
3. vazio ou não eu (Anatta) 

Todas as coisas do Universo são impermanentes, cíclicas e vazias de um Eu e se conseguirmos parar para refletir sobre isso, veremos o esplendor do ciclo constante da vida em cada detalhe.

Wabi-sabi é uma boa maneira de nos ensinar a entender a natureza em sua plenitude e ver as maravilhas presentes em qualquer substância ou ser em sua forma mais natural e crua. Se olharmos profundamente para as paisagens, os objetos que nos cercam, os relacionamentos que temos e também para nós, seres humanos, a ideia de Wabi-sabi pode ser entendida como a apreciação de uma beleza que está fadada ao desaparecimento, ou mesmo uma contemplação efêmera de algo que se torna mais belo à medida que envelhece, desbota, fenece, morre, se transforma e consequentemente, adquire um novo encanto.

Para os japoneses, Wabi-sabi é um sentimento, mais do que um conceito.

É um sentimento baseado na aceitação, transitoriedade e imperfeição. Aceitar que o belo é imperfeito e incompleto. Um exemplo são os tapetes persas, que sempre possuem um pequeno defeito que garante sua autenticidade.

Perfeição só existe na ficção. A vida real é imperfeita.

Algumas características dessa tendência são a assimetria, aspereza, irregularidade, simplicidade, rusticidade, austeridade e modéstia. Uma forma de pensar muito ligada ao slow living, uma vez que busca a conexão com o autêntico e com a natureza, reconhecendo três realidades essenciais: nada dura, nada é completo, nada é perfeito.

Algo que podemos notar nessa tendência é o foco no processo, e não no produto final. 

Na jornada e não apenas no objetivo. 

É importante ver o belo na imperfeição e nas marcas que ficam registadas com o passar do tempo, como rugas e cicatrizes em nossos corpos.

Podemos perceber esse conceito em diversas artes japonesas como a Ikebana (arte de arranjos florais), jardins zen, bonsais, cerâmicas japonesas e a tradicional cerimônia do chá, kintsugi.

O kintsugi é a arte japonesa de reparar com laca de ouro ou prata objetos quebrados. Quando algo com história é danificado e sofre algum infortúnio, esse acontecimento entra na história do objeto. Portanto, deve ser enaltecido e celebrado, tornando, por exemplo, a cerâmica reparada mais forte e mais bela do que a original.

Como uma filosofia, kintsugi pode ter semelhanças com a filosofia japonesa de wabi-sabi, a aceitação do imperfeito ou defeituoso. A estética japonesa valoriza as marcas de desgaste pelo uso de um objeto. Isso pode ser visto como uma razão para manter um objeto mesmo depois de ter quebrado e como uma justificação do próprio kintsugi, destacando as rachaduras e reparos como simplesmente um evento na vida do objeto, em vez de permitir que o seu serviço termine no momento de seu dano ou ruptura.

Kintsugi pode se relacionar com a filosofia japonesa de "não importância" (無心 mushin) que engloba os conceitos de não-apego, aceitação da mudança e destino como aspectos da vida humana.

Wabi-sabi (侘寂?) é um ideal filosófico japonês, assim como uma abordagem estética centrada na aceitação da transitoriedade e da imperfeição dos objetos e dos seres humanos. 

Esta concepção é muitas vezes descrita como a do belo que é “imperfeito, impermanente e incompleto”. 

O wabi-sabi é a apreciação do despojamento, introduzida no Japão por Sen no Rikyu na cerimónia do chá. Refere-se ao viver uma vida comum com a simplicidade, com a insuficiência ou com a imperfeição, e está relacionado às doutrinas de desapego do Zen budismo. Estes conceitos estão representados na produção artística através do rústico, do imperfeito, do monocromático e do aspecto natural. Através do wabi e sabi, é possível o alcance do vazio da mente que traz tranquilidade. 

Wabi significa "quietude" e sabi se entende como "simplicidade", e expressam-se através do afeto que os japoneses possuem por simplicidade e subtileza.

Ensina-nos a olhar de uma forma positiva para tudo o que temos e a encontrar beleza naquilo que consideramos ser imperfeito: o wabi-sabi é uma filosofia japonesa milenar que nos permite enfrentar as nossas lutas modernas sem a sensação ilusória de que alcançaremos a perfeição.

Não raras vezes, concentramo-nos naquilo que poderia ser ou ter sido; o wabi-sabi concentra-se em apreciar, simplesmente, o que é. Sofremos com os desafios que encontramos no nosso caminho e o wabi-sabi olha para eles com aceitação e apreciação, encarando-os como algo que faz parte da natureza da vida.

Pelo facto de estarmos constantemente à procura de atingir algo que nos torne mais felizes, acabamos por não aproveitar aquilo que, efetivamente, já é nosso e já existe. É aqui que entra o conceito japonês wabi-sabi, cujas ideologias tradicionais se baseiam na importância de apreciar a beleza da imperfeição.

Os conceitos gerais associados a esta forma de estar na vida são a impermanência e o seu princípio fulcral assenta na crença de que devemos nutrir tudo o que é autêntico ao reconhecermos três realidades simples: “Nada dura, nada está terminado e nada é perfeito”.

Em japonês, os significados e as conotações de wabi e sabi evoluíram ao longo do tempo: wabi estava associado à solidão e à beleza da simplicidade e sabi estava associado à progressão natural das coisas (o passar das estações, por exemplo). À medida que a sociedade japonesa foi, também ela, evoluindo, estes conceitos passaram a ser vistos como libertadores, sendo as imperfeições algo natural, na medida em que resultam da progressão da vida. Juntos, estes termos harmonizaram-se para criar uma conceção mais abrangente da apreciação do avanço do tempo, que representa a beleza da impermanência.

Esta ideologia representa o equilíbrio entre a apreciação do que temos e o tempo, que nos permite entender que tudo é fugaz. É um escape a tudo aquilo que nos tenta convencer de que devemos querer mais; faz parte do mindfulness, porque se relaciona com a importância da atenção plena – para viver o agora e aproveitar esse momento único.

Que lições retiramos do wabi-sabi?

Sendo a noção de wabi-sabi algo muito amplo, são muitos os ensinamentos que nos transmite. Um dos principais encontra-se na mensagem de que tudo na nossa vida é impermanente e é essa transmutação constante que nos permite apreciar a sua beleza.

E sobre o tópico beleza propriamente dita, há algo que o wabi-sabi nos ensina também. Em todos nós existe uma noção programada daquilo que é o belo, desde o momento em que nascemos. Nesse sentido, não desconsiderando o cuidado do nosso corpo (que é a nossa casa), sobreleva-se a importância de aceitarmos o facto de existirem partes do nosso ser que não podemos mudar.

Se não precisamos de algo, para quê comprá-lo? 

Ser wabi-sabi no lar é adquirir peças que sabemos que vão «crescer» connosco, à medida que nos vamos transformando também.

Para aplicar esta filosofia é necessário que aconteça uma mudança de perspetiva. Deixarmos de procurar a perfeição e começarmos a valorizar a forma atual do que nos rodeia. Não existe uma fórmula fixa para aplicarmos estes ensinamentos no nosso dia a dia. Para algumas pessoas, wabi-sabi pode significar praticar a gratidão, para outras pode representar o valor de saber ouvir o outro, por exemplo. Encontre aquela que funciona melhor consigo e relembre sempre o seu ikigai – aquilo que a move todos os dias, ao acordar.

O wabi-sabi prega o oposto do que estamos a viver nos dias atuais. 

Prega a desconexão, a imperfeição e o relaxamento.

A beleza na imperfeição.

A simplicidade e naturalidade.

“Wabi-sabi é a beleza das coisas 

imperfeitas, impermanentes e incompletas, 

antítese da nossa noção ocidental clássica de 

beleza como algo perfeito, duradouro e monumental. ”

Leonard Koren