I love you Jacques.

Happy New Year friends!

Just thought I’d drop a word here to say thank you for such an amazing year. I feel so blessed to be healthy, to have had all these incredible experiences and met some wonderful people – while also reconnecting with old friends who mean a lot to me.

Also I wanted to share a few of my new year’s resolutions. It’s a tradition of mine to set myself goals every year and I enjoy the challenge and the direction it brings to my existence.

1) Look after my body: this year I want to keep losing weight, get fitter, feel stronger and freeer. Also want to start doing things I’ve never  done before like skiing, surfing, diving – activities that bring pleasure and aliveness. This is my number one priority: keep challenging myself physically. Discover my limits and push them.

2) Stop buying new things:  for a while I’ve been feeling like I already own way too many things. I have so much stuff I never use, and I have way too many clothes, bags, shoes. I don’t need any new things (with one exception: books, that I always try to buy second hand). So I will pay extra attention to how I spend money. The idea is also to use all the things I have (cameras, craft things, kitchen stuff) in a way that’s more creative. This means finishing things I start and recycle into a new life things I don’t seem to use at all. Sell all the rest on ebay. Appreciate how much abundance there is already in my life.

3) Read more:  in 2012 I have managed to make a giant leap in terms of learning as I started reading again after what seemed like a very long reading fast (ie: running a business) but I would like to take it further and make it an essential daily habit. Reading while having breakfast is something I’m trying out at the moment and seems like I could implement it. That way I would read in the morning AND in the evening. Reading before bed is something I want to do every day as well, as I tend to take the computer to bed with me and it’s such a bad habit. It fucks with my brain and overstimulate it which delays the time I eventually switch off to sleep. In the long run it damages my rythm and energy levels.

I have a few others on my list which are more private but these 3 are the most important of this year’s objectives.

Today was a good start as we went for an hour run with my dad and brother. Let’s do this, folks!

Hope you have a creative and fun year!

Here is my favourite view of 2012: sunrise in Monument Valley’s Totem Pole

I have started a pinterest account.

The solitary

I hate to follow and I hate to lead.
Obey? Oh no! And govern? No indeed!
Only who dreads himself inspires dread.
And only those inspiring dread can lead.
Even to lead myself is not my speed.
I love to lose myself for a good while.
Like animals in forests and the sea,
To sit and think on some solitary isle,
And lure myself back home from far away,
Seducing myself to come back to me.

Nietzsche

Two years ago I was in the hospital unable to walk or even stand up so today I’m going to spend the whole day dancing in my apartment to celebrate.

When was the last time you spent the day celebrating your life, your safety and the mere joy of being?

My friend Jugurtha in NY and I have had an interesting conversation that I want to remember.

“Narcissistic Pervert” ~ personality disorder first defined by psychoanalyst P.-C. Racamier (1924-1996): A form of perversion whereby the subject behaves following a predation pattern vis-à-vis others. In those individuals, the need to be loved is superseded by the need to be obeyed. For the purpose of fulfilling that need, they are bent on demolishing the identity of their “prey”. They are manipulative & resort to mental harassment. They use induction: they have a talent for suggesting to others specific feelings, causing reactions to (often entirely fictitious) situations, without, ever, mentioning explicitly their obsessions. They always manage to avoid expressing to another being what they think. They proceed by innuendos, with, always, once the person is effectively hurt, “plausible deniability”.

Me: Do we know if the NP has a tendency to have addictions? (alcohol, gambling, drugs, overeating….)

Jugurtha: yes — it can be gambling like you say or sex addiction — or torturing the loved one — most likely, both alternatively on-again-off-again (sin, stray/silence/distance, then, remorse, make-up, promises, calm, torture, sin, etc., etc., etc. as long as the torturee collaborates

Me: Damn. Also (please excuse my candour but I have no expertise in that field) is there such thing as the opposite disorder: a personality with an overwhelming sense of empathy that corrupts judgement in the opposite way: embracing others feelings while ignoring ones own… if worse even: not having ones own…?

Jugurtha: big time — sure. A person that — for some specific reason or other (typically a violation of the person’s innermost intimacy) — will not revolt and, instead, (unknowingly) cultivate a situation where they suffer and are abused and defend themselves weakly so as to be abused & mistreated some more; the person’s hope for a prosperous, trusting, equal-to-equal relationship that hope was shattered for some historic reason (the person doesn’t want to venture in wildly risky territory again, but doesn’t know it, knows it only in the form of indirect suspicion). Consequently the person goes for second best: sole language where “love” is found in the form of the cycle of torture above.

The NPs suffer a lot deep down — it is hell for them — atrophied empathy doesn’t mean “never a moment of clarity” — they suffer a lot, it is a form of hell, I really do believe that — it’s hell for those individuals

Me: I really hope they do have these moments of clarity, but i’m not sure they do… It makes me infinitely sad inside. You know, the thought that they never can feel truly loved or at peace, or forgiveful of themselves or others… Or never even say the truth, see the truth.

Jugurtha: The most important thing to remember is that “the fight is fixed”, everything is predetermined, nothing can break the cycle, nothing can break the cycle, it is all like clockwork — those people are wonderful people locked in a cage, and the cage will always be there between the person and other human beings — always always always.

Thanks Jugurtha.