What are the priorities in your life?

Some deep inspiration can come from very easy reflections.

In our life we THINK some issues are very important for us.

Regardless what we think, in practice what happens to this priorities?

One day it happened to me to make a list of what are the most important things in my life.

I took family, my couple, friends, knowledge, social transformation, personal transformation, prestige, and I put them in order of importance, thinking, when comparing two issues, if I’d feel worse if one of the two were missing me, in order to understand which was the most important.

A side of this list I put how may hours a day I was dedicating to this issues.

The result was amazing!

Would be the same 4U?

What happens inside?

In the former post about violence I talked about the fact that to be “nonviolent” one should be able to recognize violence and that in order to do that he or she can start only from her or his direct personal experience.

This opens a huge field of careful consideration about the theme of personal change.

When one starts dealing about themes such as social injustice and the necessity of a social change, he or she should consider that we lived all our lives completely immersed in an environment full of violence and injustice and that sometimes some aspects of those ugly things are sublety proposed as values.

Moreover, in today's age of massive transformation individuals, institutions and society are facing crisis. Transformation is going faster and faster, and the same thing applies to individual, institutional and society’s crises.

Changes which are taking place follow unexpected directions. This creates a general disorientation concerning the future and what to do in the present. In reality it’s not change per se what bothers us, because change in itself has many positive connotations. What worries us it’s not knowing what direction it may take and where we should direct our actions.

It is then necessary to give direction to a change which appears inevitable. The only way to do that is to start from ourselves. It is within ourselves that we should give direction to this disorderly transformation, whose outcome is yet unknown.

People who are active in a process of social transformation, such as those who work with associations, are particularly vulnerable to personal difficulties, such as frustration caused by the failure of a project, the feeling of being powerless in the face of too strong an “enemy”, or even the loss of enthusiasm and sense of purpose.

Taking into account the importance of human subjectivity as a fundamental factor in any process of change, it is very important to have a working method that helps sustaining our best aspirations and overcome the false differentiation between “personal” and “social” life. It is no possible to change the way the world goes without starting, at the same time, a process of personal evolution and personal strengthening, undermining the values and conditionings which prevent the achievement of one’s goals.

In the Humanist Movement we call this method “Personal Work” and we do it together dealing with some themes and interchanging experience... in some following post I'd like to propose some examples of those works, hoping that some readers of this blog would like to take part in a “virtual start” of a personal work process :-)

What about the “violence” issue?

In the first post of this blog I wrote about the aim of producing a big change using “active nonviolence”.

I think that this is an evidently positive proposition, but someone could argue that it could seem quite “naive”, at least if it remains just a simple statement.

Today I'd like to start dealing with the theme of nonviolence and I think that the best start would be to start with “what violence is”. To refuse violence I have to be able to recognise it!

It is not always easy to understand that violence is taking place in a situation we directly live in or we are in contact with. If one wants violence to end, however, he must be able to recognise it, in order to understand who is committing it, how, and maybe whether the person who is committing violence is simply carrying on the violence he or she received in the first place.

To break the chain of violence we must learn to recognize it, starting from our direct experience.

The most evident type of violence is physical violence, when someone is hurt or is forced to do something under the threat of being hurt.

There are however other types of violence that are equally severe and that sometimes can cause terrible consequences on whoever is subject to it.

There can be psychological violence, sexual violence, economic violence, religious violence, caste-related violence, and so on, depending on what kinds of limitations to freedom are imposed on the person who is the object of violence. Moreover, violence can be perpetrated by an individual, by a group or collectively by society as a whole. If someone cannot do something because of his or her gender, that is a form of violence. If someone is discriminated because of his or her religious beliefs, that is a form of violence. Violence takes place if someone is discriminated because he or she acts contrary to morality, or, even worse, if his or her freedom is limited because of his or her family or the place he or she was born.

In many of these cases violence takes place without physically hurting the victim. It always however causes a great sufferance to whoever receives it, and often to the person that perpetrates it.

There is violence every time a human being imposes his or her will on another human being. If I impose my will on others, limiting in any way their freedom, I am committing an act of violence.

So... my proposal is to talk about violence in everyday life, to talk about the violence that any of us commits in many cases even without realizing that it is violence!

virtues

Yesterday I made one reflection.

We are used to considering difficulties, the things we aren’t able to do, our negative side. Wouldn’t be much more stimulating to value our positive traits, the qualities that each of us has, more or less refined, to recognize and express them in action, while working to strengthen them?

In this field it is very interesting to notice that there is something like a shame when someone talks about his or her own qualities: just like if he were immodest.

We also use to feel ashamed when we want to tell someone else her or his virtues.

So I thought that it is very important that each one uses one's positive traits as a support when carrying on his or her projects. Could it be helpful to change a point of view on our life from an overcoming of difficulties to an enhancement of positive traits?

So I did one thing: I made a list of my virtues and I thought “How can I use these virtues to reach my goals?”

Try, folks, try…

Introducing this blog

...what to say... I am an Italian guy, living in Milan. So why am I opening a blog in a site visited and used by Indian People?

Well, the first thing I can say is that I'm really really fond of India. I've visited it several times, mostly to explore its huge culture such different from mine.

I work in Milan in the IT field but, as a volunteer, I belong to the Humanist Movement, an international organization whose aim is to produce a deep change using active nonviolence and putting the Human Being as the very centre of society. This is, of course, one of the reasons for which India is so fascinating to me. India, whose People succeeded in using nonviolence in order to liberate themselves from a domination!

Some friends of mine are Indian active members of the Humanist Movement and, in my journeys, I've also met many social workers and other people belonging to Indian NGOs, very active in the struggle against injustice poverty and violence.

I've discovered India not only as the economically emerging country that European People find every day on newspapers and TV, and not only as the society full of contradictions and contrasts with which I felt a strong impact in my fist voyage.

I discovered a place full complexity and whose people is trying to face all conflicts and contradictions of today's world.

I think that the roots of nowadays' problems and crisis are, for the first time in history, the same all over the world. These roots include one highest levels of violence in history but also a high level of consciousness in people who are realizing that.

I think that to face all this any of us must put in discussion many things, both about the society in which he or she is living and about the way of thinking and feeling inside.

That's why I open this blog: hoping that it will let me interact about all that with people from a culture so different from mine!!