Getting Real With Rita

Edition #58 — July 2, 2004

Even Flow

Yesterday I spent the day at Toronto's Centre Island with my good friend Rita. We don't see much of each other — she's a habitual globe trotter who's currently living in another province — but we always have great conversations that flow freely and effortlessly between the profound and the ridiculous as we look for reasons to laugh. Our communications have been effortless from the day we met, some ten years ago.

It's a funny thing, really, because there are some people I just can't seem to talk with at all. My conversations with them are always uncomfortable, rigid, strained, largely impersonal and mostly shallow - the weather and sports report syndrome...

I find my poorest communications usually occur with the defensive types — people who are hiding their true selves from others because they don't want to appear weak and vulnerable. This causes them to take on the unnecessary burden of a false exterior; some fake personality that they believe will impress others — maybe the "tough guy", the "genius", the "super nice" person, or the "martyr" who suffers for everyone, etc.

I am very sensitive to that falseness in people; I feel it before they even speak. It's kind of weird to prejudge others before they've even uttered a word, but this one instinct of mine has always been 100% reliable — though many times it's after the fact as I'm giving myself an "I told you so" lecture for not having heeded my gut feeling and bought into someone else's illusion.

Take Off The Mask

It's difficult for me to speak to a mask when I want to connect with the soul of the occupant behind it. Rita and I have never had to worry about masks; we talk openly and honestly. Speaking with her, and people like her, always reaffirms that I am not wearing a mask, and that such levels of communication are not only pleasant and natural, but necessary. To do without them would be detrimental to my mental and even my physical health, I must assume — after all, laughter is the best medicine; the more open a conversation, the more light-hearted the atmosphere becomes.

Yet it's easy for me to imagine living in a world surrounded only by people who wear fear-based and hostile social masks. And if I were not familiar with the deeper levels of communication I've experienced, then I might even be fooled into thinking that this shallow, strained and impersonal way of communicating with others was "real", "normal" or "just the way it is".

Now look at today's corporate world. Here, "masking" is practically mandatory, since doing business is almost exclusively about selling and surviving in a hostile, competitive, greed and fear-driven atmosphere. Where is the soul level communication? There is none. Especially in a competitive hierarchy. People are afraid to expose themselves because they might get "kicked of the island" as it were. The mandate here is competition, not cooperation, and that sets the tone of the workplace, and the world.

Behind Blue Eyes

But the unfulfilled need for intimacy leaves a void; a hole that yearns to be filled with deep, meaningful interaction that comes naturally, but only when we're not wearing our competitive masks. Yet if we cannot fill that void naturally, then we must find some artificial means to balance that spiritual debt.

And so we have the drug addict and the alcoholic; the angry pessimist resentful of everything, the egotist and the sexual materialist who negates all but himself in the quest for more; the workaholic who spends 24 hours a day at the office, or the mediaholic who watches tv all day to drown out the noise of their own inner suffering. Everywhere we see the symptoms of our need for introspection and dramatic life change. Depression is not a chemical imbalance — it is a symptom, just like selling drugs to ease a spiritual imbalance is a symptom of materialism, and capitalism.

We can see such large-scale and unnecessary suffering everywhere. If only we could get real about the kind of world we want to create and help to sustain. Do we want to live like the Wizard of Oz behind some flimsy curtain, creating false and dramatic effects to impress others and keep them at a safe distance from our delicate hearts, or our wallets? For what good is a long, miserable life surrounded by material prosperity but without true intimacy? Who will ever know us, if we never allow ourselves to be known?

We don't have to be spiritually bankrupt. All it takes is opening up, letting down our guard, and being okay with failure, rejection and maybe finishing the race in second, or third, or fourth place.

The true secret to success (ie. happiness) is found in accepting ourselves in relationship to ourselves, not others. Speak up, speak well — and speak your truth.

Till next time,
Roland Kriewaldt


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