About desire

I have just had a fantastic week full off mastering moguls and black slopes in the snowy mountains of Austria. I went there with my brother who had the brilliant idea in the week before to book a trip while the snow was good. The snow was great and so where my discussions with him when we were not having fun carving. I learned something about him that I hadn't realized before; we are very similar people. Everybody always wonders how we can be brothers because we are so different. I am sorry to disillusion those so opinionated; we only express ourselves differently. We more and more seem to find each other without necessarily agreeing and I love him for it. Haven’t we written about this here before? Trust, respect, values and personal drive?

Where I get enthusiastic about something new, he is interested, but much more cautious. We both revere integrity, we want to be the best at what we do and have a passion for sports; I over analyze, he tends to think as little as possible. We are both very stubborn people; he listens, pretends to agree and then still does his own thing, I listen, tell you I disagree and then do my own thing. Which people interpret as me not listening, but that is another story. We are both opinionated and emotional people, we even found we partly share the same taste in women, music is debatable. We both are enthusiastic people, he just needs two more beers to show it. Where we differ is, as I said, in our expression; I wear my emotions on my sleeve where he is pretty hard to read. I anger easily, but forget just as quick; he has a higher threshold, but he does simmer a lot longer. I am not an easy person to be around unless you know me, he is an easy person to be around until you want to get to know him.

What if this is the same for most of us? What if we have the same desires, but just express ourselves so differently that it looks like we don’t? As brothers, there is this blood tie that keeps us trying to get to know each other better; the beer during the Après ski probably helped as well. What if we can facilitate this process of getting to the core of other people and get a real understanding of what drives their behaviour and desires so we gain more respect for each other as me and my brother did during our trip? Without copious amounts of alcohol, but with a lot of falling and getting up and probably some conflict on the way.

I have been thinking why we appear to be successful at building trust and mutual respect and apparently are able to facilitate the process just mentioned. Churchill said: “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” We approach most of what we do with a healthy dose of self-mockery, so there is no lack of failure. Because we believe in what we do and desire to be the best at it, we provide a lot of enthusiasm mixed with our vulnerability and we try to teach that it’s not desires that are a problem, it’s that they are too often too small. Too small to ignite the spark of creativity in people, too small to spark necessary change, too small to bother getting up in the morning. There is something else Churchill said: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Now isn't that something to desire and aspire to?