DailyJim: Present and distant at the same time

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the episode for Tuesday, yeah, Tuesday, May 21st, 2024. Just a few hours late. I am going to talk today about being present and distant at the same time. And so what I mean is, I am here on a project called Make Music Not War, here in Bremen, Germany. Make Music Not War 3, actually. It's the third one that I've participated in, third one that they've done, where it brings people from eight different countries in conflict, musicians together, and social media people, and filmographers, photographers, etc., to make songs together, to come together and bond, make songs together, cook together, eat together, live together in the same house for, I think, 10 or 11 days, about 50 people in total. And one thing that I've noticed is hard for me is to be here on the project like this, that is an all-inclusive, really focused project outside of the city, to be present with the people here while also being present at a distance.

Maybe that's the thing. Present at presence, present at the present, and also present at a distance. And to blend these two is really hard for me. So I just almost forgot, to be honest, about doing this episode. And I said, oh my goodness, because I've been talking with people from this place and that place, people from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, North Macedonia, Germany, Poland, Italy, people from many different places, a person from.

Very easy to get focused on this, and yet at the same time I pull back and I looked at Facebook for just a quick second, and part of me normally wouldn't look at these things while on these projects, but trying to stay present online while also being present in person. And saw that one of my friend's mother-in-law passed away. And I know his wife, so it's kind of like a friend, her mother passed away. And it's just this weird combination of being here while also being there at the same time. And I think about when we did this project last year and there were participants from Israel and Palestine and this was before October 7th, this was last March I think it was and yet at that time some of them almost didn't make it to the project because the airport was shut down in Israel because of protests I believe over the Netanyahu government but it was more specifically about a bill that I think was going into place that was going to give the executive branch power over the legislative branch or something like the legislative branch had power over the judicial branch and there were a lot of protests about it. And then once the people did arrive on the project, I remember that something happened in Israel. There was some type of attack, and I remember some Israeli participants saying that their friends were being called into the army reserves, and they felt guilty that they weren't there to be able to kind of join the effort that their friends were being called into. To and i just i think so often when we try to be present and really focused locally in person with somebody that we are pulled away to something that happened distantly um in trying to maintain kind of these connections so sometimes it's trying to maintain a connection between being here in germany and my friends in east africa but also my friends and family back in the u.s but also So that's more intentionally trying to maintain it, but sometimes there is the unintentional distance that we get pulled into where, again, we can be here on a project and then something happens back home, whether it's a death or whether it's a war or whether, maybe it's not even something happening back home, but maybe it's something that pulls us into our past. We think about, you know, some woman the other day talked about she had some sexual trauma and she was basically saying, you know, interacting with a man could take her back to that moment in the past immediately. Whether she wanted to go back there or not. Maybe she was trying very hard to be present with this person, but the guy touched her in a specific spot, or in a specific way, or gave her a specific look, or who knows what happened, or maybe there was a specific smell in the room, and all of a sudden she's transported back to that distant place in her past, and is no longer present. So I think there's just this.

I don't know, fastening is the word. There's a juxtaposition of trying to be present but also distant.

And sometimes the distant pulls us more than the present. Sometimes the present pulls us more to the distant. And just recognizing that maybe these elements are often dancing and playing with each other. And so even if we're quote-unquote 100% present, we're not really because we're still thinking about past events. And so we're thinking about people who are no longer in that space, and we're just trying to understand what's going on at a distance, and what's going on here as well. And yeah, this kind of goes maybe with my episode last week, talking about how we only cause 5% of what's really going on with somebody else.

Maybe there's always somewhat of a balance and a mixture of being present, and being distant, being focused on the present time while also being focused on the past and the future, being focused on the present location while also being focused on a more distant location as well. So I don't know. I hope this helps you reflect on something. It's late. I'm tired. I'm traveling a lot in the next couple of days. So I'm going to go sleep and try to focus on the present sleep and the future engagements that I have. And just trying to keep, what do they say, keep the balls in the air, keep juggling the balls or the bowling pins or whatever. I don't really want to juggle chainsaws, but I guess some people do that too. Or flaming swords, who knows what. So on that note, good night and talk to you all tomorrow.