THE GAZE OF OTHERS

Every morning when I wake up I go to the kitchen to make my coffee…with one of those new coffee machines… I hate it! I have to turn on the machine, I have to add water in the tank, I have to find a pod of coffee in the closet, I have to place the pod in the right place, I have to put a cup under the beak of the machine, and then I have to press a button, the one indicating medium, and I wait…. A few seconds later the coffee comes out…. If I want another cup, I have to do ALL OF IT, over again instead of just pouring from the coffee pot…who invented this nonsense?

On my way to my favorite morning chair, I pass in front of a mirror, and it reflects the image of a man that sometimes I do not recognize, and depending upon the morning, it fills me with surprise, astonishment, pleasure, anxiety, pride, disdain, pain, joy or sorrow, with ….anything that comes to mind.

Looking at myself is a truly adventurous experience as I am sure it is for everybody… Do I see in the mirror what others see? This image in the mirror is it really me or only an appearance of me? Who really am I and what do I really project on people?

I feel like saying all the time, you believe I am like this but in reality I am not, I am more this or that, and the this or that depends on the hour, on the day, on the time in my life.

What impressions do I make on people? And do I project the same kind of person to different people? Does my personality change if someone looks at me in a different way, projecting what he wants to see or what he wants not to see?

I have heard many different and even contradictory comments about me, about my personality, my life, my temper, my behavior…Is it because I was changing according to whom I was talking, or is it because people project on us who they are?
Or even may be because they do not care that much!!! I have been called rude when I was, according to me, just honest, and it seems that sometimes you have to be careful about everything you say because it can be understood by others in a complete different way or even taken as something you had no intention to have happen….

Am I the product of what others want me to be? Am I funny sometimes because people are expecting me to be funny? Am I pontificating sometimes because the situation set by others demands my pontification?

As a stage director, do I change my ways, do I dress differently, do I speak with a different voice on purpose and become fake, OR do I find a different MOI within myself?

How many times we look at couples and we wonder what she/he can find in the other? Or we look at leaders in every area of life and we wonder WHY?

Are we all multiple personalities, multiple possibilities of being and every different situation dictates how different we should be?

How can we have honest relationships with anybody if we are most of the time called to answer their expectations? How can we stay real and ourselves if at so many moments we have to change who we are because of the decision or the need from others?

Does” THE EYES OF OTHERS” influence us so much that we can be like a chameleon and mutate according to the situation?

And who are the OTHERS? Do we need their absolution? Do we need their comments? Do we need their friendship? Do we need to be understood by them?

And is it so important to be able to change according to whoever is in front of us?

Some professions are based on this possibility, this sometimes unconscious attitude, this perpetual bet on finding for every situation the most rewarding (and in some cases the least rewarding) answer to challenges!                                                                                                                                         When I arrive in a classy restaurant, before I enter, I look thru the doors and the employees of the restaurant are apparently joking, laughing, with elbows on tables and totally themselves as human beings… Then a customer comes in, and everything changes, they become waiters, sommelier, Maître D with all the gestures, the attitudes that we are expecting and created by THE GAZE OF OTHERS.

People in performing art professions are probably those who are most confronted to this situation!!! They have to become somebody else and a character in their work and in the same time they have to be submitted by the perpetual judgment and gaze from others!                                                        AND
in rehearsal it is even a harder situation, they are the creation of THE GAZE OF OTHERS as a person trying to become somebody else!!!!!!!!
How can they deal with that? How can they be at the same time, somebody trying to become somebody else under the eyes of others turning them into what they want to be!!!!

And we wonder why sometimes they can be temperamental?                                                              Or the opposite, cold and indifferent?

I know people who never bend or accept THE GAZE OF OTHERS, they apparently stay themselves, or what they believe is themselves, all the time, and deal very little with others! They protect themselves by ignoring the need to please or to refute, they enclose themselves in an armor of artificial strength, and travel through life like astronauts in space! It must be a very lonely life, but for some, success can be achieved faster by just concentrating on ignoring others and by making no concessions…

Is that way of leading your life actually the key for great success and leadership?

Do we have to murder the truth in order to survive THE GAZE OF OTHERS? Or should we try to reconstruct the truth? But the truth? The truth of what? The truth of the lies created by our imagination? Or the imagination of others? The truth of unfinished fantasies?

Hopefully when we reach a certain age, wisdom can take possession of us, but does wisdom leaves an after taste of bitterness on the apparent truth at times?
Can we disappear in the fog of life, in the path of what we called existence, forgetting who we really are and what we really want, dismissing our aspirations and be recreated only by THE GAZE OF OTHERS?

Do we have the right to be lost because others look at us, projecting their own uncertainty? They always want to know: is all this truth? Is your life is it truth? Is It the Truth? Truth? What does that mean? Everything is truth and all is invented…There is only one truth, the one we chose and THE GAZE OF OTHERS is only a possible comment on a possible moment and should never determine who we are and what we do or what we want to do.

We have to continue to have a mind that tries to understand the meaning of all this, the aim of life lost in the eternity of life… We have to learn how to absorb others and their GAZE, we have to learn how to stay strong and complete, and to continue to live trying to understand, trying to live.

Too many people believe that life is life… we should not believe in a controlling fate, we should believe in the idea that we can change other people’s opinions about us, we should believe that we can remodel the world around us by looking at it in a different way and have people looking at us in a different way. We have to stay one, and not become a wave of changes in the perpetual violence of an ocean full of rage.

THE GAZE OF OTHERS should become a weapon to advance, a tool for knowledge…

And what about OUR GAZE ON OTHERS? Should we be more generous, more understandable? And be willing to forgive?

In an ideal world, THE GAZE OF OTHERS should be only constructive, generous, understanding, helping, giving, affectionate and even full of love… AM I DREAMING ABOUT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD????

Let’s work on it…