_{The featured image is an AI-generated picture. I used a new option in the WordPress-Editor, and this picture is the product of the editor analysing the first few paragraphs of this blog entry. Amazing.}

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This morning I am starting to write in front of the little coffee shop at my campsite in Berlin, enjoying a breakfast, a coffee, a smoke (with some delight and some regret), watching the many people on holiday waking up. It’s a beautiful summer morning, temperatures will soar into the high nineties (Parts of my brain are still used to write as if I would be in the U.S., it will be more than 30 degrees Celsius here in Germany). I am looking forward to swims in the lake, the beach will be crowded and I will like to look at myself as a younger person showing up, opposed to how other people will see me: As the older person I am. 

Vanity has a special place in aging. It is a function of a concept of self-identity which is using the growing repository of memories of the past. In the past I was young. I always prided myself to be one of the youngest. My mind is telling me that this must continue, looking for all sorts of confirmation that it really can’t be that I am getting old now.

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I haven’t been writing on this blog for a long time. Things have been extremely busy since the beginning of this year. I completely rearranged my private life, got myself a new home in Germany, moved out of Serbia after four years in Belgrade, continue to work in my advisory job on Arms Control, and took a second job as a COO in a non-profit. I furnished my new apartment, decorated the garden. Got myself a new motorbike. Moved back into a job with a real office, not only a home-office. Traveled to Canada, to Moldavia, to Montenegro, several times to Berlin. Worked seven days a week. Took on a bunch of new and very demanding projects. Found myself, after several years of a break from responsibility for staff, back in a leadership position where I have to organize the collaboration of very young people, and retired people who have been in senior command positions during their active careers. I am dealing with challenges which I thought I had left behind, becoming a self-employed consultant. Now I am a manager again, in addition to the consultancy.

I doubled down at the age of sixty-six. Vanity: I can do that. I have my reasons. I’m still useful. Well, it fueled my restlessness. Big time. Whilst I am in an office with real people on a daily basis, opposed to the virtual connections for most part of the last four years, whilst my life got tremendously busy, whilst I could re-connect with my brothers who are now a stone-throw away and not thousands of kilometers, I perceived an increasing feeling of loneliness, as a consequence of feeling restless. My old instincts and reflexes of future-tripping are back, combined with grievances about the past. Staying in the moment is the single-most priority I am working on. And it is really very challenging.

When I argue why I am doing all this, I will say: I can pass on my experiences of a lifetime. I can mentor, I can advise, I can assist other people in their evolving careers. I can extend my passion for all things peace&security into a new phase of my life. I can use all arguments under the sun to place emphasis on that this is a next step in a long career, I can thrive in the recognition of my relevance, for all the wrong reasons hidden under the hood of some self presentation of an image how I would love to be seen: Acknowledged. The extension of an image which I, like everyone else, especially in leadership positions, have honed for all my life.

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I am, for all accounts and purposes, on a developmental path which I try to shape as a path of growth, and not a path of fear about future decline, and that is not an easy task. It has myriads of aspects, and often it is an emotional rollercoaster.

My tools of self-awareness have grown over a period of eleven years since I radically changed my life, since I had to change everything, because none of my old ways of controlling my environment was working any longer. It is this self-awareness which has grown enough to allow me to see what happens when I indulge in permanent work, which allows me to see what happened since I doubled the amount of work by taking on two jobs at the same time. It makes me think I am relevant again.

There are experiences with the effects of too much work and stress which are specific to my own path of recovering from life-long trauma, and they are not subject to my writing here. 

There are experiences, however, which I believe are common for people who have gone through a long career development always striving for becoming more relevant in the next job compared with the previous ones. I look at myself with some self-awareness that I, like so many others in leadership positions, have created an image of myself which has an appreciation of relevance, of importance, of “being inevitable” at its core. With the development of such a self-concept lasting over many decades of an adult career life, its profound impact on all aspects of life can not be overstated. Like, in so many situations where I am either introduced into a new set of people by making reference to the senior positions which I have held throughout my active career, or doing this thing just myself.

So, moving into a next, blessed state of my life, as I aspire, includes a constant confrontation with the “devils of my past”: The path from sourcing energy from external validation towards sourcing it from an inner peace of mind and heart, it is a bumpy path. This, in itself is inevitable. Just to say: I feel that I am on course. I don’t feel like I am stuck. What I do is to share this experience.

For a reason, as always on this blog.

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July 20, 2024, the New York Times is carrying an OpEd by Maureen Dowd: “Lord Almighty, Joe, Let It Go!” It is heart-wrenching, like the video of President Biden failing against Donald Trump in the TV-duel as of June 28, 2024. It was so painful to watch that I could not get through more than a few minutes. What made me furious was that a distinguished person who I got to know myself, who I deeply respect and admire, and who has always been a beakon of civilised democratic culture stumbled. The decline was so mercilessly visible, whilst the other person with massive cognitive decline in the room, the former U.S. President Donald Trump, had it easy, simply because the amount of inconsistency, lies and incoherent mess coming from his mouth was just an extension of what he does for a living. For Trump it was easy to hide behind the fake he is. For Biden the curtains of mercy which had been webbed around him by his campaign managers, they fell. Brutally.

Maureen Dowd brings it to a point when she writes: “The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.” In her OpEd, like in so many other pieces I have read, she points to the bitterness of President Biden coming from previous situations during which he had felt let down. She points to a complex analysis, like others, of a person who is not able to get through the web of self-delusion, who is trapped in an inner fight about whether passing on the lead is a defeat, or the right thing to do. A person saying “I am the only one who can fix this.” Joe, I pray for you, you will make the right decision.

I have heard the sentence “I can fix it” too often, and I will say that I used it as a strong motivation for continuing in my own career, systematically. In my career it worked. In my private life it was the delusion which brought me to my knees. “I can fix this” is a human character trait, and crossing from the positive realm where this assumption is useful into the horror realm where it sets one up for delusion, and ultimate failure, this is where uncounted people break.

The point which I want to make, perhaps: There is a plethora of situations, including the big one in Washington, where old people struggle with their delusion of relevance, and their being challenged, their clinging to control. It goes through many societies, and many systems of different forms of governance. The old guard not giving up, depriving the young generations from taking their rightful place.

It would appear to me that this form of delusion is something for which especially those become vulnerable who have built their careers on their ego. The Darwinistic selection which, more often than not, brings those into command positions which have an unhealthy degree of egotism, narcicissm, and even sociopathic traits, who have a blown-up self meandering into delusion, it is intrinsically connected to how we have put external values, symbols of power, youth, sexuality, richness into the core of how we live our lives.

This is becoming a problem when we age. The past is sourcing us with everything which made us creating our identity. The future becomes a shorter perspective. The question “What comes after this?” is leading to uncomfortable answers: “Not much more”. And whilst “Not much more” is true when being used as “Not much more of the same”, it is wrong when it comes to the real path of growth: Aging presents an incredible opportunity:

To let go of ego. To have confidence in change. To understand and to accept that nothing, literally nothing, remains unchanged. And that this does not mean that aging is equaling diminishing, becoming dim, disappearing. It is about recognising that always the new arises from the old. In this, we, the aging people, can play a very important role, by being role models of this growth.

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I am reading Pema Choedroen’s beautiful book “How We Live Is How We Die” for the fifth time. Often just one page, then contemplating again.

Pema is quoting Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, one of her spiritual teachers in the line of Tibetan Buddhism:

When the appearances of this life dissolve

May I, with ease and great happiness

Let go of all attachments to this life

As a son or daughter returning home 

Throughout the entire book, Pema continuously makes the point that preparing along these lines is by far not only applicable to those of us who believe in re-birth. Read this book. It provides so many examples for how the acceptance of continuous change in our lifes is the only real thing which will allow us to be happy.

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I, on my part, will go swimming in the lake, now.