Sitting in the quiet, pleasant backstreets of Vienna on a short break from a marathon two-day coaching session I’m conducting here, I’m thinking it’s Valentine’s Day and how if I override my tendency to think what a load of bullshit, I actually detect a certain lightness, a tingling in the air, as if Cupid is darting about hither and thither spreading romance dust over everyone. Now I’m not saying romance is a good thing – or a bad thing – it certainly seems to occupy an honored place in people’s cosmologies, even the most intelligent: that capacity to see past the imperfections and failings of another to the radiant shining spirit within them, or just to gloss over all of that and be totally taken by their exterior appearance enough to believe their continued presence in your life will be the antidote to all your existential pain and yearning. When in fact, what it’ll more likely be is a trigger for all your learning, and as we all know, learning is never all sweet.
But whether you get swept along in the rush of romance today about someone you fancy, someone you love, or someone you don’t even know yet but can somehow feel approaching in the distance, I strongly suggest doing what I am: getting swept up in the romance of you. Not in a narcissistic way, but in the sense of being the hero or heroine of your own life story – someone with the courage, wit and strength to have achieved the incredible feat of having made it this far against all the odds in what you’d be excused for believing was an essentially hostile universe, and someone with the fearlessness and magnificence to be carrying on from here, despite already knowing how painful it is and that whichever way you play it, you die at the end, probably horribly.
Now that person is someone worth getting swept up about.
So that’s my Valentine’s vote – in fact, not just for Valentine’s Day, which like all days when a certain feeling is socially enforced and overly commercialized, disturbs my sense of aesthetics and sensibilities, but for every day: see, know, accept and love yourself for being the hero or heroine of your own adventure and somehow all the rest, all the romance of connecting with others and admiring the hero or heroine in them, will sort itself out around that.
Tell yourself a minimum of six times with feeling and conviction, ‘I am now willing to see, know, accept and love myself as the hero/heroine of my own adventure.’ Do this fairly often for a couple of days now if you find the notion resonates and I believe you’ll experience a rush of supercharged empowerment you’ll be delighted by – an auto-Valentines gift that’ll stay with you and in terms of existential value, be worth a lot more than diamonds.
Greetings from the city of the founding fathers of psychotherapy meanwhile.
With love, Supercharged
