Andy's Mind

A week ago I was walking down the street in Warsaw from a popular flower market. I’ve just bought some beautiful roses for someone very close to my heart and was heading back to my car passing other people, everyone preoccupied with their own business. Two guys immersed in a conversation passed me and in that short instant just those few words reached me: “people are dying every two seconds”.

I don’t know what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about starvation in Africa or human rights abuses in China or maybe about just a computer game or an action movie. But this short reminder about impermanence and karmic bounds didn’t upset me, it just made me enjoy my living seconds more that day.

Communicating with people is the most important part of my work now. Encouraging, forcing, charming, coercing, negotiating, inquiring, judging, establishing rapport, motivating, reprimanding, understanding, directing, coaching – you name it. It means being in contact with many egos, some of which create the collective “ego” we call “our company” or “our team”.

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In one of my favorite spirit-lifting movies, “Love Actually”, there is a scene when a concerned stepfather finally learns what was it that visibly disturbed his 8-year old stepson, Samuel, for weeks. After many tries the boy finally confesses that he is desperately in love with a classmate, a girl called Joanna. The stepfather, who suspected the kid is mourning his late mother, maybe even taking drugs, says he’s a little relieved as he thought it might be something worse. The boy looks up at him amazed and exclaims incredulously “Worse than the total agony of being in love?”.

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I was on a train to Warsaw yesterday evening and I went to the bar to eat something. There was not much to choose from on the train buffet’s menu, so I ordered a chicken fillet and sat waiting for it to be prepared. The train wobbled and jumped as it moved ahead, as fast as old carriages and tracks allowed. Since it was already dark there was not much to see out of the window so I looked around the carriage. There was an artificial, 40-something blonde sitting by the next table, her back on me, reading fashion magazines. There was a bespectacled, sweeter wearing man with grayish hair, eating a soup two tables away. He looked English to my eye, but such appearances are misleading.

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