If you, like me, live in the United States, you run into political and cultural polarization in every corner. Polarization has become especially hard to avoid as we are getting close to the presidential election. But polarization is certainly not unique to the United States. We can probably argue that, as the world is getting more globalized, it is also becoming more polarized, with rifts within and between some countries growing over time.

Polarization is the opposite of connection, and connection has been an important theme running through my scholarship and writing over the last few years. I have been thinking a lot about the critical need to emphasize connection as people are dealing with problems in today's world. Back in 2020, when I was finishing my book Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Blame, I found a song that seemed to encapsulate, albeit cryptically, my thoughts about polarization and connection, and about such related themes as the human condition, empathy, and self-awareness. I am talking about "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie.* (You can find lyrics here.)

My goal here is not to argue that my interpretation of the song is correct. We will probably never know exactly what Queen and Bowie meant. And maybe it's even not that important what they consciously meant. As some might say, real masterpieces happen when artists allow something greater than an individual speak through them. So, my goal here is merely to explain why I think that, in the age of growing polarization, "Under Pressure" is a perfect anthem for empathy.

First and foremost, the song talks about pressure that all people have to live with. It is a pressure that no one asks for. This pressure is simply a function of being human. Everybody has to deal with it, no matter how powerful or powerless they seem, although this pressure takes different forms for different people.

I talk about this pressure in my scholarship when I describe powerlessness that all human beings experience. For example, I write: "We are born into society governed by unspoken rules and by ideas that we do not fully comprehend. On top of that, we constantly have to deal with the limitations of our bodies, with forces and laws of nature indifferent towards our feelings."

This pressure sometimes manifests itself as an intense feeling of existential horror. If we think too much about what it means to be human, we might discover the deeply unsettling strangeness of life itself. What am I, really? Why am I here? What's the point? 

Another form of existential pressure is the need to make choices, to decide what's right and what's wrong. We can, of course, try the strategy proposed by the ancient skeptics and suspend all our judgment; but, as their critics pointed out, this would mean doing nothing, not living a life and not dealing with its problems. And, as the singer laments, you cannot pretend to be blind, you cannot spend your life sitting on the fence. It just does not work. Many people who choose to deal with pressing social problems come to this exact conclusion. 

As the song develops, the theme of pressure is intensifying. But the singer also reminds us that there is a glimpse of a better tomorrow, and this hope gives us wings, gets us higher... while the pressure keeps pulling us down. What kind of hope can we count on in this maddening game? If pressure was the main topic, this song would be dark and hopeless. But there is another key theme: love.

First, love itself appears hopeless. Can it really solve our problems? I get this doubt, I get it so well. How can I love someone whose worldviews are alien to mine? Whose choices, it seems, I would never replicate? When love is mentioned for the first time, it is described as something that the singer has to keep coming up with. The definition of "come up with" is "produce something, especially when pressured or challenged," which brings us back to the theme of pressure. We might want to try using love, as opposed to violence, in response to life's challenges, but this strategy does not necessarily produce immediate results. And we are not all Kings and Gandhis. Not surprisingly, our attempts at loving our enemies often seem to be doomed. Love we want to offer keeps getting torn and shredded.

Here, the song throws us back to one of the most existential questions. Why? The singer repeats it three times, the last one turning into a cry that signals desperation. But in response to this desperate plea for meaning, the other voice answers, firm in its certainty: "Love." The answer is simply love. I am not a religious person, but I believe that love must be our faith. I believe that, when conflicts keep escalating as each side responds with violence to violence, there will be no end to suffering unless we wholeheartedly believe that love is the answer and act upon this belief. Love will save us in our darkest hour, when we are breaking under pressure and going insane from sadness and grief.

Rolling on this juxtaposition of pressure and love, the song reaches its crescendo. At the time when the fate of the whole of humanity might be at stake (think about nuclear weapons, climate change, wars), the song tells us that we need to give ourselves one more chance--"ourselves" being people, collectively. Can't we do it?--the song asks. And it continues asking, dramatically: Why can't we give one more chance to love? Indeed, we must do it, even when everything seems so hopeless and the pressure is breaking us down and apart. Here, the song offers a beautiful play on words. The question about giving one more chance to love morphs into another vital question: Why can't we simply give love? The end of this last question, "give love" turns into a persistent echo. It turns into an imperative. If we want to save ourselves, save the world, we should stop responding with hate to hate. Love is the only answer. Remember King's words: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

But, of course, it is not easy, so not easy. We need to keep asking ourselves this question: Why can't we just give love? The song continues, reflecting on that. It calls the idea of love "old-fashioned". We are afraid that if we talk too much about love, we will be seen as "not cool", as too soft, as inferior to people of action who do stuff instead of trying to hug their problems away. Just to be clear, I am not talking here about some weak toothless love that allows everybody to step over it. Love must be strong, love must be proud, and this love can be perfectly well combined with resistance to violence. So, we should not think that love is something that's just for babies and romance. Love requires an effort. Loving your enemy while stopping him or her from doing harm to you or somebody else requires extra strength.

Love that will save the world in the age of growing conflicts and polarization is the kind of love that dares you. It dares you to care for people no matter how much you dislike their worldviews and actions. It dares you to empathize with "people of the night" no matter how much darkness you see in them.

Love dares us to change how we deal with each other, and it also dares us to change the way we take care of ourselves. Real change starts from within. We cannot love others until we learn to truly love ourselves and know ourselves. This is like a two-sided coin. Know yourself to know others, and the other way around. Love yourself to love others, and the other way around. Take care of yourself in order to take care of others, and the other way around.

This all is so not easy, but we must do it, as humanity, because this might be our last dance together on this planet. Our last dance, our last chance. Will we take it?

We keep dividing ourselves into us and them, but there is no us and them, because on this planet, we are all in this together. And in the grand scheme of things, there is nowhere else to go. This pressure of being human might be killing us. But the key to our survival is in our hands. Not ours as opposed to theirs. Just ours. There is nobody here, on this planet, but us--under the enormous pressure of being human.

This is just a quick post to share my self-portrait from this summer. I think it represents pretty accurately what's going on inside my brain! 

I previously shared it in my Newsletter #9. If you like the stuff I post here, please sign up to my newsletter (scroll down to the bottom of any page of this website to see the sign-up form).

Also, you can find more photos I took over the years here.

Zach: In a recent blog post of yours on your site, you talked about many people’s kind of simplistic idea of power. Like, there’s a king and there’s a peasant as a common example of… somebody having power over somebody else. Can you talk a little bit about what you wrote in that post and how you saw more complexity in that dynamic?

Elizaveta: Yeah. You’re referring to a page of my website. I have a website… that I specifically dedicated to exploring power as a paradox as opposed to power as a binary. Power as a binary – this is a common perception… we consider… that just some people have power, and some people lack power. Or power is something that you can clearly say, “Okay, I have it,” or, “I don’t have it and the other person has it or doesn’t have it.” Right? And I wanted to explain how [power is] more like a paradox that… it’s something that you can have and lack at the same time.

So, I thought that this example with a king and a peasant can describe it well because… Well, first of all, I wanted to take an example that is sort of detached from the modern debates because I feel like whenever we use examples from controversial issues, then very soon people just stop listening because they’re sort of feeling very strong emotions about those issues. So, I felt like king and peasant is something that is further removed from our everyday life, but also a very vivid example because you could think of a king as somebody who has absolute power over this peasant, right? So, [the] king has power and can do whatever he wants, and the peasant has zero power. I mean, he makes some choices in his everyday life, you know, when to harvest or whatnot. But then, if the king decides to send soldiers to arrest or kill the peasant, the peasant won’t be able to do anything, you know? This sort of relationship.

And so, I wanted to explain that when we think about power as a paradox, it’s not like we’re saying, “Well, a king and a peasant have the same amount of power.” It’s not like the king… doesn’t have power over the peasant, but the peasant has power over the king. You know, kind of reversing this relationship. This is just turning this simplistic binary around. It’s true that the king, in many situations, has more power than the peasant. A king can make a law and then the peasant has to obey this law, for example. Right? If we just focus on this relationship, it’s fairly clear who has power over whom. But it’s not like this is the only relationship in the world. Right? There are other relationships. There are a lot of people around the peasant and around the king... 

If we look at those other relationships, we start noticing that things are not as simple because, first of all, the king was born to be a king, right? And he doesn’t necessarily choose to do things that are expected of a king. Now, it might sound kind of vague, those examples, but I can give some life to it. I’ve been actually researching [the] life of Louis XIV because I thought this could be an interesting figure to dive into, and I’m now working on a page about his life based on a very extensive book that I read written by a historian... So, there are plenty of examples to show how Louis XIV, with all the power that he had… he also lacked power in many ways.

You know, he became king when he was four. And then as a child, he didn’t have much power at all. He was pushed around, and he needed to follow different ceremonies and he was used as a pawn in political games of his relatives and parents. And in general… living in a royal family in a court was tough. This all is not to say that he had it worse than a peasant. Obviously, a king like Louis XIV, I don’t think he ever experienced hunger, for example. But there are a lot of things that he couldn’t control. He wanted to control desperately because he was told… He was born into this meaning of absolute power, and he was told that he’s supposed to have it. But throughout his life, he had many instances when he couldn’t use power. He had to do what other people wanted him to do or expected him to do. And he had to live according to this idea of monarchy that he didn’t invent… the expectations for what it means to be a king. And those expectations, if you think of it, were created before him and supported not just by him… and embraced by everybody in France and in Europe of the time.

​So, in this sense, peasant does come into play because believing in the monarchy, believing in the power of religion that gave the king the divine rights to do whatever he wants, supposedly… everybody in his kingdom played some part in that. Although obviously, people did criticize him and dislike him… some people. Yeah, so that’s where it gets complicated.

I have not posted here for a while. First, I was busy with an exciting - but very time consuming - project for Oxford University Press. Then my mom was visiting, and I took a well-deserved break from work to enjoy Chicago during the precious weeks before the heat wave. (Although the cicada madness made that a tad difficult. If you are in Illinois, you know what I am talking about!)

My plan and hope was that I would be then able to do some writing and video-making before new paid tasks knock on my door. For better or worse, I have not had much time to focus on my personal projects - copyediting gigs are already piling up. Before I got sucked back into the vortex of work, I was able to make this short video based on an old (probably, from about fifteen years ago) poem that I wrote while still living in Russia.

I had no plans to leave Russia back then, yet now it is evident that this poem predicted my future. Back then, it seemed impossible. I even wrote it from a perspective of some male narrator - I was probably imagining an immigrant writer like Nabokov. You can hear that only in Russian, where verbs in the past tense are gendered. 

See the video or read the text in Russian (original) and English (translation) underneath. Special thanks go to Slava Korolev, who kindly allowed me to use his photos, and to Maarten Schellekens, whose beautiful music always fits perfectly the mood of my poems. 

My next newsletter won't be out for a while as I am busy with a big editing project for Oxford University Press. In the meantime, I am going to share here a recent podcast interview. A few month ago, I had a conversation with Zach Elwood, host of the podcast People Who Read People. We talked about social power, the oppressed/oppressor framework, free will, and empathy. It's my second time chatting with Zach on his podcast, and it is always a pleasure! 

You can listen to our conversation here.

As for my next newsletter, it will be coming out in June. Stay tuned!

Am I truly known -
To myself and to others?
I don’t think I am.
I don’t think I will ever be.
But I am not alone.
I am a part of a club that spans continents and generations,
Starting from the first person who was a person and not an ape anymore,
Whose mind opened its wings, so strange and new.
From then on, throughout history,
How many people do we really know?
First, we wrote books about some.
Then we realized that so many important others had been left out.
Now we are hastily adding them.
But can this task of remembering ever be completed?
Like the wings of a butterfly,
Smallest actions can cause big effects,
Connections no one will know about.
Imagine how many people have lived on the Earth:
Laughed and loved,
Healed and hurt,
Hoped and despaired,
Tried and failed,
And sometimes succeeded.
They all have mattered,
In ways beyond good and bad
That nobody will ever fully grasp,
Because a hurricane cannot be traced back
To the butterfly that caused it.
We will sing songs about heroes and villains.
We will disagree on who our heroes and villains should be.
That’s okay.
Disagreeing is human.
But I hope that we can also agree on something:
You, and I, and the infinity of souls
Will remain unknown
To ourselves and to others,
Yet we all matter.
Beyond good and bad,
We are forever tied together in the fabric of humanity.
I hope that once in a while,
You can light a candle, or plant a flower,
Or just sit for a few minutes in silence,
Quietly wondering
About all the butterflies
That have ever danced in the wind.

*If you liked the poem, you might also want to watch the video below, where I where I read the poem to the beautiful music by Maarten Schellekens. 
​

**You can also check out my other poems here! 

Louis XIV is probably one of the most famous kings associated with the idea of absolute monarchy. Many people probably believe that he had absolute (or at least almost absolute) power. Among scholars, however, it's not uncommon to point out that the power of absolute monarchs (in fact, of any kings) was limited. In my own scholarship, I explore the idea that power always coexists with powerlessness. I decided to take Louis XIV as an example to show what this might look like. I figured that some people might be intrigued by the idea that this famous king could be described as being powerless in some ways. 

I carefully read a very detailed account of Louis XIV's life and reign by a historian Philip Mansel. His account is based on thorough research of numerous sources. Then I wrote an essay using quotes from Mansel's book to support my claims. This essay turned out to be the longest one I have written so far. It is still not entirely finished. I feel that my argument could be further improved, but I feel that I need to step away from this project for a while. So I am going to share with you what I have so far. 

As I write in the introduction of the essay: "I must clarify that any historic account can only be a work of interpretation... I acknowledge that it is my choice not to see Louis XIV merely as a haughty and heartless lover of exquisite entertainments. Instead, I choose to see him as a person who, like all of us, was born into the world of meanings and relationships that he did not fully comprehend. He tried to navigate this world the best could, in the process making many mistakes and hurting numerous people, which he was able to do due to the meanings of absolute monarchy instilled in his mind and reinforced by those around him."

You can click here to see the whole essay. Below I am am going to share the part that I titled "King's Childhood".

*******************************************

When his father died in 1643, four-year-old Louis XIV was proclaimed King. Of course, he did not start managing France right away. Upon the death of her husband, Queen Anne became the regent, ruling with the help of Cardinal Mazarin until Louis reached the age of majority (13 years old) in 1651. After that, although his mother was not a regent anymore, the young King did not fully take state matters in his hands for another ten years, until Mazarin passed away in 1661. 

Let us first take a look at the formative years of the future self-proclaimed Sun King. We could hardly claim that Louis XIV came anywhere close to absolute power as a child. But as King by law, perhaps he enjoyed a life of exceptional happiness and freedom? 

Chapter I of Mansel's volume dispels this myth starting from the first sentence: "Even by royal standards, the family into which the future Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 was a nest of vipers." In this family (not atypical for a royal household of the time), closest relatives often could not trust or even stand each other. Intrigues flourished and rebellions were common. Queen Anne herself, being of Spanish origin, conspired against her husband (Louis XIII) and helped her home country during the conflict between Spain and France that was ongoing at the time. 

Driving this point home, Mansel writes in the Introduction: "Thus antiquity, heredity, coronation and the widely proclaimed belief that the kings of France were representatives and images of God himself did not protect them from rebellion or assassination. France was a monarchy on a knife-edge... Both Henri IV’s son Louis XIII and his grandson Louis XIV would be threatened by repeated revolts and haunted by fears of new religious wars and acts of regicide." 

All in all, Louis XIV's family could hardly be called a healthy environment for a young child trying to make sense of the world. Consider that, as Mansel argues, "[e]ven at the age of two, Louis was a pawn in his parents’ marriage. His feelings and manners were used as political weapons" (Chapter 1). The French court where this family was embedded was no better. "[A]t the French court every nuance of human relationships, and every inch of the royal apartments, could have political consequences. The court was a zone of negotiation, and a school of psychology, as well as a battlefield" (Chapter 1). Louis XIV had to navigate this battlefield, or rather minefield, of a court from a very young age while attending a variety of required events. As he was growing, his public life was quickly turning into "an unending sequence of ceremonies" (Chapter 2), which he soon came to detest but could not avoid.

One can only wonder how becoming a king at the age of four can affect a child. No psychological studies that would help us better understand what it really means to grow us as an absolute monarch can ever be conducted. But it is clear that, before Louis XIV could start exercising his power as a king, he received many lessons in powerlessness.

​On the positive side, he had a close and tender relationship with his mother, something that few (if any) contemporary kings could boast. Unlike many royal parents of the epoch, Queen Anne spent a lot of time with her beloved first-born son and played an active role in his education. 

In particular, she worked hard to instill in Louis  the belief in the divine rights of the King of France. Queen Anne, who had experienced her own share of powerlessness, wanted absolute power for her son, probably because she believed that power could protect him and make him happy (these wishes are natural for any caring mother). We can assume that her lessons sank deep and determined how Louis XIV wanted to see himself and to be seen by others. Over the years, the conviction in his divine rights coupled with life's stresses, heartbreaks, and very human biases led Louis XIV to commit mistakes that hurt numerous people. One of these heartbreaks was his mother's painful death at the age of 64 (Louis himself was only 28 at the time) of breast cancer in a Parisian convent, where she had retired after her regency was over. Louis XIV was so shaken by her death that he barely visited the city since then, preferring to enhance his beloved Versailles and surrounding smaller residences. 

There is another reason why Louis XIV hated Paris, and this reason further illustrates why his childhood was far from carefree. Mansel describes France's capital as "a cauldron of combustible institutions, at once the support and rival of the monarchy" (Chapter 2). Indeed, support and rivalry were often tied so close that this combination could easily become confusing, frustrating, and scary. The King would be glorified when riding through the street of Paris one day, but booed and threatened on another occasion. He was alternatively treated as god and as the worst person on the Earth. For instance, "On 18 May 1643, three days after his state entry into Paris, Louis proceeded from the Louvre through the streets caked in mud and excrement, for which Paris would remain notorious until the mid-nineteenth century, to the Parlement on the Île de la Cité" (Chapter 2, my emphasis).

​Before Louis XIV reached the age of majority, Paris became a hotbed of dissent known as the Fronde. It was essentially a civil war. The Fronde was not a bottom-up rebellion; instead, it was led by aristocracy dissatisfied with their rights and privileges. The noblemen exploited popular discontent among Parisians who were not happy about growing taxes and diminishing authority of the Parlement. Notably, when Louis XIV was 12, an angry mob broke into the capital's palace and demanded to see the King.
Upon seeing the boy sleeping in his room, the rioters left the palace. Soon thereafter, the Queen and her son fled Paris accompanied by the court. On another occasion, Louis XIV and his mother were held in the same palace under virtual arrest. 

This is not to say that Parisians did not have reasons to be concerned about the actions of the government trying to centralize its authority (something that absolutist monarchies were known for). Without excusing the French government's actions, my goal is to have my readers wonder how confusing messages and events of the time could affect the King's maturing mind. (And remember that, at that point, he was not the one making decisions about how France was supposed to be ruled.) We can assume that the idea of the King's divine rights was attractive for the growing Louis XIV as it promised certainty in a life full of conflicts and contradictions. In addition, the idea of the King's absolute power matched what Louis XIV often observed, since "[f]or most Frenchmen in the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, Christianity and monarchy were similar cults of hierarchy and obedience" (Chapter 1). Any rebellions and riots (even as extensive ones as the Fronde) could be written off as unpleasant aberrations. Inspired by his beloved mother, Louis XIV was growing up with the conviction that he was destined to become the King of the World. He was learning about his rights and responsibilities. But nobody could explain to him how the power he had been given was going to change him over time.

Click here to keep reading. Thank you for your interest!

*This post is a part of my project ​​Me, Looking for Meaning.

The phrase "give somebody credit for" has two meanings. First, it can mean believing that somebody has a good quality. Second, it can mean praising this somebody for an achievement. And praising can also implicitly mean comparing one(self) to others who supposedly did not do as well.
So, the title of this essay has two interpretations:
(1) Am I empathic?
and if the answer is "yes",
(2) Can I, metaphorically speaking, pat myself on the back for being empathic AND compare myself to somebody else who seems to be less empathic than me?

I think and write about empathy a lot. Usually, I believe that empathy is my strength, a skill that I can develop in myself and, indeed, keep developing. But I also have plenty of doubts in my ability to be truly empathic. I want to think of myself as being fairly good at using empathy. However, I often catch myself focusing on my own emotions and experiences instead of feeling more with others or trying to understand what they are going through. (Side note: in this essay, I describe empathy as a useful skill, which is itself an assumption that not everybody agrees on, although in some cases this might be just a semantic disagreement after all.)

I see empathy as consisting of two aspects: cognitive and emotional. It's a way to connect with others on an emotional and/or intellectual level, to peek into the window of their world, so to say. I think that I can be a fairly empathic person because I do my best to remind myself that my perspective is only mine, to remain attentive to and curious about other people's worldviews, even if I do not quite like them (these worldviews or even the people who have them) for some reason. I believe that my empathy (when I manage to do it right) helps me stay connected to others, avoid blame by remaining curious about other people's actions, and keep an open mind, which allows me to learn and grow. Even if I am overwhelmed with an emotion, I am working on staying in touch with what's going on in another person's head and heart. 

Thinking about the past, I notice that developing this level of empathy has been a journey. My memory offers some painful reminders of situations when I did not sufficiently care about how other people were feeling. The more I go back, the more painful these memories become, but then I remind myself that empathy is a skill that requires honing. And as with any skill, having trained yourself in empathy does not mean not making mistakes when using it. If anything, awareness about my mistakes in the past, and even in the present, helps me to keep learning. But even if we decide that I am an empathic person after all, the second interpretation of the title question remains: Can I praise myself for my achievements?

To remind you, what makes this question controversial (in my mind) is the implied comparison with some others who are supposedly less empathic than me. Does striving to be empathic and actually being empathic make me a good person, better than those less preoccupied with honing this skill? If you know me a bit, you won't be surprised when I say that I don't think that I am any better than someone who does not use empathy that often, someone who does not think that empathy could be improved and is, indeed, worth improving. Yes, I work hard on being more empathic, but in a way I just happen to be more preoccupied with it than some other people are.

If I observe somebody who does not seem to use empathy as much as I do, I have two main options: (A) I can say to myself, "This person is just not sensitive, they just don't care, they don't want to help, they are just making it worse, etc." (B) Or I can say to myself, "Empathy is hard. I struggle with it all the time. They must be overwhelmed with emotions, and I know how it feels. There must be something going on in their lives, or something from their past, that would explain why empathy is so hard for them or why they don't see its value." (Admittedly, I would be making an assumption that the other person in this situation is not using empathy, which is my interpretation entirely. They might be using it but in a way that makes sense to them.)

...I see this complexity as part of a much bigger conversation about free will. In general, when other people behave in ways that (we think) are not ideal, we can either explain this behavior by claiming that these people are inferior: "they are mean", "they are just stupid", "they are not normal." Or we can explain their behavior by taking into consideration a combination of (1) circumstances outside of these people's control combined with (2) some element of choice, and by admitting that the ratio of these elements is unknown to us. I believe that people do make choices, and that's why I am personally striving to be more empathic: I believe that empathy is a choice I can make, a sort of power that I can develop. But I also think that our actions, thoughts, worldviews, and even desires are shaped by our environment. So if I value empathy or find it easier than others to be empathic (ok, not always), there must be something about my genetic makeup, my upbringing, my experiences, rather than a fully controlled decision that I made (or make)--a decision that which would put me on some kind of pedestal compared to others who might not be as good (arguably) at empathy as me. 

And really, can I give myself credit for anything good about me, for any of my achievements? For example, I am fairly organized in my work. Does it make me better than someone who often procrastinates and leaves projects unfinished? Or how about my ability to focus on and enjoy all the little things I see? I believe that this ability greatly helped me when I started learning about mindfulness. I probably made some choices along the way that helped me develop my ability to be mindful and self-aware. But I can assume that there has been something in me (e.g., the way my brain can focus on these details and enjoy them) that determined my openness to the idea of mindfulness. We can assume that there is some element of choice present in our actions, but the exact scope of this choice is hard to identify. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of determinism, including individual nuances of how every person's mind works, values we were taught growing up, coping mechanisms we were able to develop based on our experiences, etc. Even choices we made are often determined by circumstances that we would not be able to fully wrap our minds around. 

So, I do not think that I can take full credit for my ability to be empathic, or for any other good qualities I might have. I might be able to take partial credit, though, but the vagueness of free will does not allow me to be more specific about the praise I might deserve. Just as I cannot be sure how much I can praise myself for my good qualities, I cannot ever be sure how much somebody else could be criticized for not having these traits. It is very possible that this somebody could not be rebuked at all. (Again, I am not even getting here into the thorny conversation about what makes a quality "good". I might think that I have good qualities, but somebody else would disagree. And who's to judge?)

Since I cannot take full credit for what I can do, I should also avoid looking condescendingly at people who do things differently. It is true that these people did make some choices in their lives, but many of their choices were constrained (so were mine). And if free will had been involved, I will never know when this freedom began and when it ended. Keeping this complexity in mind gives me further reasons to be more humble and curious about other people. I might not fully understand their circumstances, but I can give it a try; at the very least, I can acknowledge how little I know. To make a full circle: acknowledging that I cannot give myself full credit for being empathic is, in my mind, an essential aspect of developing my empathy.

I am kind of obsessed with power. I think about it every day. Not because I am bent on achieving world domination! My interest is scholarly, and it is connected with very practical concerns about the world we all share. However, this connection is probably not what you might think.

“Power” is an incredibly rich concept. We can talk about it in the context of military dictatorships — or of an individual’s (potential) ability to escape the claws of anxiety. We can consider the importance of power balance in intimate relationships — or the popularity of superpowers in modern media fairytales (and also the power of media companies that produce them). There is power of speech and power of hope; power of mind (e.g., intelligence) and physical power (e.g., weight-lifting). While some of these things seem to be similar, others — not so much.

Perhaps “power” is just a word that has numerous meanings, many of them unrelated? After all, it is also used to talk about electricity, an order of angels in Christianity, and the process of washing cars with highly pressurized steam (the list goes on).

Setting aside the meanings that do not directly describe people and their relationships, I believe that all the aspects of power — ranging from political to personal — should be explored together.

So, yes, military dictatorships cannot be tackled if we don’t consider the power of mindfulness. The goal of this exploration is not to forcefully connect some random dots that just happen to have the same label. The goal is to better understand each other for the purpose of living better lives in a healthier society.

To keep reading on Medium, click here.
Or listen to me reading this essay out on Spotify!

Where are you now?
The sand of years has slipped through our fingers somehow.
The words we tried to use as bridges between us--
They don’t mean what they meant before.
The stars we thought were guiding us aren’t there anymore.

We were once friends.
Or were we? I don’t know.
Time can be just like sand or it can be like snow.
It covers quietly our memories, our dreams.
We were once friends. Or so it seems.

The world has changed.
The world has rearranged itself.
The paths you used to walk, lead somewhere else.
And if I wanted to find you, 
I wouldn’t know where to start. 

But I don’t want to look for you.
You are someone new. 
I’m someone new.

And still, I don’t know why, I don’t know how,
The thought comes back:
Where are you now?

As time goes, relationships change. Connections that once seemed special and strong slowly dissipate. You reach a certain age and start wondering, "Where are all these people I once knew?" You might even have a sudden urge to find them and talk to them again, see if those friendships and feelings can be rekindled. And sometimes it works, sometimes it's worth doing. But often you just have to let it be. Focus on the connections you have right now. And still, once in a while, you will think about some person that was once important to you and wonder, "Where are you now?" In this poem, I wanted to capture this feeling of wondering mixed with bittersweet sadness of letting go of a relationship that was once special. ​