LJILJANA w CLIFF #5.1
Hello. So for today's conversation we started with talking about your perfect day. Or our perfect day, because I offered mine as a comparison point.
You told me that your birthday's in summer. And so you have in the past, on five or six occasions, celebrated it with a long distance swim.
The event that you chose was about three and a half kilometers, although there are upwards of five kilometers swims.
Because it's not near where you live, you have to wake up at 5:00 AM to travel to this marathon and, one of those times you shared the car with somebody who took it very seriously and was gearing himself up for optimum performance with all kinds of food and telling you that because you had only had a small breakfast that this was just not going to go well for you. And you round up leaving him well behind you in that whole thing.
You told me that you love the spirit of the event, that you don't participate in. It in order to win first place or any kind of recognition, but to just experience it with other people who are, who feel that same spirit. And then when you're done, you can take that feeling and bring it into the rest of your life, which is really valuable to you.
On your perfect day, you would fill the remainder of that day with things that you enjoy doing by yourself. So reading, writing, and taking a walk in the woods.
Maybe if it were a truly perfect day you wouldn't be doing it alone, but be doing it with a worthy partner.
Which is something else that we spent a fair bit of time talking about the nature of. Of partnership and of what, what a good partner really is. And we both agreed that a good partner is somebody who might share some common interests, but much more importantly than that, they accept you for who you are. And that means that they accept the things that you do. They don't necessarily have to like them. They don't even necessarily have to understand them. But they should not criticize them, because that that takes away a measure of joy that these things that we do bring us and being with somebody should be about being elevated, not being diminished.