Beaten up
This has been a very rough week, what with my purse getting stolen and a terrible cold and a demanding visiting artist in town. I'm not at all satisfied that I made enough of a priority of myself and my life. I let the artist get her way over and over again, compromising several of my own principles, for the sake of being polite I guess? Norwegians are known for being blunt, and she was comfortable with utilizing that national trait. Thankfully, I had a chat with a guy I know in Iceland, I like to think of him as my Icelandic body guard or bouncer, this morning. He's always been good at showing me, without telling me, that I need to stand up for myself more.
Now Icelanders are generally known as risk-takers, and a bit naive, and those are qualities I have to some degree and which I generally assign to my Icelndic identity. But there are those rare, very critical and absolutely essential Icelanders who counter-balance that, individuals who have found a way to harness that iconoclastic, entrepreneurial spirit in highly appropriate and productive ways, to be strategic. This is a skill I am still working on.
So I love it when my Icelandic bouncer takes time to check in with me, usually along the lines of "why in the world are you doing x?", to which I rarely have a good answer. But this time he caught me in time, before I made another arrangement I was unhappy with but which fulfilled someone else's expectations.
Sometimes, less really is more.
Comments