A short answer is yes, my tactic worked. I’m here referring to my previous post named the strudel incident (a short read), which was about the toxic environment of our kitchen. But as with other aspects of our lives, and life in general, there was a hidden trade-off in my strategy.
It worked in a way I should say. My strategy not paying attention to Emma had come to the point, where she was so decomposed by my behaviour that she couldn’t handle it anymore. This escalated the other day when we met in the kitchen. She goes: “you’ve been very rude to me lately, I can’t live like this”. Ok. She didn’t care the whole time, so why should I now? Then I said my part and left. I’m not going to give my housemates lessons in cleaning etc. as if I were their parent, nor don’t I want to waste my energy trying to change them. Thus I’m not going to talk about this bit further because the conclusion of my experiment stand solluteraly without a need to dig deeper in the subject of who did what and why. To explain my moves over the last weeks, I’ve put an effort to engage with my housemates as least as possible, which, in practice, meant to buy some bowls for my morning porridge and a bowl of ramen or rice. Ok, done. Beside that, I’ve bought an ottoman which can serve as a small side table or eventually a seat for guests. Ok, good. Now I can spend just the most necessary time in the kitchen.
That was the main point in my plan. The thing that I didn’t planned at all was the fact that even I’ve solved the issue for myself I didn’t think a single minute about a situate in which I would have some friends over. Forget I’ve mentioned the new ottoman, but what about the kitchen? I can happily eat in my room, but with more people over we’d probably need to stick to the kitchen. The place with a very unfriendly atmosphere and stingy overfill bins on top of that…Overall, it’s mostly the atmosphere what makes things worse. I’m slightly exaggerating, but the following is the home take message, at least for me.
I’m bringing this up cause this can serve as a nice example of how life situations work. There is usually no silver bullet to our life problems. We have a perfect plan in our head until something else doesn’t come into play. Life is like a chess game. Often we find ourselves having grand ideas about how to trick the opponent, yet it’s his action what makes it a real game. It’s the response from the environment we live in. Plans captivated in our mind remain just a pure imagination unless we confront them with the real world. Because reality, most of the time, turns different flavour onto things we’ve expected to happen in a certain way.
So what is this game called life all about? It’s about to try, to show up, and to adjust. And if that didn’t work, try again :))