Some well-intentioned advice leads straight to ruin. I got one like this for my driver’s license test: “If the examiner takes you on the freeway, he wants to see at least two overtaking manoeuvres.” That’s not entirely wrong. It was more wrong what I made of it: I overtook everything. Everywhere. I raced on the country road at 120 km/h past no-overtaking signs, shooed cyclists from Freiburg’s senior lecturers into the ditch and put myself in a Golf-Diesel-against-Porsche race on the feeder road to the south. After 50 minutes I had left southern Breisgau behind me and – you guessed it – not a pink rag in my hand.
Why am I telling you this? This has more to do with my life now than you think. Whenever a friend of mine is struggling with love, kids, or work, I think of that darn winter day in 1987. Because in other situations the same thing often happens: we are so anxiously fixated on a single challenge, staring at the snake like the proverbial rabbit, that we forget everything else.
As a beginner, I have For example, the team got annoyed for months because I interrupted everyone in conferences. Even the boss. I felt good. At the university it was said that committed employees are in demand! At some point a colleague took me aside. Thanks! My friend Nadja’s jogging pants trauma is also legendary: she was convinced that the sight of her baggy look and glasses had scared away her lover at the time. Since then, she has thought that baggy knees were the worst love trap. True, she soon met a guy with whom everything fell into place. But it was only after five years of marriage that he found out about the existence of her TV glasses and her favorite striped pajamas.
Send less, receive more
Another example of this kind of tunnel vision comes from Marilyn French’s classic novel “Women”: A girl longs for her mother to brush her long hair thoughtfully and thoroughly. What does she do later with her own daughter? Sure: groom, groom, groom – without noticing that the little one hates the squeaking and fiddling. What do we learn from this? Send less, receive more. For a happy coexistence we need the ability to look at what is really in demand. Maybe it bothers our loved ones a lot more if we already plan the next weekend on Mondays than if we crawl into bed in a baggy shirt (it also has a certain shabby sex appeal). And maybe the daughter would rather read books about horses than ride a horse – even if we consider contact with creatures to be very important.
Sure, it’s hard to always keep an eye on everyone’s needs. The painful realization from my second driving test: No driving school golf fits past a coach on a tiny bridge. I only passed on the third try, half asleep in the morning so I didn’t have time to get nervous. Incidentally, 23 years later I can park to the left and raise my two little passengers on the back seat at the same time. This is also an encouraging finding: we all make mistakes. But in life you usually have more than one try.
