Q: Are we learning to be alone? To listen more instead of just hearing?

A: It’s funny, but we have never given as much importance to our thoughts as we do now. Every day we listen to everyone, their requests, their problems, their demands, their concerns, but we don’t listen to ourselves.

Now we need to stop hearing and start listening, so we can focus on ourselves instead of others and redirect our priorities towards us.

It’s good and positive to help and listen to others, but we must not give everything to them. Our heart also needs to receive the same affection that we provide.

Now is the time to look inside and, establish dialogues with ourselves. It´s time to see our strengths and weaknesses and put them in their true place.

Others make us feel good or bad because of the power we assign to them, so it would be a positive start to recover that power and start thinking that we are important too. Suddenly we’ve had to learn to be alone and we’ve realized that having to be alone has nothing to do with “being alone”. In addition we’ve had to deal with thoughts that are sometimes irrational.

In the past we’ve avoided loneliness at any cost. We have used our free time for work and given importance to social approval, smiling on the outside when we are stressed on the inside, until eventually everything suddenly falls apart.
We looked the other way when we were with a person who made us feel alone, as we thought it was worse to admit to the loneliness.

We created emotional dependencies that we satisfied with a few crumbs, until everything changed. Now we must listen to our thoughts and take advantage of the fact that life has stopped in its tracks. We need to synchronize our compass and not let chance govern our destiny.

Q: Do we need batteries to start?

A: Too many times we say “I’m out of batteries” instead of “I don’t want to do something.” We blame energy when we lack discipline and / or motivation, leaving (as in our student days) everything to the last moment.

But that’s not the worst thing, when it comes to performing a task we spend our lives with a mantra based on the “I have to do….”, “tomorrow I´ll do it…”, etc, When tomorrow passes, we still don’t do it, nor the next day, it becomes a never ending cycle.

We need to realize that when we don’t make a decision, we have already made it. Deciding not to do something is a choice we’ve already made. On many occasions it’s fear, on others it´s perfectionism that makes us question the answer over and over again without making any decisions.

We need to understand that it is better to make mistakes instead of spending our lives regretting not having made a decision.

Q: Where are you in your life now?

A: It’s curious, but one of the most complicated questions we can answer is: where are you in your life now?

It’s very difficult for us to respond with any precision, because our life is full of many things that are often unbalanced. Love, health and work, are big areas of our lives and each one works at its own pace. This often means that we compensate for each other and think that we cannot have everything.

Life passes and things change. Sometimes we have to reach the conclusion that it is not life but us who put our interest in something and block out the rest. We hope that life smiles at us, without working for it. As the song says, there are three ingredients in life, but we forgot that the recipe was written by us.

If this crisis is teaching us something, it’s to live in the present. Thinking about tomorrow is fine, as long as we focus our action on the “here and now.”

As somebody used to say, “building castles in the air you also need to have your feet firmly anchored to the ground, because dreams without a present are nothing but soap bubbles”.

We’ve realized that our projects, our illusions, can fail so we should concentrate all our interest in living today without neglecting tomorrow in any way.

Life is funny… when we thought we had it the safest, it kicked us in the behind and locked us in our houses. Let’s learn the lesson and don’t leave for tomorrow what we can live today.

Lda. Elena Blanaru Lucanu is a general psychologist
at Gran Alacant Family Doctors 24h
Every month she will try to answer your questions,
your name will be kept in the strictest confidentiality

T: +34 610 684 970 I Email: elenablanaru@cop.es