The other day, a friend of mine shared an article about “the trend of not responding and not returning in the art world”, and this prompted me to say a few words on this subject, to the best of my capacity. This is something that can happen not only in the art world, but also in business life, in private life, in any situation where you are the protagonist and the other party is the decision maker. Western culture calls this “ghosting” if I’m not mistaken. In other words, neither your messages nor your calls receive any positive or negative response from the other party. You are treated as if you were an invisible ghost. This can leave you in limbo and unable to move on.
But even a “no” is such a good answer that it allows the other person to draw closure and chart a new path for themselves. Answering no does not end something, it actually opens up space for it to come to life again in another form. You can liken it to a plant whose top bud has been cut off. The plant will immediately develop new branches from the side and continue to develop, albeit in a different way. I think this is why the ancients associated the word “no”, which in our language denotes a negative answer, with “auspicious”. This requires a lot of thought, and we can understand that the ancients were not actually rejecting you when they said “no”, but they were giving you the opportunity to move on by saying that there is a good in not doing this, that this will open another door that is more beautiful and auspicious. Isn’t that marvelous?
It’s not hard to understand why people don’t put some energy and effort into responding. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most common one is that the other person doesn’t have the courage to confront you and chooses the easy way out by ignoring you. The second is that they don’t value you enough. Either way, I think the best thing we can do is to have our own closure and move on in a different way.
However, if we are in the decision-making position this time, let’s act with that awareness, let’s put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. For me, confrontation is a very challenging experience, I spent a long period of my life avoiding confrontation. This is an aspect of myself that I have been working on and trying to develop for years, after I realized that I had an escape reflex. Every time I have managed to confront, I have realized that these confrontations are not as challenging as I thought they would be and that they can lead to the opening of new doors that I never expected, both for the other person and for me. Many times I realized that I was making that confrontation scene too dramatic in my head, that I was scaring myself by overloading it with too much tension. Believe me, most of the time the confrontation goes much better than we think it will, and as a result, it is as if a burden is lifted from our backs and we feel lighter. Otherwise, like a parasite, every unresolved story that we throw into the nooks and crannies of our minds continues to feed on our mental energy, and from time to time it gets stronger and starts to cause some problems and internal troubles.
The people we leave hanging in limbo have another effect on us. This effect is more in the energy dimension. At a time when everything in my life was going upside down and with every new setback I thought “this is not enough!”, I somehow felt the urge to solve all my unresolved stories by looking for the people I had left in limbo. To give you an idea of how difficult it is for me, I think it is the same as climbing Everest in shorts. One by one, I called or texted the people I had missed, ghosted, chosen to ignore, and had somehow broken their hearts. This experience was eye-opening for me. Although months and even years have passed, without exception, everyone I have called, no matter how many hearts I have broken, has closed with me with great openness of heart. I didn’t hear a single harsh word, I didn’t hear a single reproach. When I opened my heart to them and told them how sorry I was, they all embraced me and forgave me. When the calls were over, I enjoyed being alone with my conscience for a while, astonished but light as a feather.
And then what happened? Miraculously, all the knots in my life began to untie one by one, the untied ones began to close, and they became the occasion for a new beginning. I watched with my mouth open as one thing led to another. The energy of my life has completely changed and having experienced it myself has given me the courage to share that experience with you here.
Life always gives us opportunities to put things right. We have a guide for that, actually, all of you are familiar with that voice that whispers to us when we are doing something wrong. That voice that we usually ignore is actually our guide to living our lives right. Let’s at least do some soul-searching during the periods when that voice turns from a whisper to a shout, let’s think if there are people whose hearts we have broken, people we have left in limbo. Let’s get out of our comfort zone and do what we have to do, even if it’s hard to say “no” in our new connections from now on. I am actually writing these things to myself as well. On this occasion, I would like to take this opportunity to ask forgiveness from the bottom of my heart if there is anyone I have left in limbo.
