Zvone – Inner Dialogue

Why Would I Need Forgiveness If I Do Not Hold Grudges? A few days ago, while wandering through the internet the way people wander through supermarkets when they only need bread but somehow end up examining electric drills and exotic sauces, I stumbled across another discussion about forgiveness. The topic appears regularly online, usually accompanied by soft background music, photographs of sunsets, and sentences written in decorative fonts by people who apparently spend their afternoons healing humanity between yoga sessions. "You must forgive. Forgiveness sets you free. Holding grudges only poisons yourself. Release the past."  And so on. The strange thing was that while reading all this wisdom, I suddenly realized something uncomfortable.  I could not think of a single person I needed to forgive. At first that sounded almost noble. Mature, even. Then I became suspicious of myself. Surely there must be somebody. Over the years I have met enough difficult people to ...

When Tiredness Starts Feeling Like Loneliness Today was a strangely difficult day. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody died, nobody argued, and the world did not collapse. And yet from the very morning something felt wrong. I drank coffee with relatives, wandered around the house, sat in front of the computer, checked messages, opened random websites, closed them again, looked at unfinished work, avoided it successfully, and then repeated the entire process for several hours like a highly inefficient office employee trapped in a psychological escape room. I simply could not start. Not because there was nothing to do. There was plenty to do. But every task somehow felt heavy before I even touched it. So I circled around work like a cat around hot soup until almost noon. And then something else slowly appeared. Not boredom exactly. Not even depression at first. More like a strange emptiness. A feeling that something was missing. The Feeling ...

The Quiet Shape of Loneliness People often imagine loneliness very simply: a lonely person sits alone in a dark apartment, staring sadly through a rainy window while dramatic piano music plays somewhere in the background. Reality is usually much less cinematic, and much more complicated. Deep loneliness is not really about being physically alone. Some people spend weeks by themselves and feel perfectly peaceful. Others sit in crowded rooms, surrounded by friends, coworkers, family and constant messages, yet still carry the strange feeling that they are somehow disconnected from the rest of humanity. As if everyone else received an instruction manual for life and relationships, and theirs got lost somewhere during shipping. The Feeling That Nobody Would Notice One of the first things that happens in deep loneliness is subtle but powerful. A person slowly loses the feeling of social safety. Most emotionally connected people carry an unconscious belief somewhere inside themselves:...

We Were Both Right A few friends and I were sitting beneath the shade of a large apple tree, escaping the afternoon heat and discussing a traffic accident that had happened the previous day. One of them mentioned that a motorcyclist had died after crashing head-on into a car driven by an older woman. Apparently she crossed into the opposite lane for reasons nobody understood. Naturally, the discussion immediately transformed into unofficial forensic investigation conducted by men holding coffee cups. My friend shook his head and said: “I’m not saying the woman wasn’t at fault, but these motorcyclists… they drive like lunatics. No wonder there are so many fatal accidents.” And instantly, without even thinking properly, I reacted. “No, wait a minute. Motorcyclists are often hard to notice. Older drivers lose reflexes, attention drops with age, maybe she simply didn’t see him…” At that exact moment a memory flashed through my mind — a motorcyclist who once appeared beside my car ...

Drunk By Obligation Yesterday one of the younger nephews celebrated his eighteenth birthday. The family organized a proper village-style celebration. A maypole was raised, long tables appeared under a canopy, crates of drinks materialized from somewhere mysterious, and relatives operated with the quiet efficiency of people who have organized exactly the same event at least forty-seven times before. Most guests were his generation — classmates, friends from town, loud boys pretending to be men already and girls pretending not to notice them pretending.  The atmosphere started warming up already in the late afternoon. Naturally, the first thing served was whisky. Because apparently in human civilization the transition from “child” to “adult” is traditionally marked by immediately poisoning the liver. The Ritual Begins At first everyone behaved relatively normally. People laughed. Music played. Someone grilled meat. Someone carried chairs around nervously as if chai...

You Only Listen to the People You Respect This morning the conversation on the terrace ended surprisingly quickly. Slightly awkwardly, actually. We were drinking coffee, half awake, staring at the hills while pretending we understood the world better than the people currently running it. The discussion drifted toward politics, economics and global tensions — one of those enormous topics that no human can truly understand completely, but everyone confidently explains anyway. My wife reads a lot of articles about politics, economics, ecology and social issues. And not just casually. She follows journalists whose opinions she deeply respects. According to her, these people write intelligent, thoughtful analyses that explain the world properly. Which is fair enough. Some of them really are excellent writers. The problem appears when we start discussing those same topics together. “Read the Article First” At one point I started talking about economic trends, global power stru...

While People Are Still Alive When people die, we suddenly become very good at remembering them. We say beautiful things. We bring flowers. We write long messages about how important they were. We stand beside graves in silence, looking serious and thoughtful, as if we have finally understood something profound about life. And yet I often wonder what any of that actually means. Not in a cynical way. Mourning is human. Loss hurts. But still, somewhere in the back of my mind there is always the same stubborn thought: if someone truly mattered to me, perhaps the important part was not standing beside their grave afterward, but sitting beside them while they were still alive. That idea has followed me for years. The Friend I Forgot To Call I once had a friend who suffered a terrible motorcycle accident. Recovery took him eight months. Broken body, endless rehabilitation, pain, uncertainty, all the things that suddenly reduce a person’s world to hospital walls and slow movement. Ba...

When Everything Is Someone Else’s Fault: Emotional Displacement Under Stress A Smile at the Wrong Moment “Why are you laughing?” she asked accusingly. I was smiling, yes. But not out loud, not with that relaxed Sunday kind of laughter. It was more of a curious, slightly sour smile — the kind that appears when you connect things in your head and suddenly realise that, by some strange logic, you have become the main culprit for the existence of bacteria. It looked as if I was mocking her. And I admit, that is something I can do rather well. With words. But this time it wasn’t that. Her mother, Ana, had been taken to the emergency room because of a urinary infection. Bacteria. Nothing dramatic at first, but serious enough to become dangerous given that she was over eighty. My wife called me just as I had returned home. “We’re at the emergency room,” she said. I packed a few essentials into a backpack and drove back to Ljubljana. We waited. After several hours, Ana still hadn’t been...