May 25
This post continues the logbook-like blog-post about my 25th birthday
Tuesday, 26.05.2020 – Retrospective
Again, I'm writing retrospectively. Right now it's Tuesday, 12:52, and I'm sitting on our balcony in shorts and long jeans shirt while my flatmate Sarah is watering our tomato plants.
The water is flowing down the facade like a small waterfall. The paprika plants are still as small as a few weeks ago. Probably they don't get enough sunlight on our north-facing balcony.
Yesterday I finished writing the last blog-post and the e-mail to Gaby that I had been editing for a week.
After finishing this I opened Instagram (recently I spend more time there because it's connecting me to people better than real-life interactions in these times of quarantine) and saw a quote in a friend's story:
(27.05.2020 – 01:34
Nils just left me to go to sleep and I have poured myself a small sip of Whiskey. Now I'm about to vaporize a bit of the weed I bought yesterday and then I'm going to continue writing this. It was a long but happy day.)
“Deine Seele wird sich nie mit weniger als Freiheit
zufriedengeben. Sie ist die Geliebte des Ozeans.
Sie ist hungrig nach dem Unendlichen, und das
Unendliche ist hungrig nach dir.
Der Fluss muss zum Meer.
Folge deiner Sehnsucht. Sie ist heilig.”
This gave me goosebumps. Seriously. It touched something in me that suddenly felt aroused, accepted, recognised.
“Your soul will never settle for anything less than freedom
satisfied. She is the ocean's lover.
She is hungry for the infinite, and the
Infinity's hungry for you.
The river must go to the sea.
Follow your longing. It is sacred.”
Word-by-word pseudo-translation German to English and Spanish:
“Deine Seele wird sich nie mit weniger als Freiheit
“Your soul will (itself) never with less than freedom
zufriedengeben. Sie ist die Geliebte des Ozeans.
satisfied-give. She is the lover (of) the ocean.
Sie ist hungrig nach dem Unendlichen, und das
She is hungry for the infinite, and the
Unendliche ist hungrig nach dir.
Infinity is hungry for you.
Der Fluss muss zum Meer.
The river must [go] to (the) sea.
Folge deiner Sehnsucht. Sie ist heilig.”
Follow your longing. She is sacred.”
And after this quote gave me goosebumps I simply responded to the story by sending Micha the word: “Gänsehaut”
It felt weird, probably because I already felt that this would trigger a longer interaction.
She sent me a voicemail:
“Wie geht's Dir? Was machst Du so? Wie läuft die Quarantäne? Machst Du überhaupt Quarantäne? Was machst Du momentan so? Erzähl mir einfach. Belastet dich irgendwas? Ich hoffe, dass es Dir gut geht. Ich hab dich nie vergessen.”
“How are you? What do you do? How's the quarantine going? Do you even do quarantine? What are you doing now? Just tell me. Anything bothering you? I hope you are well. I've never forgotten you.”
Me: “Habe heute über die spanische Revolution 1931-1937 gelesen und muss zugeben, dass ich noch gar nicht verstanden habe, was genau damals alles passiert ist. Bisher habe ich nur verstanden, dass es eine ziemlich tragische Geschichte gewesen sein muss und dass etwas daran ist, das wir heute noch daraus lernen müssen. Insgesamt geht es mir gut, ich verbringe viel Zeit mit meinen nächsten Freunden, war schon wieder fliegen und klettern und Radfahren und versuche momentan, mich so gut es geht zum Lernen und Arbeiten zu motivieren. Irgendetwas hält mich dabei konstant zurück, das habe ich auch noch nicht genau verstanden. Irgendetwas an der Idee von Leistung und Arbeit und Zeitplanung und Zielsetzung stört mich und löst in mir Widerstand aus.
Wie geht es dir und wie verbringst du deine Zeit?”
“I have read today about the Spanish Revolution 1931-1937 and have to admit that I have not yet understood exactly what happened back then. So far I have only understood that it must have been a rather tragic story and that there is something about it that we still have to learn from it today. Overall I'm doing well, I spend a lot of time with my closest friends, I've been flying and climbing and cycling again and I'm currently trying to motivate myself as much as I can to learn and work. Something is constantly holding me back, I haven't really understood that yet either. Something about the idea of performance and work and time planning and goal setting bothers me and triggers resistance in me.
How are you doing and how do you spend your time?”
She then immediately offered to talk and as I had the time I climbed to the top of our roof and called her.
It was a good conversation that's hard to sum up. In the end, Jens came to the roof to visit me so I ended the call and climbed down. Exactly in this moment Mattis called me to tell me that our Cannabis dealer was at home and that he would appreciate if I could quickly come by at the workshop, pick up some money and then drive to our dealer.
Jens borrowed Sarah's bike and off we went.
The next day was overall not much different from all the last days. I got up, had breakfast and in the evening went climbing with Sarah, ate cake at Simon's flat, made Pizza at home with Nils, talked with him and Ben and now I'm here.
But my feeling during parts of the day was subtly more joyful than the last have been and I don't know what exactly it was, but I know it has something to do with the my psychological fine-tuning. I suspect since a while that with my current life-setting, without really changing anything to my experience or external world, my overall happiness, success and positive impact could be much greater.
This, seen as a preliminary approximation of what I mean, is what I'd like to explore. I know there's been a great amount of work in the spiritual, philosophical and psychological realms of human knowledge creation, but I also believe that everybody needs an access to that, and that access needs to be highly personal. All we can try to provide is a condensed top-level view that gives an image of possible entry points. Everyone has different world views, experiences and inspirations that lead them to the same universal insights, realizations, and en-lighten-ments (a lightening of their perception of reality, both in the sense of less weight and more light).
Maybe it is also possible to make these points of universal insight glow for people to see their direction.
What I feel sure about is that if we are able to transform the unhappy, unproductive, adverse people (to which I also count myself some of the time) into the opposite, this might be a process that is contagious and therefore able to grow quickly and that it is therefore important to study it.