We are entering a new year.
2011
My thirtyfirst year of living.
This year is going to be very different from 2010. In all ways imaginable. But there is also something I want to bring with me into this new year, something I want to stay the same.
Once upon in a time I lived a stable and perfect life. Never afraid of anything.
This year I have done things I have never done before, my emotional life has been on a rollercoaster, up and down, up and down. I have been bored and exhilirated. I have been happy and scared to death. In love and completely desperate. Sometimes all at the same time.
Looking back at all this, nothing has really been too bad, nothing to be afraid of. But I didn’t know that then.
The real heroes in our world are the ones who despite their fear goes ahead and do it anyway.
It might look like people like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela were never afraid, that they had some inner strength that we lack.
I don’t believe that.
I believe they are just as afraid as we are. They were only better at ignoring that feeling, moving forward anyway.
They are no different from us. What they have done, we can do.
We must face our fears, stand up and tell it to it’s face that no matter how loud it screams, we are not going to listen.
We must go the whole way, live life fully, no matter what it means. We cannot all fight for independence or abolish apartheid, but we can give all we have right now, right here.
We can dare ourselves to fall in love even when it looks stupid, dare to be honest with the ones we meet, trust people we have never met. Dare to risk it all, dare to fail. Dare to stand there looking like fools when we do something weird. Sing when we bike down the street and see astonishment and smiles on peoples faces.
We must stand up against the impossible without closing our hearts and turn around.
Dare to be human
Maybe that means having more bad days than before, but maybe we will also have more great days. It is a risk. It is dangerous. It might be crazy, immature and stupid.
But to survive in a crazy world, we must be a little bit more crazy.
Stop waiting for some hero to come and save us. It will never happen, no one will do it for you.
2011 is the year when we have the chance to be the heroes in our own lives.
Take that chance.
I am now home. Or maybe not home. I am at my parents place, waiting to leave for Stockholm, pick up my keys and then come “home”.
I have a few things left to write, about my last days in Lucerne, my visit to Vienna, but after that, the trip itself is over. Kind of.
On Sunday, the day before leaving for Vienna, the Dodds family, James and me took the chairlift up to the top of the Pilatus mountain, the highest in the region. There was already snow up there for the kids to play in and the view is undescribable, my pictures are only bad copies of reality (as always).
Köln or Cologne pops up every know and then in all things related to Germany, several people I have meet during my travels is either from here or is related to the city and several friends really like the city. For me it’s my first time here though. I am staying with Sabrina that I met in San Francisco in july when we were hosted by the same guy Eric.
The city is the fourth largest in Germany and among other things famous for the Carnival that takes place every year, but the most famous tourist attraction is the cathedral, the Dom.
I got a glimpse of the Dom when i arrived by train from the airport and even though I’m not that big of a fan of sightseeing, I felt straight away that I had to go there.
The cathedral itself is from the beginning of the 13th century and a lot bigger than I thought it would be. I just stand there on the square in front of it. It is probably one of the most beautiful churches I’ve seen, a lot nicer than both the Notre Dame or St. Peters in rome. It’s impossible not to get impressed.
It must have taken hundres of years of combined hours of work from thousands of people to build this cathedral, to work on every small little detail.
During the last six months, I have noticed that I not only pay attention to things, my thoughts automatically also goes to the person behind the thing, how they have put their soul into the creation of it, the enormous amount of time and energy spent on it’s perfection.
It hits me that I’m not only in a building that has a function, practising ones belief, but that people have invested a lot into something that doesn’t directly give you anything back. An enormous building that really isn’t useful.
In todays society, this is something strange, we hardly build anything anymore that doens’t have a direct use. Concrete is popular partly because it is so easy to maintain, you don’t need someone who cut the grass or trim the garden. No one spends months anymore, carving out tiny details in a rock, everything gets done fast and it has to be cheap to maintain.
If you look at what is built today in our society as a symbol for what we as a culture think is important, it’s remarkable to observe that what is built today is Sport arenas and shopping centers.
ABB Arena, Swedbank Park, Cloetta Center.
Less and less people go to these sport events and yet we have seen dozens of these huge business sponsored arenas pop up all over Sweden, just like we have never seen so many shopping centers being built. All of them with the same stores.
These huge areas of malls is our times temples and cathedrals. Sunday mass has been replaced by sunday shopping at Ikea and Media Markt.
Today, many look at religion as an escape from reality, but in a hundred years, maybe our children’s children will look back at our society and say the same thing about shopping.
Karl Marx once called religion for the opium of the people, today we drug ourselves with entertainment and consumption. Every time has it’s drug of choice, but the question is what this so called reality we are escaping from really is.
Are we not already in the middle of it?
The first thursday every month is Art Walk here in Seattle. It means that a lot of museums and galleries have free entrance. I took the oppurtuinity to visit Asian Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery.
On the way back I got off the bus and snuck into Remedy Tea, a café with 150 different types of tea.
I like tea and I like a good selection. It is one of the many advantages with living in a big city such as Stockholm or Seattle. But when I sit there and drink my Silver Needle White tea I can’t stop thinking about all these apparently endless choices we have today.
Do we really become happier by all these choices or do we only get overwhelmed by them?
Todays society give an apparent endless oppurtunity to choose who we want to be, how to live our lives and what we want, something we take for granted in todays invidualized world. At the same time, we can see how all these choices, all these oppurtunities we can experience through the internet and tv and in stores also creates stress.
When we can read about all these millions of possibilities we have to shape our lives it easy to get stuck in all the choices we didn’t make, all the oppurtunities we missed. We choose and then worry that we made the wrong choice. All these choices create an illusion of control over our lives, we can choose anything, but it also creates the feeling that it is my fault if we choose wrong, if we are unhappy. Because we had the choice.
We go around spending a lot of energy making all these choices, that when we stop and think about it seldom really make a huge difference in our lives and in the end we have less energy over to really make the decisions that are tough and important and really make a difference.
To be poor in todays modern society is not so much about finding food for the day, except for a few rare cases, it is about wether we can keep up the consumption compared to everyone else around us.
Sociologist Rollo May see this in the paradox that the more we have, the more unhappy we are. If it was truly so that we became happy by having a lot of material things and unlimited possibilities then people in poor countries be constantly unhappy, and I have seen with my own eyes that this is not so. In many cases they even seem, despite their rough situation, to be happier than us in the west. Material wealth makes life easier, more comfortable, but not necessarily better. If that was the case, life in Sweden today would be happier than in the 80’s. I would say that life is probably more fun today, but that we would actually be happier I have a hard time seeing.
Freedom is not about having infinite things to choose from but being happy with what we already got. To be rich is not about having an unlimited amount of money, it is about seeing that we already have everything we really need.
I recommend watching this inspirational TED-video about choice below. The speech is held by Barry Schwartz, the author of the book “The Paradox of Choice”. It is a well spent 19 minutes and 45 seconds of your life in my opinion.
It is strange how things that we once took for granted, held on to as if our life depended on it, suddenly is nothing more than a memory.
Just like with everything.
Our opinions, thoughts, ideas, our friends and the things we have must never become so important that we desperately hold on to them, suffocating them.
Our lives must be like writing on water, one door close, another one opens up. The world we live in, the people we meet deserve to be taken seriously, but we must never take ourselves too seriously.
What I write here is important and completely meaningless, all at the same time. We must never think that the words we use has anything to do with what they describe. To hold on to what has been is asking for trouble.
We do what we do in the moment, then we let it go.
That is to be happy to me.
Today I will board another plane. Pack my bag yet another time, go through security, arrive at a new, yet old, destination. I have been there before, but every situation is unique.
I am grateful that someone has let me stay with them during my journey, and at the same time, willing to let it go, to become a memory in my past.
Next stop is Seattle again. The first day of the rest of my life.
We are slaves in our own life for two reasons.
The first is that we believe we need external things to make us happy, the other that we think we can distract ourselves from being bored or unsatisfied with our lives.
As long as we think that material things can make us happy, we will always want more, more and more, but never really become satisfied. As long as we believe we have to live in luxury with food and wine to have a good time, we will always eat and drink too much.
As long as we can’t handle to be bored, sitting still without constantly looking for something to do, we will always be addicted to nicotine, caffeine, sugar, alcohol. When we learn what it means to be bored, we are no longer bored.
We will never give up something we think we need to make us happy. Why would we?
Break these mental ideas about how life has to be for us to be happy, and we no longer will be slaves to our surroundings.
Then, we can actually start enjoying it.
We can think about living Life all we want, but in the end we just have to act. Take the risk of loosing it all, embarrassing ourselves and looking like fools.
We can write reports, forecasts, go to meetings for form commitees forever, but in the end the only thing that bring real experience and feedback is action.
All these procrastrianting activities, the need to always be certain is probably the best sign of decay of what we call the western culture.
We are like zombies walking around without direction and only disaster will wake us upp.
Too bad they saved the financial system back in 2008, but don’t worry, there will be another chance. Maybe we will wake up when the water from melted ice caps in the Arctics come flooding in under our front doors.
It fills me with a feeling of both depression and expectations.
It’s going to be interesting times ahead.
Sometimes when I listen to what I say, reading something I have written earlier, it sometimes sounds like I am against everything, that the lives we live are empty and the society we live it in is rotten to it’s core. Sure, sometimes I do feel like that, but in the big picture life is great and most things we do is good.
I am a person that question things though. Mostly myself and my own behaviour. I think about why we so often talk without really have anything to say, how come we so often talk about the weather?
I do these things often myself, but what I’m saying is that if we are in the same place, it’s kind of obvious what the weather is like and why do we need to constantly state the obvious? And if we are in different places, how does it matter anyway?
I could tell you that today it is cloudy and around 20 degrees. It creates a mental image in you, something you can relate to, a feeling that you know what I experience. But the truth is, I can never share my experience with you. The only way would be to experience the same thing, but that is not possible either. Even if we where at the same place at the same time, your experience would be yours only. Similar, but at the same time completely different.
It is obvious, yet we do these things all the time, creating the illusion that we live in the same world, despite the fact that everyone is confined to their own. Often, there is another reason behind our behaviour.
Finally we have to realize that no one can experience someone elses experience. No matter how hard we try we are always completely alone. Isolated. Like islands without a connection.
It is like trying to explain to someone who has never tried what a mango taste like. It’s impossible. The only way is to try it themselves.
It might feel depressing to think like that, but in the end we are completely alone and when we acknowledge that and learn to live with it, we can also see how far our minds are willing to go to avoid this loneliness.
This desperate need for relations create a lot of conflict, we give in to peer pressure, adjust to others’ will and sacrifice our integrity. Compromising the things we value in life.
The paradox is that only when we are ok with being alone that we can truly get to know other people. When we stop looking for someone or something else to complete us or make us happy. When we look for companionship, not because we need it, but because we enjoy it.
It is considered egotistical to put yourself first, but do we really serve anyone else by sacrificing ourselves? Is it not when we put our own well being first that we can truly be there for others?
I’m not saying you should not look for company in others, sharing our life. It is after all, one of the things that make life worth living.
How much fun would life be if all musicians only played home, alone or if all authors wrote books and then put them in their own bookshelves.
All I’m saying is that it is worth the time to look why we do things, the real reason for it. Why for instance I write this blog to share my trip with you, when I know you can never see what I see.
Maybe there is no good answer, but it is worth it to ask the question.
There is now about one and a half month left of my journey before returning home. Back to reality as the expression goes. Not that it gets more or less real, only different. But still, it’s obvious that there will be more demand for responsibility, more planning and a way of living that I haven’t lived during this trip.
There will be a process of assimilation and I don’t know what that will feel like. I’ve been thinking about it, but have no need to figure things out now what it will feel like later. That is just a waste of time.
I know my life will be different, I know I will want to live it in a new way. Not because I have a plan, but simply because I am a different person than before.
I have no plan for what will happen. Planning is something I have more and more let go of and I realize that it is quite meaningless. If we look close enough, we realize that we have very little control over our lives and the world that surround us. Things might change in a second and suddenly we are heading in a different direction than before.
That realization can either be very scary or very liberating.
Decisions that need to be made will be made, problems that occur will be solved one way or another. Some days will be up, some will be down. No matter what, all is well.
For exampel, I sat down to write about voluntary simplicity, but instead all of this showed up. I will have to write about that some other day, or maybe I don’t do it at all. If you think about it, it really doesn’t matter does it? The only thing that matters is what you do right now. And if I focus on now, life is pretty easy to live.
It doesn’t mean you don’t make plans for the future, that you don’t have ideas about what to do and how to do it, what it means is that you make the plans but know that they might change. Nothing is fixed, you act in accordance with the current situation and not how it was supposed to be according to your plans.
In a way, that is voluntary simplicity. Though I didn’t think like that ten minutes ago.
In the spring of 2004 I went to Schwarzwald (Black Forest) in Germany, visiting friends. One day we went on a small tour around the area and arrived at a store known for it’s ceramics and cristals. I was still a student back then, so I really couldn’t afford to buy much in that store, but when I was walking around in there looking at things, I suddenly got this urge to buy something to bring back home.
I didn’t know what to buy, but at the counter there was a box with different kinds of magnets you put on the fridge, made out of ceramics and costing only a few euros each. So I bought a few of them, just to buy something.
When I came home I got that feeling you often get from souvenirs. Why did I buy this? The small things I had bought was completely meaningless. I still can not understand what I was thinking about but I still remember how embaressing it felt when I got home.
I think that most people realize how meaningless souvenirs usually are, but when you are somewhere, walking around in the stores they are all over the place. It is so easy to just reach out and grab one, because we believe that the places we visit will be easier to remember if we have something from that place. The trip becomes a bit more real. Solid.
Among the things I bought, one was a cow. Behind each “KLÖV” and behind the head there was a magnet. I still have that cow. I have it hanging in my kitchen on the magnet on the wall where you hang your knives, arms stretched out, feet crossed.
Like Jesus on the cross.
Jesus-the-cow is my reminder to myself to stop wasting time, money and energy on things that really don’t matter.
And maybe, Jesus-the-cow is the cheapest lesson in the art of living I have ever recieved.
At least I haven’t bought any souvenirs since then.