Monthly Archives: November 2016

Sunset over Amsterdam, day one of hundred and eight days

If you love something very very much, let it go. When it comes back, it’s yours. When it doesn’t, it never was
Does human history teach us what happens when one acts against the odds? I like to keep track of the odds for a sacred amount of days to come in order to document the present. I start with day one as the absolute beginning, while questioning it’s absoluteness instantly at the same time. Our life begins where we want it to begin. And so does this story. About love, believing in it against all odds and most significantly, acting upon it. If Hamlet were to be living today the quintessential question would be: ‘when to let go and when to hold on?’ Instead of the infamous coming to age individualism dating back to early Renaissance – meaning rebirthing – Europe expressed by Hamlet’s personal struggle ‘to be or not to be’.
Dark grey, almost black with a purple lining in the form of an horizon. Topped by deep red, like starved flesh, spilling into soft bright orange. Not the kind of orange our country is adorned with as it’s national color. Although the color scheme in fact is very appropriate, taking off and away from Amsterdam. Really taking off and away from it. As if the Dutch sky decides to give me a proper goodbye. Although the copper orange is soft and heavy and more reminiscent of a warm Spanish night in the midst of summer, a village square with flirts of flaming flamenco music, enchanting and everlasting.
Memories and expectations fight hard to be acknowledged. Taking off and away from Amsterdam. I feel it in my lower stomach, my core, more then that I cling to thoughts that plop up in my mind like popcorn but vanish as soon as they meet the languish orange twilight. Leaving behind feelings that cautiously fill the farewell gap. Feelings that unconsciously look for a wardrobe, a sheltering sky. Wanting to be neatly tucked away in a closet. Well kept and guarded until they are deliberately taken out when the time is right. I like them orderly and controlled, no outbursts please, nothing too heavy nor too outworn, just decent. And preferably well recognizable. For when I come back to pick up my ‘feeling’ I don’t need to search through a vast eclectic wardrobe for a long time, rumbling through many look-a-like ‘feelings’. My feelings envelop me like a warm winter coat or they protect me against a cool breeze on a bright summers day like a light wind proof jacket. 
Day one of hundred and eight days. A sacred digit. One as in absolute beginning, zero as in Omega and infinity at it’s side shaped by number 8. 
Flying over Saxony with Leipzig and Dresden informs the lcd screen. Five and a half hours to go before I transit in Doha, capital of Qatar. A very modernist and affluent moslem capital with hints of an archaic society. Of which I was reminded within a matter of minutes after I sat down in the Qatar Airways vessel. My neighbor at the other side of the aisle prompted me to switch off my phone when the plane was about to take off while I was still usurped in messaging the love of my life. Is it me or women from Amsterdam in general that react like allergic to Arabic men trying to dominate us, women in general? I am not talking about how off setting we experience them dominating their personal women. But they fucking act like that all the time, against all women. Inside I scream. However, turning forty eight in five days I’ve learned how to express my complete inability of how to cope with this behavior in other more decisive ways. Neglect the message, knowing that that is exactly what ignites their feeble masculine pride and really puts them off. Talking cultural-religious conditioning here. Both mine and theirs. Love will safe the day one day. One first and last and until infinity breaks, day, shining bright like deep orange copper, laced by a purple horizon.

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An homage to great escapes

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I am in the air. As if it is a radio show. But it is about flying. An airy no-show. Absent from my daily life for a week, maybe two. What is my daily life and why is flying away from it seen as an escape? It doesn’t feel like it is. There’s stuff – like matters of life and death – that don’t get to be done because they are overruled by short term daily life priorities and goals. Being easily overruled or overlooked doesn’t mean however, that matters of life and death are of no importance. To be precise, short term and long term both need equal attention. But yes it’s difficult to free one’s attention from short term busy-ness. Because most of the time short term busy-ness is surfacing acute and clear. Whereas long term busy-ness is like an undercurrent building up and gaining force over a length of time and therefore harder to capture.

It might even seem that daily life is composed of only short term busy-ness. So the moment one abdicates from setting the alarm at 7 am to prepare breakfast and lunch boxes for the kids, bringing the kids to school, attending to work or other engagements, groceries, play dates, making dinner, the usual entertainment time abided with phone conversations, media or so called ‘quality time’, the very moment one doesn’t set mind and body to these occupations, it’s called an escape from daily life.

I reckon my daily life deserves as much time to be spent on overthinking my values in life, exploring the borders of my comfort zone, breaking habits that have silently turned into unconscious patterns or setting up new ones. What I am saying is that to me, the time and energy spent to achieve these goals are as much part of my daily life as the repeating schedule captured in set moments of time. How to create space to do all that? Flying time – a good time unit of being in transition or even better, of being lost in translation – is terrific. Obviously flying is not the thing we do out of a quest for taking distance from our set schedules. We’re not going to be in the air for the sake of being in the air.

Which actually is pitiful. Flying time is excellent to float amidst the clouds of life, possibly peeking into ‘see-throughs’ on to our short term busy-ness – as in being busy and maybe capturing a glimpse of the overview; origin and destination included. What I am getting at is that abdicating from our so called daily lives in fact isn’t an escape at all. It is so much not of an escape that instead of merely experiencing the reality of it, temporary abdication of a set schedule even turns out to be more confrontational on a deeper level then engaging in the fairly superficial daily ‘short cuts’, is.