Next to the Hotel Windsor I am sitting in the sun behind glass. It feels much like being at a Dutch beachcafe early in the season. Only some elderly people take or have time to drink a coffee in the first warm sunrays of the year. Well protected against Northern winds by glass window panes. Cafe Excello’s window panes are made of translucent heavy plastic. The sunlight that shines through has a golden lustre. This is down town city business centre Melbourne opposite the public transport hub Parliament Station. A brisk autumn clarity with the sun shining bright and the usual late morning hussle and buzzle. Which in down town Melbourne is almost as easy going and soothing as the sight of a sunflowerfield in Southern France. 

Another time, which now seems ages ago,  another life time even, I bided my time in the same cafe. It was during the last hours I had to spend by myself while waiting to go to the airport, to return to Amsterdam, where I still lived back then. While I write lived, I realize I wasn’t alive in Amsterdam. At least I wasn’t alive in the way I am alive here. Is that because my heart had moved here already and everything else was yet to follow? Or had I stopped living in Amsterdam way before I met the love of my life and before he enabled me to re-take life? Revisit it like I revisit Café Excello now. The transition that took off upon falling in love with him confronts me with a lot of unfamiliarity, with feelings of loss, being lost and a loneliness because of no longer being alone. Which seems to make no sense. But only because of the presence of a significent other one distinguishes what it is to be alone. I reckon new beginnings involve a lot of death and dying.  What isn’t aligned with my heart ceases to draw me in. No more compromising, no more compromises, all cards on my lucky number. In order to get started, to only get started with playing the game, with living life again. I engage. First with him. Then slowly to slowly with other things that form part of my life. I vibrate. Sometimes in terror and agony but more then that, I feel again. He allows me to. The moments I spend with the love of my life make up for the losses. It’s as devastating as it is a sumptuous release without precedent. It’s excellent.

I guess we suffer for love because love wants us to. True love really is too good to be true. So at least it needs some re-balancing by agony, hardship and warfare. Basically it demands unconditionally all we are able to throw in: the highest most exquisite pleasures versus the lowest darkest hours. I have started living again. Feelings of bliss, gratitude and falling completely to pieces alternate, making their way into homeostasis, the new balance, him and me. It’s the most satisfying and challenging journey I’ve been on, throughout my entire life.

Back in Café Excello after two years. My heart manages to get things aligned. It does need more time to get it all done. Meaning more hope, expectations and set backs to live through, but I trust the process. I just listened to a talk about trust. I didn’t agree with the speaker. It’s about finance and ethics, organised by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne, hosted in The Windsor Hotel. We were less then thirty people. I did feel maybe for one of the first times in my adult life, part of an association, of a group, having recently signed up as a member of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in Australia. There’s no commitments or responsabilities involved. It’s just because I am, here to stay. After I followed my heart. Which is enabled and allowed by the love of my life. Bringing forth feelings of intense gratitude. Revisiting Café Excello leads to the awareness of a spark of excellence, with golden beams of sunlight reflected in an empty waterglass at the table in front of me, stricking beauty of life, of love and of the magnificent power of the heart.

What’s an agreement and why does it take time and sometimes effort to reach an agreement? Is an agreement basically a compromise? I like red. You like white. Is the agreement we drink rosé? No. That is a compromise. If I don’t get what I want you also should not get what you want. Both maneageable unhappy is what we call a compromise. A compromise makes us survive. As opposed to truly live, be happy, be angry and reach agreements out of disagreements. It seems to me we tend to focus on compromises. Today the ‘flow of things’ is important and should not be obstructed, at least not completely. In our personal relationships we say yes to what ‘the other’ wants in order for the other to say yes to what we want ourselves. The constant deliberating, debating and dealing becomes the dynamic of the relationship. We find it more important to be heard and our wishes and desires to be taken into account, then that they are being met. We compromise ourselves eagerly. Dealing, debating, arguing, resolving matters is a dynamic and to me it seems one of the most common forms of relationships between individuals, governements and most important, couples. If you say yes, you agree. If you say no, you disagree. Disagreement calls for war or desertion into the dessert of one’s own self. Are you comfortable being alone with yourself in disagreement with the world outside you and/or with  your significant ‘other’ ? During puberty we are. After that we are supposed to no longer (be) like that. So we compromise. We compromise our wishes and desires, we compromise with each other, we compromise the past, the future and the present. It goes without notice, no yelling, no tears. So much better then reaching an agreement over things you don’t agree upon. Or is it maybe worthwhile to sweat, cry and express yourself, to retain your sanity through confrontation, to wade through mud, master dragons and suffocate in order to reach the destination of The Agreement as the defenite and purposeful ending or resolving of the habitual disagreement. We’ve all got our own agendas, fortunately. Like humanity got into a spur because of differentation of professions, we might want to adhere to our differences of opinion rather then forging them into badly fitting merges by way of compromising. 

– soft whispering in the background: 

Soft and snappy: ‘This is so not peaceful’

Esoteric and melodious: ‘It goes entirely against the flow’

With a sigh: ‘Unheard of’

Further away: ‘Indeed! Unheard of…’

-until the mumbling fades