Running Away With The Gypsies

When I was a little girl, I liked to hide my head between the pillows of our sofa. Usually I did that when I wanted to be somewhere else and someone else. It allowed me to shut out the rest of the world, kind of like an ostrich. Thoughts such as “If only I were a big person!!” would shoot through my mind. My memories of feeling limited to be my own person are still very clear, however small I still was. The urge to go out there and discover the world my way was often nipped in the bud. At least that’s what stuck with me.

In the end I did get my adventure all right; it was just a bit in a bookish way! Looking back at my childhood, it seems to me I read my way right through it. At least once a week I frequented the local library to get a new stash. During school holidays, that would be at least every other day. My preferred choice of books as a young girl was invariably adventure books. Those were the ones I liked to get lost in. The world could stop spinning for a moment without me noticing it. It grew to be a habit of mine frowned upon by many around me, family as well as friends. If my mother was calling me to do a chore for her it would usually end in a small drama. She would call and call and call, but no response till she snatched my precious book from my hands. Family and friends sometimes called me bookish and boring. If a book had me in its grip there was no stopping me: I had to read it right to the end.

It took me a long time to figure out I had to adapt to the social rule that reading in company was not done.
By then I had hit puberty and my choice of books had shifted to reading about other peoples lives. Part of me was longing to travel to far countries, get a lover, be kissed and have sex, experiment with drugs and alcohol. The other part of me decided that all of that wasn’t for me just yet and I simply kept on reading about it. I have fond memories of me exploring those departments of the library that I wasn’t supposed to be in just yet…

Leaving home aged eighteen I was still as immature as can be. But I had big plans for myself. “My life is going to start right this minute,” is what I thought. It did in a way. I moved to another country, became an ‘independent woman’ and lost my virginity. Besides that, life still seemed quite tame to me. It wasn’t as if I was running away with the gypsies or anything. It was all quite organized.

When I moved back home after a year, I quietly and slowly settled into an adult lifestyle. Went to college, met a guy, moved in with him, had my first real job, and so on. All quiet serious stuff.
Was I happy? I really wouldn’t know, especially in hindsight. One thing’s for sure: I was displeased with what my life was evolving into. I did the one thing that I thought would make a difference and broke up with my partner. Isn’t it so that a door needs to be closed before another one opens? That’s when the waiting started. I took a risk, now I wanted my reward. That didn’t come: my life remained pretty much the same, only now I was alone.

It was alright, because I always have and always will be one for the anticipation of something new. Quite a few years passed by. Boyfriends came and went. There was always an insatiable hunger for traveling. Not to travel to new places per se – though that was nice from time to time - but to go somewhere that was totally different from home.

Until there came a point in my life where I felt everything was coming to an accumulation. I found myself in another country; lonely, broke and scared. It seemed to me the universe wanted me to move back home. As soon as I did, I got sick and I had to admit I was in the best place in the world I could be.
These days I still find myself in the situation where I want to go and run away with the gypsies every now and again, I do. There’s an itch, and that itch makes me want to scratch. To do so, I go back to my first love time and time again.
I pick up a book and start to read.


Photo from: http://www.journeyfolki.org.uk/HistoryCulture/TheEnglishGypsyVardo/TheBowTop/tabid/885/language/en-US/Default.aspx

On Forgiveness

A while ago I skipped my high school reunion. Life is full of choices, and what I’m going to spend my time on is one of those. What I ended up doing that specific weekend I don’t even recall, but I do remember clearly what the main reason for not wanting to go was.

It started with imagining walking into a room filled with people I haven’t seen for such a long period of time. It doesn’t really matter whether I used to like them or be friends with them or not. The reason is, it’s just too confrontational. 

Every conversation will start with one simple question: How are you?

What I will usually do when confronted with such a situation is to focus on the other person. That works like a charm! Most people seem to love it when you ask them that question and will enjoy it even more if you elaborate on it. That’s suits me just fine! But it does happen that people genuinely want to know and expect an answer to that question: How are you?

Sometimes I just can’t be bothered and I will play it the easy way. A casual ‘yeah, good’ will do. Truth is most people won’t ask you any further questions. Some will, and then the answer will mostly be: ‘Aah, can’t complain. Not good, not bad’. Since I’m very much aware of the power of words I express gratitude. ‘In fact, when I think of it I’m very lucky. After all, I could have been so much worse off. I could easily have been dead as well!’ Truth be told, that's exactly the way I think I should feel. 

In reality, it’s not the case at all. After all, my life has become so much more complicated through no fault of my own. This is the point where I must be careful not to start wallowing around in self pity. I know I should be grateful but my words are often hollow. In fact, I still carry around a lot of anger.

Ofcourse I am happy to be still alive.  I survived a cerebral haemorrhage without  too much consequences. I can walk, I can talk. You can even look at me and wonder how it’s possible such a thing has happened to me without you being able to notice from the outside.  But life has become so much more complicated. Fundamentally, I am a happy person but I’ve got a great deal more troubles. Sometimes I feel like I lost my innocence at a  late age: only now life has showed me its true colours!

First thing I did was work very hard.  Much harder then before. Working like a dog while hoping in vain I would one day wake up feeling like nothing had ever happened. Needless to say that never happened. In fact I wasn’t really working, I was putting up a figh instead. A fight with reality. I simply had to work so hard to keep up with tasks I had no trouble with before.

It was then that I realized I felt like my body had betrayed me. It left me feeling stuck.  Stuck with a life that wasn’t supposed to be mine, almost like a favourite pair of clothes that has gotten out of shape. Stuck with a body that didn’t respond in the way I was used to or wanted it to. Stuck with a life that didn’t fit me anymore, almost like a pair of knickers that have become out of shape.

Then I started meditation. I have been doing quite a lot of that. My Monkey Mind kept on jumping out of my reach, so it took me a while until I had it under control. And still…

Nowadays, I meditate for Forgiveness. My body and I, we need to forgive one another. My body needs forgiveness for changing when I wasn’t ready for it at all. And I want it  for being unable to accept the change and adapt to it.. 

From now onward, I won’t fight anymore for what I have no power over.  From now on, I’ll only fight to grow.

Until then, I can’t wait for the day that I can truly be grateful for the experience. An experience that allowed me to grow.

A Place To Call Home

For as long I’ve known, I’ve been a bit of a vagabond. Not in the sense of a tramp; I like to have a roof above my head and preferably a nice one if I can help it! Don’t call me spoiled, but I do appreciate some comfort. Like a soft warm bed, a good shower and some personal space. A place like that can be found anywhere, at least that’s what I like to think. In my own home, I have created it for myself. When away it doesn’t seem to take much effort either.

Nevertheless there’s more than meets the eye. A variety of countries I visited gave me a sense of belonging soon after I set foot on their soil. Like I could live there, or I would want to! Or at least that I wanted to return, perhaps time and time again… Egypt was – and perhaps is – such a place. First time I visited I was quite sure it wouldn’t be long till my next visit. That was indeed the case: it took less than 3 months. In fact, I did go back a couple of times within less than a year and ended up moving there by the end of it. Call it Kismet, but casually I had applied for a job in Cairo and before I knew it, it was handed to me on a silver plate..  

Moving to a country that is so fundamentally different to the one where you’re from can’t be easy, yet I had that sense of belonging. It could take me off guard at the strangest moments. One of my favourite was when driving back home from work on that awful Ring Road. We would get stuck in traffic on an almost daily basis, which would allow me with plenty of time to look around and soak in everything I saw. Rural migrants risking their lives trying to cross over as if they were still back home, unfinished buildings by the roadside (because living next to a highway is posh!), bilingual signs with funny spelling ‘mistakes’ in English, a thick layer of dust everywhere and palm trees. Palm trees! It would never fail to hit me with a small, sharp pang. Oh my god, I’m living in a country with palm trees!! It would take me home with a sense of gratitude.

 Yet I left again. Home is more than being contented with the place you are living in.  It is also the people and what it is you do there. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, so after a small detour I found myself back in the country that I had so eagerly left a few years before that. Just to make myself clear: the place I didn’t want to live in anymore. I vowed it would only be for a short while, I was now too much of a cosmopolitan to get stuck there! But once more life played a trick on me and before long I had to acknowledge this was going to be where I was going to spend many years to come. It didn’t take long before I could accept my fate. This was my old home, where I grew up and spent the vast majority of my life. And last but not least: the people that I had loved for such a long time were close to me when I needed them most.

The other day I was struck with that sense of belonging once again. Oddly enough, I was in the region where I was born and raised. At the tender age of eighteen, I had pretty much ran away, out into the world. I have always loved its flatness, its emptiness with only distant rows of trees and scattered farms for variation. Even the greyness of the water and the sky would put my mind at ease, bringing me back to the days where I had just left and still felt the urge to visit on a regular basis.

Last time around something upset me. Driving around with my beloved I enjoyed pointing out all of these places from a more and more distant past. I was entertaining myself with the thought how I had escaped the ugliness of all the cheap modern buildings. A lot of distinct land marks had disappeared over time. That’s when it hit me: the place from my childhood is slowly fading away. This place looks nothing like home anymore..

photos from:
* http://www.ptank.com/blog/tag/cairo/
* http://www.omroepzeeland.nl/nieuws/2013-05-08/430306/bluswater-wetteren-mogelijk-over-dagen-pas-westerschelde#.UpR8bWS1W68

Slut Fear

Suddenly she was staring at me from the cover of various magazines in a mischievous kind of way. Sure enough I had heard of the documentary and the book (both only in Dutch language: Sletvrees).  Also, I was immediately curious about the subject. Slut Fear. Double standards are being used for men and women. The phenomenon is something almost every woman has to deal with from time to time. Noticing you’re  being considered a slut, or perhaps even worse: thinking exactly that is going to happen.

As a teenager, I went on a trip without my parents for the first time when I was sixteen: camping with my cousins. Before we took off, my dad had a ‘heart-to-heart’ with me. What he did was to basically warn me about boys. His exact words have disappeared from my memory, but what stuck with me was that I needed to be wary. They might want to use me for their own purpose! Put differently: don’t just go with any boy. Make sure you have safe sex, if you’re going to have it at all. Truth is, I was still a baby at that age. Like lots of girls, incredibly curious about sexuality though. Kind of looking forward to it but not ready at all: snogging was where I drew the line. Anything beyond that was unknown, exciting, yet too scary. It goes without saying that every now and again a boy would try. That made me feel resentful. Who did they think they were and what made them think they could cross that invisible line?? Yet all the while something was stirring inside of me…  Somehow I wanted it. Thinking about kissing a boy, letting a boy touch me and  to see what would happen filled me with excitement.  I was clueless about what that would be precisely. All I knew about sex, I had been taught in sex education and by reading Harlequin novels. A tall dark handsome man that would swipe me off my feet, press his body against mine and kiss me hard… Thinking about that was enough to feel a knot in my stomach. I believe it made me feel sexual. Could it be I connected with my inner slut?

 Then one day when I was eighteen it happened. I met a tall dark  handsome stranger. He was very to the point and I slept with him. Yet it was nothing like a first time was supposed to be! Yes, he did all the things the heroes from my novels did. He even used the right words. But it was all about him and then it was over. He didn’t even realise I was still a virgin. After that, I saw him one more time and the spark was definitely gone. I’d seen all his tricks by then, that’s what it felt like. My next lover – and boyfriend for eight years – was the exact opposite. Also tall, dark and handsome – a recurring theme in my love life – but very gentle, considerate and serious. That made up for a bad start. Yet it didn’t last. To tell you the truth: partly because I lost touch with my inner slut.

At some point I stopped counting my lovers. Not that a lot of men came after that. It was more that most of my curiosity had been answered to.

In the end, there was one time in my life a man called me a slut, by which he meant a cheap girl. It must have been projection. This relationship started and ended with deceit, but not from my part. Luckily, he never managed to make me feel like I was cheap. He mostly confused me: how can you say this about me and still claim you love me and want to be with me? The poor guy must have been terrified: definite case of Slut Fear!

Needless to say I have been most happy with men that made me feel loved as well as sexual.  The word slut has a negative connotation to it, but why not embrace what is behind it The mere word paints a picture of women that is heavily influenced by modern society. But women as well as men need to feel desired from time to time. If we manage to maintain a balance between the sexual and the emotional aspect of love, there’s nothing wrong with exploring our own boundaries. No Slut Fear needed.

November

My favourite part of the year is over. Living in one of the greyest parts of the world I cherish what it is we call summer. By which I mean: some sort of summery weather. If we’re lucky, it starts around May and ends somewhere in October. Sounds good? Well… Foreigners often joke that we don’t have any seasons, that it is just grey and dreary all year around. But having lived here for most of my life I’m able to see the silver lining: there is a difference from one part of the year to the other! That’s why I feel free to take the liberty to label such a long chunk of the year as ‘summery’. Everything is relative.

This year we had a summer that wasn’t bad at all. It didn’t start off too good, spring was rather cold and June was still rather chilly but at least there wasn’t much rain. But then July and August: they were wonderful, marvellous….

Often I found myself walking or cycling around town thinking life should always be this way: to step out of my front door and feel happy, just by feeling warm air on my skin. Not to ever be bothered thinking about bringing a jacket is high on my list of priorities.

Then it starts sneaking in: temperatures drop, days get longer until it gets to the point where I leave the house in the morning in the dark and get back home under the same circumstances. That’s when I start to feel again as if life is just passing me by and there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing to do but just wait patiently. Bear with it until that day, where I leave my house in the morning and suddenly notice the sun has started to rise earlier. I like to pretend the birds serenade me on my way to work. That is the moment everything feels lighter and easier again. After all, days have been getting longer from late December on without me realising it..

Leaves me with a good six months of the year to struggle through.  But what a waste of precious time, this feeling of being stuck in time! I’ve wondered if it is possible to transfer that summery feeling to another part of the year. To be happy to just walk out of the door? And to feel the crisp air on my skin, or raindrops? So far, no positive outcome: I only feel like rushing home after work and hide away. Not with an entire sense of unhappiness; it’s all just so bland. With a long, dark grey winter ahead of me that I’m pessimistic about I’m unsure what to do. I keep reading about the subject “How to live my life purpose”. Till I have to conclude that I’m spending an awful lot of time reading instead of doing whatever it is I’m supposed to do!

Martin Seligman is one of the founders of Positive Psychology. Dr. Seligman and his co founders thought psychology should not only heal the illness, but also build on strengths that all humans carry within them. He has concluded psychology helps people to feel better about themselves. It seems that 60 % of our chances to be happy is up to genetics, while the remaining 40 %  is in our own hands. Now that’s catching my attention! I’m basically a happy person, how can I be happier?

Three different types of life are being distinguished: 1) A Pleasant Life; Where you have as much fun as you can. 2) A Good Life; Where you have found engagement and inspiration in what you do with your day. 3) A Meaningful Life: Where you know what your strengths are and how to use them.

The outcome shows that the Pleasant Life barely has any influence on positive emotions. Dr. Seligman compares it to the cream and the cherry on top of the cake. First make sure your life is one with meaning and engagement, the rest will follow.

Sources:

·      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/16/happiness-habits-of-exuberant-human-beings_n_3909772.html

·      http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

·      http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

If I Were...

Now this is entirely for fun. Thank you Julochka from Moments of Perfect Clarity at www.julochka.com! She checks back every year to see how much has changed. I’m planning to do the same thing just to see how much I change. My answers are intuitive and without delay. Very cool and entertaining thing to do for anyone who has about ten minutes to spare.


If I were a month I’d be August.

If I were a day I’d be Sunday.

If I were a time of day I’d be sunset.

If I were a font I’d be Cambria.

If I were a sea animal I’d be an eagle ray.

If I were a direction I’d be south.

If I were a piece of furniture I’d be a day bed.

If I were a liquid I’d be spring water.

If I were a gemstone I’d be a rose quartz.

If I were a tree I’d be a willow.

If I were a tool I’d be a screwdriver.

If I were a flower I’d be an iris.

If I were an element of weather I’d be the sun.

If I were a colour I’d be white.

If I were a musical instrument I’d be a violin.

If I were an emotion I’d be happy.

If I were a fruit I’d be raspberry.

If I were a sound I’d be a heartbeat.

If I were a car I’d be a 4WD.

If I were a food I’d be Nasi.

If I were material I’d be silk.

If I were a taste I’d be sweet.

If I were a scent I’d be Un Jardin sur le Nil by Hermès.

If I were a body part I’d be shoulders.

If I were a song I’d be Long Time Sunshine by Benjahmin.

If I were a bird I’d be a hummingbird.

If I were a gift I’d be flowers.

If I were a city I’d be Cairo.

If I were a door I’d be oak wooden.

If I were a pair of shoes I’d be Mary Janes.

If I were a poem I’d be The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.


Hopefully I’ll remember to repeat in a year from now….