Ups and Downs

Normally I write about wider topics, but today I am inclined to get personal.  It is a windy and emotional Sunday for me in Dunedin, New Zealand.  

Maybe it is time to take stock of a year, or even of a couple of years.  It has been an amazing and scary journey since March 2008.  Not only did I experience an epiphany of sorts where I saw how life should be different and how it could be more rewarding, but I also went through the turmoil of following my new insight and dragging my family (and the dog) into it.  And here we are, still in the process, but much of the change is behind us.

Chrissie is in a new position at a new hospital,and she is very happy and successful.  I have seen her flower into a new being as I imagined in the taxi in the middle of Johannesburg in 2008.  For all the effort, this is reward beyond any expectation.  My wife, my best mate, my fellow traveller on this road of life is now an assertive and confident individual, slowly growing into the full potential I believe she has.  As Ian Dean (a very wise man) once said: “Chrissie has a certain presence that many of us just dream to have.”  I took this to heart Ian, I listened and wondered why she is not shining like she should be.  Now she is getting there.  It is her time.  I am awestruck.

My son is finding it tough.  Perhaps he is like me, a slow starter.  In 1995 I was siting in an old library room at the chemistry department of the University of Stellenosch.  It was a cold  day and I took the early flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town.  I was waiting on a professor that was supposed to be able to evaluate my proposal for a doctorate.  He walked into the room, a man with a smile and a soft attitude, and after listening to my carefully prepared presentation, he made a few comments.  Only one stayed with me: “Jan, some people flower later in life.  It is more important to know that you have to persevere than it is to achieve early.”  This is what I hope Jan-Dawid will hear from people around him.  We are ready when we are ready, not a second before then.  And we are often ready for things completely different from what we think we should be.  It takes wisdom that we do not have necessarily at age twenty.  I just hope that he takes the cue from us and persevere through the tough times he now faces.

I have registered my own company and I am getting to grips with what it means.  At the same time I am trying to do more at home, to be a more supportive partner to Chrissie and a better father.  I also try and take Jessie (the Irish Terrier) for regular walks.  It is not easy, to be honest.  I have many days of severe doubt and fear.   At fifty it is scary to drop everything and take up something completely new.  It is also something that gets the energy flowing.  That is important.  Some guys buy a Harley, some get a girl friend (in her twenties), I move to NZ.  I guess it equates.  

In summary, it has been 24 months of discovery for us.  It has been more than a 100 weeks of contemplation for me.  It is not done yet, not by any measure.  We have a house and we can sleep sound at night.  I have the resources to cook for friends and give them a glass of wine.  We can crack jokes and debate the plight of humanity.  

I can look into my beautiful wife’s eyes and see her joy and I can see my son getting to grips with reality.  This is all I need.  And perhaps to have Jessie listen when I ask her not to go after the cat across the street.  We need less than we imagine. 

Kissing

The art of loving needs some attention at the end of 2010, I guess.  Many of us have long-term relationships and these need more effort to keep them fresh and vitalised.  It is easy to be blown away by the heady fragrances of a new lover.  It is an automatic reaction to buckle at the knees when a new flame ignites the pheromones.  However, how do you ignite the flames of an established relationship, how do you kindle the embers of those passionate days?

Without being ready to take responsibility for the outcome, may I suggest the following course of action?  (As my son would claim: whatever - just get on with it!).

Kiss:  Science tells us that this is the primary way to ignite the fires of passion.  We only kiss those we are comfortable with. Yes, just forget about kissing your aunt when you were a kid, it does not count as kissing!  So kiss with clear intent to pleasure.  Slowly and with intent to touch the soul.  Kiss with the sole intent of giving something of yourself.  Kiss where it matters.  

Kiss your special one on their eyelids.  Land kisses on ears and on the nape of the neck.  Brush over hair with your lips.  Lightly taste the skin of a forehead.  Brush over cheeks.  Caress shoulders with your lips.  Find the lips of your partner - but softly now - like flowers touched by the airy attention of butterflies.  Breathe in the soft fragrance of your lover and savor it for a moment, then breathe your heart over them.

Spend time in embrace.  We need to be touched and we need to touch.  We were made for kissing in soft embrace.  We were made to speak in soft tones and to share moments of quiet.  Go into these days with only one intention - the one of touching with deep care.  Kiss with intent, kiss with your soul.

Have a great end to 2010.  

Via: OnlineDating Blog

Snapshots

When you remember an event, what does it “look” like, or feel like?  How do we “experience” the past?  A new website I subscribed to recently suddenly had me thinking quite a bit about this.

According to the scientists (and no, I am not even going to try and make this into a scientific paper with references - just go search Scientific American for some good articles), we have long term memories, short term memories and sensory memory.  We have ways to remember things that we use to drive a car for example, which seems to be located in a different part of the brain than the part that remembers your fifth birthday.  The sensory memory fades quickly and is related to what we remember shortly after having seen a flash card with a number of items on it.

I am interested in what I call the snapshots in time that we seem to carry with us.  These are those images that somehow get burned into our minds: a specific scene that we remember fondly, how someone looked on a specific day, a feeling that we resurrect sometimes in moments of solitude.  Do these snapshots fade or change over time, do we re-contextualize them as we move on in life and what is it that makes for a good snapshot for each of us - is it the same for all of us? 

My first overseas trip was when I was already 35 years old.  I remember packing my analogue camera and a video camera to make sure that I capture as much of the event as possible and bring it back to share with my wife and family.  I took hours of video, and quite a few rolls of film.   The film I promptly developed on my return and as soon as I had an opportunity I sat my wife down in front of he TV and started playing back the video.  I had high expectations of how she would react.  Obviously it was not going to be the same as being there, but still, it would be great to share all these events. 

Not so.  And you will probably tell me that you could have told me so!

Some things that I found very special she found utterly boring.  I had long sweeping country side shots, she asked what the people looked like.  I had lots of pictures of old churches and great buildings, she wanted to know how I experienced the interactions with the people I met.  Yes, it was great to see the different places and things, but to her there was a disappointing  lack of “life” in what I brought back.  After that, I noticed that she almost always had people in her photographs, some posed, but mostly just grabbed in a moment!  Somehow our contexts were not overlapping...

Maybe we all have different signals that we use to recover the experience?  And this brings me back to the website that triggered all of this:  Blipfoto.com.  Here you are allowed to post only one image on the day that you took it, building a snapshot collage of the days of your life.  I’ll let you go there from here just now.  But before you go, first imagine something that you would have liked to capture today and that you would have posted there.  I have learned that I need people in my snapshots too, and not posed for the moment so much as just being in the moment of life - frozen in a certain setting that will help me recall a multitude of emotions.   Enough already - link me to Blipfoto!

Migrants

Immigrant - “A person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country”.  That sort of sums it up when natives of a country consider anybody that was not born in their native country.  How can they become truly part of us?  And when the chips are down, these immigrants are easily pointed out as being part of whatever problem the natives may be facing.   I believe that the migrants may hold the keys to more solutions than what they are credited for and I shall return to this later.
When a person emigrates, the loss of sense of place is immediate.  The natives in the country of origin see the emigrant as a “loss” for the country or in many cases as “good riddance”, one less person to worry about, or in the worst case, the emigrant is seen as a traitor to the values and culture of his country of birth.
All immigrants and emigrants are transients or wanderers in the eyes of those that have never ventured to settle outside their known world.  As migrants our accents give us away, the simple things we get wrong in conversations, the subtleties of the culture you are trying to adopt, all these things set you apart.  In many cases being an immigrant puts you at a disadvantage in the work place.  Can this person be trusted, will this immigrant be able to cope with our way of doing things, and should he/she not rather start at the bottom and remain there?
Many immigrants to the developed countries go through stringent selection processes.  You must be of the right age group, you must have a skill that is in short supply, you cannot have a criminal record, you must bring enough currency to fend for yourself for a while, you and every family member that comes with you must be in excellent health, you must conform to very interesting rules and regulations, and once you arrive, none of this is effectively recognized by the people you meet every day at the supermarket, in the job interview, on the bus and in the classroom.
Still, governments have expensive immigration programs.  They see it as a way to bolster the economy, to grow the number of productive citizens, to cover for the skills that leave their country for various reasons, to bring investment into the country and to get a certain diversity that they see may be advantageous in future.  These are all valid reasons.  But do the general population accept these facts?
The world is rapidly changing and the developing countries have aging populations.  For this reason getting skilled young people from other countries into the economic activity makes sense.  As long as the immigrants can integrate with he culture of the new country, this is a good way to renew economies.  The key is integration.  This can only be achieved if there is acceptance that the immigrants are carefully selected for their future contribution and if the community invites them in and values their contributions.
Many older people have a sense of adventure and massive experience that they can bring together to the benefit of a country.  The fact that they are older and wiser must be seen as a positive for those countries looking for exceptional skill sets.  Here you can choose people with proven track records in the country of origin, you can inspect their value systems by interrogating friends and family and co-workers.  The fact that they have the energy and the will to bring incredible change to bear on their settled existences must be an indication of the potential of these people to be active participants and agents for change in their new countries.  For this to happen the communities in the new country must acknowledge this potential and integrate these people rapidly at the levels of planning and strategy to harvest the wealth of experience.  In many cases these people bring established and strong families with them that can be centers of renewed growth in family values in developed countries where this has deteriorated.
As I said earlier, I believe proper immigration policies and programs are key to the constant renewal of cultures and countries.  Immigrants are not the slaves of the new era, they are often the cream of the crop.  They may be the ingredients needed to refresh a stale economy, or to bring the insight for renewal of a stagnant city, or they may bring with them the warnings of paths taken somewhere else that ultimately led to disaster.  It is up to the communities in which the immigrants imbed themselves to utilize this resource.  It also asks of the immigrants to unconditionally adopt their new environment, and to do the rootstock onto which they are grafted proud by bringing forth magnificent fruit. 

Stories Wrought by Volcanoes

When I was flying in from Washington DC to Copenhagen on 12 April I asked to sit on the left-hand side of the aircraft in the hope of seeing the volcanic activity at Fimmvorduhals in Iceland. Little did I know that there would be such a powerful eruption only days later at Eyjafjallajoküll. This event started an avalanche of stories that will be told for the next couple of years by thousands of people directly touched by it.
I was alerted to the fact that I may not be able to catch my planned flight back to South Africa by a travel companion. I looked at the people around me and while a lightness filled my heart I responded with a simple “Fantastic!”. An act of God stranded me in my happy place! I was in Sweden. My family was safe in New Zealand, my dog was happily lounging at Xantah Kennels in South Africa and my house was locked up, lawn spritely growing with the recent rains, and my pool was filled with a chemical cocktail guaranteed to outlive anything. I considered my credit card balance and realised my company sent me here in the first place. I would keep the extra cost to a minimum, work on my projects (I do a lot of individual stuff in any case) and use my free time to experience Stockholm and maybe even more. And I did just that. Some of the images I captured are shown at my Picasa site and on FaceBook. I put one here at the top - it touched me deeply.
But back to my story: you know, I learned other things. For example, we all tend to handle a crisis in our own ways. It is clear that it is a function of how we see and experience life. Is the glass half full.... Can you adjust your sails to the changing winds, or do you look for the outboard? Can you see opportunity in adversity? Do you need others to have sympathy with your plight, or can you help others even when you are taking strain?
I saw so many pictures on TV of people complaining, of people insisting on support, of people blaming others, most of them at an airport, stranded during or after a long expensive holiday. There were others. The couple that got married in Singapore, where the hotel owner heard that they were on their way to be married in Europe, were accommodated by the same hotel owner, who organised a wedding for them there, and invited all his stranded guests to the wedding. That is a worthwhile story!
The elderly couple from Australia were only happy to be on TV so they could let their children know that they are out of pocket but ok, and happy. That is the story of two people that have seen it all and have nothing to lose but life and each other - and they smile.
Yes, there were immediately some stories of people losing millions and claiming someone should pay, there were growers of vegetables for Europe in Kenia that said they would have to throw the food away and looked for compensation - while the food could just as well feed the hungry in that pitiful place. Everywhere there were people trying to play cards that they did not hold. Innocent people at hotel desks were crapped on, tour operators were told how they should go out of business, and yes, some people did not do their jobs, I know, but in a way, this was way beyond us.
Now, I want you to think about the people and animals in Iceland. Imagine the situation there. How are the farmers going to feed their animals; the air is toxic, the soil is toxic, the water is toxic? Who can they blame? God? The planet? Global warming? Does it make sense that those who only have to wait to be shipped home should take up 90% of the news coverage? Should the world not react like in Haiti?
No!
Maybe the people in Iceland are proud and brave and used to making it work, regardless. Maybe they never rely on hand-outs. Maybe God blessed them with the right attitude to handle volcanoes. Maybe they are the lucky ones. Maybe they have the real stories to tell. And maybe they represent the true spirit of man!
I could not get rights to show the pictures on my page that I wanted you to see. Unless you are a large business you do not deal with Reuters or their photographers, I guess. But do yourselves a favour and surf over to this website.
This was the one picture that tore my heart out. We have such a special link with these animals. While I was writing this, I was listening to some music from Iceland. The artist is Jónsi and the CD is called “Go”. I love the first track and the lyrics - well, check it out here. Jónsi is the frontman of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. For those with a sense of adventure - Go Do!