A Big strong man indeed

After my Russian wizard of manual therapy got his hands on me last year and ordered me to do some special exercises each day, my knees – they had gotten pretty injured on my solo trekking with an overweight backpack in Tierra del Fuego and kept me from skiing without a knee-braces for a few years – got surprisingly better and I started to jog again. Bicycling also helped my knees, but not my head. Which is another story, of course.

Anyway, with running returning back into my life and after having been so inspired by working with Saharawi refugees this August, I started to play with the idea to join the Sahara marathon in February 2010. But since I have never done a full marathon before and I was afraid that my knees were not up to it, and that perhaps I did not have enough time to get ready properly, while in Norway in October, I asked my friend, a triathlon/ironman/marathon/superwoman, to give me some advice and evaluation, since she has done like thousands of marathons and supermarathons and all of this.

So, she was talking to me for about twenty minutes, telling me basically to not worry, and ending it with the sentence:

“I mean, Robert, it is really not a big deal, it is only 42 kilometres, after all, come on, no problem…”

Then there was silence.

I tried to smile but then I realized she was not joking at all. Not at all!

So I took another sip of the tea.

Feeling confused. Not strong. Not big. And somewhat old, though this friend of mine is about ten years older. And I agreed with her, of course: “Yeah, right, it is only 42 kilometres, quite ridiculous to worry, sure thing…”

Nowadays, when I struggle jogging back home, already managing to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I try to be positive, thinking: “…yeah, not a big deal, sure, eight times that much and it is a full marathon, yeah, nothing to worry about…”

But I have, cautiously, decided to do the marathon in 2011. In order to be REALLY ready, you know…

Maybe.

A big strong man – yeah right!

The one that shook my world

The other day my dear friend Ian wrote a post about the ten books that shook his world. I immediately thought that was a great idea and decided to do it myself too.
After a minute I realized I was not going to do it, after all. It would just take too much time and effort of trying to remember them all, write about them as well as what they meant too me…, nah, just too much. I am not as dedicated as Ian and he wins. Touché.
But, in the process of thinking about it I did remember one of the very important books of my life, one that I haven’t been thinking about for a long long time since I read it, say, 25 years or so ago, when I was pretty young: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
When I discovered Hesse I read many of his novels and I loved them all: Demian, Siddharta, Journey to the East and especially Steppenwolf. By the way, do people still read Hesse at all? Anybody knows what the situation is nowadays? In my time if you were into personal growth, Hesse was a must. I believe even more so if you were male, as I remember. Which, now that I think of it, is quite interesting.
Anyway, for me The Glass Bead Game was above it all. I still remember how very shocked I felt when reaching the last page and reading something I was totally unprepared for. After everything the main characters has gone through, after finally achieving the very top of the world, he decides to let it all go. He decides to abandon it all and to step into something very simple yet meaningful, into serving. But then, finally feeling completely free and content, he suddenly dies. Abruptly. The end. No more.
I can so easily reconnect with that moment, lying in my bed with the last page in front of me, my heart pounding hard and my face staring in disbelief. It felt as if all the four existential dilemmas (freedom, death, isolation, meaninglessness) suddenly hit me in my forehead, really hard. For days my mind was pulsating with thoughts: “Everything I begin, will end. Everything I build, will eventually crush down. Nothing is permanent and whatever I may achieve, whatever peak I might reach, even if I reach the absolute freedom, it will all end in total isolation and with death I will vanish from this world. So what is the meaning of it all? What difference does anything make? Why move? Why try?“
The romantic worlds and illusions started to crush down and I kept attempting to build them up again, and again, and again. I wanted to have a nice illusion of absolute meaning, of eternity, of connectedness and free choice, yet the pictures never held for very long and there were always pieces missing. Only in the last couple of years I seem to be starting to come to peace with it all.
Well, that book definitely shook my world. I believe I would be somewhat different had I not read it. But I am totally happy I did, of course. No mourning here, just a celebration.

 

Being looked after – in Cairo and everywhere, actually

The congress was great but I will write about it another time (there’s just too much to write right now). I also managed to find the “Tanzanian park” (very emotional moment for me), but did not find the priest – it’s been 26 years already, in the meantime Cairo got a metro and some new streets that replaced buildings… I was surprised by all this and did not have enough time or this unplanned thorough research. Which makes a perfect reason to go back to Cairo soon and give it another shot. Yupeeee!

But I did manage to walk around the town a lot, sitting down to drink a tea and smoke a shisha, enjoying the absence of tourists (I guess they sort of step, from their fancy hotels, straight into the a/c dark glassed luxury buses and head to Pyramids or whatever, avoiding to spoil their clean goretex heavy duty fancy walking shoes with the unclean surfaces of Cairo streets. Yes, I know, I am being cynical here. And I love it!). And I yet again experienced on several occasions how a community formed immediately, a little street community that instantaneously, if I was open and respectful of course, accepted me and tried to care of my needs. Not for money or anything else, but just for the joy of giving and providing, as it seemed.

Memories were flooding through my mind, tons of them, and the picture became clearer and clearer, until it hit me hard: I realized that I was being looked after so much in my life, so often and so lovingly, that I, upon this realization, felt utterly touched and humbled.

Yes, I have been looked after on so many occasions in my life, and by so open and eagerly giving and providing people, that I am not even going to try to write it all down since it would literally take hundreds of pages. But yes, while writing this, pictures just keep flashing somewhere inside my mind, from Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, I mean, from everywhere and from everytime.

Why did they do it? Why did they collect a glass of buffalo milk (not a small thing in that area)  in the nearby village to greet us somewhere in the dark night of Pakistan, us, who were the only people to have electricity (in our van) kilometres around? Why were guys waking me up each time I rolled, in my sleep, toward the edge on the roof of the train in Sudan? Why did my aunt spend hundreds of hours with me when I was a little boy – why did she play with me, take me on the long walks around the meadows and forests? Why did my dear friend from Belgrade, after reading about my accident, immediately call me and offered to sit in his car and drive over (a six-hour drive) to take care of me?

OK, folks, right now I am so overwhelmed with all these memories of being looked after in my life, by friends, family as well as by the total strangers, that I am sure this in not my story only. I believe this relates to all of us. I dare to say we are being taken care of and looked after all of the time, by people around us, through tiny little things. And sometimes through very big deeds. It must be Ubuntu alive somewhere within us. It must be that love is all around…

But I guess we just prefer to look the other way. It seems we prefer to look for and focus on the bad stuff. Rather than appreciate the good stuff and build on that. Perhaps we just like to be victims, perhaps we find this survivalistic discourse so darn entertaining. Or perhaps we were just never taught differently by our families, teachers, cultures…

Well, I will definitely, from now on, do my best to appreciate and cherish the good, the love, the attention and the appreciation. I will try to see it and enjoy it fully, with gratitude.

It would be such a waste to look the other way, wouldn’t it?

Mildly anxious about Cairo

Tomorrow early morning I will be flying off to Cairo, Egypt, for a congress of interculturalists. And I am feeling a bit edgy about it. Not that the travelling itself causes that; there has been so much of travelling and flying here and there in the last years that the excitement has all gone and has been replaced by the irritation over being squeezed in the seats of the planes and over the endless security checks at the airports. The anxiousness is also not about having so many things to do before leaving, since basically everything has been done already – about nine hours before the departure from the house. So I will even get a proper sleep this night.

The nervousness has been building up during the last few weeks because I feel that this is going to be a trip into my past and into my long forgotten feelings.

I spent a few weeks in Cairo in 1983, on my hippy journey into the unknown, at 17. After hitching a free ride with a ship from Jordan across the Red Sea to Port Suez, I entered Cairo late at night, no money at all, no clue about whatever, no address to go to, no food, nothing. Somehow I managed to come down to Aswan a few days later, but my attempt to enter Sudan without a visa failed and after a week or so I was in Cairo again. Well, it is a pretty long story, but in the next weeks I befriended some Tanzanian guys with equally empty pockets, and one of them kicked me from the self-pitying state of mind into a pro-active one, telling me that if I ever wanted to get enough money together to buy a visa for Sudan, I needed to get on my feet and start doing something about it. So, there I was, for the start going from one church to another, trying out my luck. In one Coptic Orthodox church a priest with a long black beard and utterly shining eyes stood at the courtyard, smiling warmly at me. Before I could complete my lies about being robbed, he stopped me, squeezed some money in my pocket and told me: “You come to us. We will take care of you, feed you, host you and help you get whatever you need.” His eyes were lovingly smiling and sparkling, as if he knew me all the way down to the bottom. And so I came and was fully accepted and taken care of, for about a couple of weeks. The priest was one of the most gentle souls I have ever met, just being warm and supportive, never even attempted to convince me into his religion or anything. Finally I left, clean, well fed, with the Sudanese visa and a train ticket in my pocket. And with a very warm heart.

In 1986 I took my first trip to India. I flew from Europe via Cairo and experienced a nightmare at the airport, with my passport and tickets being temporarily lost because of some confusion of officials, then raced in a van toward the plane that was already standing on the runway ready to take off, racing back after a few minutes because I had failed to provide baksheesh that would actually get me on the plane, spent another few days losing my mind over illogical discussions with the airport officials and finally found myself in the Cairo city, having to get some senseless paperwork done in order to finally sit on my plane. And so I also paid a visit to the priest. It felt like coming home, to my old and dear friends that had accepted me in my dark times just the way I was, never questioning a thing, never asking for anything, just embracing and holding me…

Anyway, the fact that I am going to return to Cairo after so many years keeps resurrecting many memories and evoking a wide variety of feelings from deep within. I am not sure I will be able to find all the places, it’s been 26 years after all, but just thinking about it keeps bringing me in touch with the feelings of confusion and hopelessness of a lost teenager in a big wild world. I would love to find that little dodgy park where I was sitting under a tree, completely clueless, and was approached by Tanzanians, who soon in a way adopted me… And I certainly wish I will find the dearest priest in a good health and be able to express my gratitude for how deeply he had touched me.

Oh boy, it really feels like walking into a time machine, heading towards the distant past.