Bearings

The Three Magi came to see baby Jesus bearing gifts, right after his mother bore him. Did that event have any bearing on the history of the civilisation? 

Bear with me for a just little longer:

Not to lose our bearings, we need to set a goal, and keep to it, just as the Magi let the star guide them. Of course we’ll be lost and confused sometimes. No worries, if we pause and reflect, our wisdom will inevitably bear fruit and we’ll get our bearings back. From then on, we’ll bear the scars of our experience with pride.
If you trust your GPS as the Magi trusted the star, you’ll be re right following its directions when the sweet voice advises you “bear right”. 

After 12 years of working in a bearing company I bear witness to one obvious fact: bearings truly are of utmost importance to our civilisation. But there’s another one, slightly less obvious: they have more balls than an average male employed to make or sell them.  

I hope the men I know and value will not bear me a grudge.

Just a Surprise, or a little Wonder?

“All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.”

I came across this quote from Louis Buñuel when checking my blog statistics (an activity that truly leads to nowhere, but I'm still doing that: if they are bad, I could be better, if they are good - they could be better). But this time, instead of the statistics, what appeared on my screen was someone else’s blog. It started with the above quote, but everything that followed was in Arabic (I think). Some posts have the shape of a poem, very short lines. Occasionally there are some comments and a few short posts in a language I can understand. For instance this one, from April 2009:

“If you want to see a Miracle, be a Miracle”.

The entries end in 2011. Shall I try to decipher the mystery? 

Or perhaps just as I peacefully accept the pages filled with unknown signs, I should also accept that days, months, years of my life, written down in an unknown alphabet, have a meaning, too. They are meaningful with the meaning I will never figure out, and there’s no point in trying “to fill in the blanks”.

I got a great present a few days ago. It’s a book with a white rabbit on the cover. It’s one of the best books I ever read. It goes like this (my own translation from Dutch, so I’m not sure if this is how the original goes):

“I’m small.

I’m too small to blow my nose.

I’m too small to lace up my shoes.

I’m to small to dance on a rope

without almost falling down,

and I’m too small to eat

without being untidy.

But I’m just big enough

to hide

until they find me,

to hide

until they find me,

to hide

until they find me,

and that’s why

I am 

a small

surprise.” 

(Louise Yates “A small surprise” translated into Dutch as “Een klein wonder”, which means, in fact “A little wonder” and is not the same thing as “een kleine verassing”).

That’s all. 32 pages with amazing illustrations. And there’s an extra surprise for me on the inside of the cover: a picture which shows a job ad at a circus, and a small rabbit walking by. The ad says “Jobs available for big animals (not for little ones)” 

I’m big enough to hide until they find me. Hidden in my hole, I enjoy the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.

A wonderful surprise.

Sleep well!

I kicked-off my sneakers to feel the sand underneath. Under the tarmac or pavement are fortunately not the only places where you can find beaches in Holland, even nowadays. Lucky me: beaches can usually be found on - guess what - the beach! Of course, you need to be able to get there, get up really early, or be patient with traffic jams, then find a place to park - but once you’re there, you can kick off your shoes and feel the sand between your toes.

I was grounded. The electrical charges accumulated in my body were unloaded, through the sand, to the water, to Mother Earth. I connected to the Earth’s natural energy. And everything became very vibrant that very instant. At least, it should have.

You don’t believe me? Just check:

http://www.earthing.com

There even exist products, such as bed sheets with silver wiring, or universal pads to use elsewhere, which you connect to the earth of your socket, and there you are - as if on the beach. 

I’m not really skeptical - I just don’t believe it yet. For cost down reasons, I would have preferred someone to tell me getting buckets of rain on your head reconnects you to those energies, because in Holland that luxury is available most of the time and free of charge. Unfortunately, I was told I needed the sheet. With conductive silver threat, starting at 139 dollars. Oops. 

The good thing is, there’s another way of getting connected - just walk on unpaved ground with bare feet. A beach is a good choice. When I’m on holiday, I always walk bare feet on the beach or on the grass - and I have to say it works - because I always feel much better on the beach than in the office. That is convincing, but not enough, as obviously there can be hundreds of other reasons why one feels better on the beach than in the office (for instance the fact that one likes to look at sea stars, and those are really scarce in offices). So I’m still hesitating when it comes to a bed sheet at 139 dollars...  A cheap alternative, walking bare feet all year round in Holland may finally turn out more expensive, as it increases your health care expenses. It does allow you to cut down on, or squarely eliminate, shoe costs, but...

But I like high heels. They make me feel high. 

On the other hand, if you’re on high heels, you’re not connected to Mother Earth’s energies, which could explain why the Sunday beach vibrancy evaporated by Monday noon.

Being earthed when you sleep is supposed to give you great dreams. With time it makes you need less sleep. That sounds like a very good idea for someone who currently needs at least 8. I did sleep veeeery well indeed after that day on the beach, unfortunately a bit long, tired by the sun and the wind. So, however much I wanted to get convinced, I’m still 139 dollars away from believing earthing really works. The benefits are very tempting though, so I'm not completely giving up on this idea...

I know someone who has a sheet like this and says it works miracles. But then again, would you dare ask someone if you could borrow his bed sheet? 

Niels Bohr, a 1922 Nobel Prize winner in physics, is said to have hung a horseshoe above his door, and, when asked if he believed in such superstitions, to reply:
“Of course not... But I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

I’m afraid a bed sheet at 139 dollar needs really strong faith though. 

Cherish the cheese

It was lunchtime and I was hungry. Hungry people buy whatever edible ingredients they see, not taking any account of the capacity of their stomachs. Therefore, my shopping basket contained: a baguette, a jar of anchovies (a particularly large jar, as I suddenly felt a craving for them), a box of cherry tomatoes, some cheese and an apple. A beautiful day it was, which means the temperature rose above 12 degrees. It wasn’t too hot either, that is: not a grade above 16. Gosh, no, of course, not a 16 and a half, all the canals would have evaporated, and where would I have my picnic then? 

There I sat, on a grass field, enjoying my 40 minutes of freedom, my bottom protected from getting wet by a plastic bag. Always carry a plastic bag with you if you’re in Holland - it comes handy before, during and after the rain. Before - as it gives you the safe feeling “I have a bag with me just in case”. During - you can put it on your head, if your hair is particularly good today, or if you simply refuse to notice that it  rains again (do make sure you leave a little opening for fresh air). After - in case you wanted to have a picnic on the grass. You can also let it dance in the wind, just like in that beautiful scene from “American Beauty” (do pick it up afterwards, not only to protect the environment, but because you’ll need it again any moment soon).

Safe and comfortable with a dry bottom I filled the first fragment of my baguette with anchovies. They tasted great. Incredibly intense. I added a few more, as they were delicious. Three bites further I stopped liking that intensity. Four bites later I thought I might  save them for later. One more bite and they ended up in a paper bag. “Good, it's time for cheese now” I thought. True Dutch cheese, one of the few real delights in the low lands. The first slice came with a surprise - one of the holes in it, the main cheese-hole, was heart-shaped. Of course, you could see it as a plain, irregularly shaped hole, too. Whatever dawns on you.

A baguette with cheese it was, for a change, accompanied by cherry tomatoes, some of them tasting incredibly sweet, some others quite bland, or sour, watery, uninteresting. 
I wondered how that was possible, the tomatoes coming from the same branch, same box,   with such different tastes. But that was the way they were. Not all of them sweet. And if it’s sweet tomatoes you fancy, you could of course add some sugar to them. At least, if you insisted on getting sweet tomatoes in the 40 minutes of your freedom. Even then, the tomatoes themselves wouldn’t have got any sweeter - that would have been the sugar’s job, but you could have fooled your senses. 

It’s all in the thought. It creates reality, just like sugar creates sweet tomatoes. “Thought is the best special effects department” as says Jamie Smart in a very smart book entitled “Clarity”. As I continued reading, some pieces of my baguette got in between the pages. It was then that the clarity and peace of mind, the default settings of every human being, came to the surface.  The shape of the heart in that slice of cheese was telling me everything will be fine. Telling me everything already is fine, in fact, because it all belongs there, in the same basket, on the same branch: sweet and sour tomatoes, delicious anchovies, disgusting after I overdosed, cold air and warm rays of sun, my dry bottom and the wet grass underneath.