Saturday 27 September 2014

Want what you find

I have been blessed lately by lack of internet access. Of course it doesn't feel like a blessing at first, like when you find a lot of acorns and wonder if they are edible, but, alas, you can't "look it up". So you start writing your little or long "look up" lists with everything that you would like to read, make, find out. Find out how mad Mark Twain really was, so that you can enjoy Roughing it a bit more. Without google or wikipedia telling you what to think, well, you have to make up your own mind. You also suddenly have a lot of free time to surf the world instead of the screen. To look around instead of up. And things start serendipitoulsy to appear, like a book on zen philosophy ( The way of zen) that tells you that rational thinking is not that rational, that after we have weighed all our information scientifically we still make decisions based on a hunch. The same book also explains i-ching as divining the lines on tortoise shells, but, should you not have a tortoise handy, you can just look around (not up), because signs are everywhere, they are there to show you your path, to give you solutions. But by now your look up list is so long you need about 10 starbucks cappuccinos to find out how to make books out of brown paperbags, how to recycle old books to use as photo albums and whatever other creative ideas you need a bit of visual inspiration for. And that is when you remember how tedious it is to try and find what you want , how many dead ends, how many digressions, how lost you get, how full your stomach with frothy milk. And this is when you finally realise the secret for a happy life: don't try and find what you want, just want and treasure what you find. Serendipity will help you (and save you from cappuccino overdose).