Disconnect

10 months ago I spent 10 days on a silent retreat, meditating for 10 hours each day. During that time I was disconnected from the busy world that surrounds me - a chance to slow down, to reflect and to listen. An invitation to visit the here and now.

There's no need to become a monk and move into the woods, but: When was the last time that you didn't go online for a whole day? And to take it even a step further: when was the last time you spent a whole day with your phone switched off?

We seem to feel that we're missing out on something if we're not constantly checking the news, facebook posts and messages on whatsapp. There's so much happening and we want to keep track of everything or else we die! But is it possible to know everything? And is it necessary to always have the latest update on everything? Truth is: if we didn't check our emails and phones for a day or two, we wouldn't miss out on anything. Nothing. Zero.

Speed-reading, checking and answering; calling and scrolling and gossiping – this is exhausting stuff for our minds! So here's a suggestion:

Once in a while, take a day and disconnect from the world around you so that you can connect with the world that lies inside of you. Ignoring all those noisy screens and finding a moment of peace – creating space to simply be!

Growing revolution

Almost 5 years ago I’ve started to become aware of the terrible state of our currrent system, how abusive and how fragile it is. The economic crisis, dwindling energy supplies, total disrespect for the environment – there’s a long list of problems caused by our greed, by ruthless growth and widespread ignorance.

When I realized how dire our situation is, I’ve started to get active, almost in panic. I helped to create a website informing about problems and solutions, with some friends I innitiated a transition town project to increase local resilience and I was involved in setting up a local currency. However, today I’m no longer part of any of these. Life demanded that I move on and that I put my focus and energy towards other projects. And so I did.

But there is one thing I’ve started back in 2009 which I’m still doing and which I believe is one of the best things you can do – against the crisis and the environmental meltdown; for the planet, for your community and for yourself. It’s called Gardening!

No matter where I’ve lived – in a flat, a cottage or a little room in a shared house – there have always been possibilities to plant seeds for a brighter future. If you don't have direct access to any land you can rent a small allotment nearby. They exist everywhere, I've seen them even in big places like Berlin and Barcelona. Urban gardening is slowly conquering the cities!

Growing your own food puts you back in control of what you eat. No genetic modification, no chemicals and no onions that have to travel thousands of miles to arrive in your kitchen. Instead, you get local and organic produce that feeds both your body and soul. Here’s an old proverb which sums it up nicely:

If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk.

If you want to be happy for a year, get married.

If you want to be happy for a lifetime, take up gardening.

We don’t need more fast food and plastic bags and new phones and all the other crap that litters the land and the sea and the human mind. We need a GROWING REVOLUTION that transforms the world back into a healthy and beautiful place - cultivating plants and consciousness!

Most importantly, gardening provides a chance to reconnect with our home: the Earth.

Sharing time

Right in the middle of working on a new book, struggling to distinguish between fiction and reality, I’ve met a beautiful woman and fell in love. A day spent together on the beach was all it took to restore my faith that falling in love is actually possible.

Unfortunately, only one week later I was dumped. A wave of disappointment rolled over me and I thought it was just not fair. To make matters worse, I had started writing a little love song which I really liked and now I saw the new melody drowning in the deep sea of failed summer romances. But then I started wondering, ‘why do I feel like this?’ Why couldn’t I be simply grateful for the beautiful moments we had shared? Letting them be what they were: unique fragments of time that had made me really happy.

So while being dumped has caused some temporary pain to my ego, the amazing day on the beach has kept its beauty; even though my longing heart was hoping for another dose of love, the experience itself didn’t actually need any repetition – it was already complete just as it was!

So on the same day that I was dumped, I finished the song.

Soon after a friend came to visit and I met his partner, Jamie. Almost instantly, Jamie and I became really good friends. We laughed and cried over broken dreams and future hopes, and we played music – lots of it! Then, after a few days, my new friend left and I got a similar sensation as before: all of a sudden, a series of beautiful moments had ended and there was nothing I could do about it. Gone!

Two women in two weeks – with both I had a very different yet equally amazing time. The fact that both experiences are over is still making me a little sad, but the dominant feeling is one of gratitude. I feel blessed for having so many opportunities to live through beautiful moments with others. And the thing is: if moments never ended, how could we ever experience new ones? As Ben Harper says, ‘there are so many special people in the world’ – all out there, waiting to be met!

The night before she left, Jamie and I played the song that I had written about my summer romance. It’s an example of what we’re doing here on Earth: Sharing time!

PS: I love chocolate too!

Imagine you were someone else

How can we change the way things are if we don’t step outside our own little world? Or in other words: As long as we stay in our ego bubble, why should we care about others?

EMPATHY is the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another being.

What if you could be someone else for a month or two? And if this was possible, once you’d enter your own skin again – would you continue living in the same way?

• Imagine you were a person sweating 16 hours per day, seven days per week in a crappy Bangladeshi clothes factory – would you still buy that bargain shirt? Would you still be indifferent to how your shoes are made?
• Imagine you were a cow or a chicken for a month – afterwards, would you still put animals into crowded factories, with no light and hardly any air to breathe?
• Imagine you were a tree – would you keep polluting the land with plastic and pesticides and cut down forrests for short-term profit and comfort?
• And now the hardest one: imagine, just for one moment, that you were a young child – would you continue to destroy our natural world, using up all finite resources and really not giving a shit about future generations?

Empathy is about moving closer together. It’s about sharing, caring and becoming aware that we’re ALL sitting in the same boat! And yes, sometimes it might be difficult, but: wouldn't it be much more fun if everybody in that boat had a good ride? Even the cows and stupid ones...

For further reading: The power of empathy!

The anger poem

Like a boiling engine on a sinking boat

I've been feeling angry, ready to explode

Nights of fire and dreams of revolution

What went wrong with the human evolution?

I went out and asked owners of funky bars

Why don't you recycle the bottles of glass?

'I'm running a business, I ain't got time for this hippie shit!'

Was the answer coming straight from their lips

Investment bankers who produce only fake numbers

they cultivate nothing but fear, greed and hunger

a thousand times richer than the farmers making food

still the fuckers they're suffering from chronic bad mood

Animals kept in prison, living creatures locked in a cage

little girls with ripped off legs, growing hate and rising rage

we're feeding the devil, hiding in the slumbering matrix

and in between wars, we watch ads of burgers and tits

A clothes factory with one hundred dead

some tears, bad news, we're feeling sad

Whole families burnt down in the east

then H&M calls – time for the big summer feast

Selfish genes are destroying our peace

Widespread ignorance is killing the bees

Toxic minds are teaching at schools

Expensive fees, producing educated fools

Priests keep preaching: don't kill or steal!

But they themselves, they fail to heal

Blaming others for the absence of light

Yet only few do know how to live life right

I'm drowning in anger, what can I do?

Pretend that we're fine, when it's just not true?

The world has gone crazy, I got trouble to cope

The times they're changing, I'm losing hope

Scream! I want to scream out loud!

I want to blow away this threatening cloud

Waking up before it's too late

Creating love and destroying hate!

I'm angry with the world, I'm angry with myself

Enough is enough with all this superficial wealth

I've got to travel deep inside where once I've been

there's only one way out: I have to find peace within!

The meaning of life

Why on earth are we here? What’s our purpose, what’s life all about? Surely, once in a while everybody wonders about these questions. Here are some possible answers:

• Life is a test - if we learn our lessons well, our soul will be rewarded with nirvana.
• The meaning of life is to recognize its beauty.
• Life is just a random occurence and means absolutey nothing.
• We’re here to earn and spend as much money as possible.
• Life is a game - we’re collecting points for good deeds; once we’re dead, we can cash in these points with God.
• Our mission is to evolve into perfect robots.
• To fall in love with ourselves.
• And my personal favourite: Whatever meaning we give to life, that’s what it means.

BUT…does it really matter what life means? Do we need to have an answer? And do we actually need to ask all these damn questions? Because if we didn’t have any questions, we wouldn’t have to find any answers either. We’d simply BE!

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they’re looking for the experience of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell

As long as we’re obsessed with a certain goal – learning a lesson, becoming rich, looking for love – we're focusing on the future. We're searching for something that we feel is lacking in the present and so we're struggling, hoping and praying. We end up waiting for better times, for the ‘right’ moment to arrive. Maybe tomorrow? Next week? Next year? Maybe never...

Yes: we need to keep learning, we have to earn money and we ought to make some plans for tomorrow and beyond. But our biggest challenge is to remember that the actual experience of being alive can only ever happen RIGHT NOW! Be it laughing, crying or smiling, loving or even dying. Conscious of what we're feeling. Breathing. Healing. Giving gratitude to this moment of being.

Paying attention

“Claus?”

I’m not answering.

“Claus?! Are you doing something else again?”

“Me? No, I’m listening.”

Of course that’s a lie. While talking to my sister on skype, I’m also busy checking facebook, eating porridge for breakfast and adding things to my todo list. All at the same time – nothing with proper focus!

Up until a few years ago, multitasking was an ability owned exclusively by the versatile housewife. Nowadays it seems that it’s a basic requirement for everyone who wants to survive in the daily jungle of hyper-connectedness. There’s simply not enough time to read all those emails, tweets, whatsapp messages, facebook posts, news articles and business updates. Plus we need to squeeze in telephone chats, skype conversations, the latest youtube video, shopping on itunes and amazon, downloading study materials, booking a flight, a train, a bus, a car. Not to forget we still have to work, eat, drink, shit, sleep, wash and dress! In short: modern life has become so demanding that many of us feel that we won’t get anything done unless we do everything at once.

But wait a minute – what about quality? Doing several things simultaneously, are we really able to do all of them well? Can we focus on one task while being distracted by another? Sure, we can clean and dance and laugh, all at the same time. But what about communicating?

Can I have a good conversation with my sister while liking photos on facebook? Can I write a decent article while checking emails every five minutes? Can I listen to a friend while reading random words on a tiny screen? Can I produce a thoughtful answer while already pressing the send button?

The truth is: the 21^st century is providing us with the best communication tools ever, yet the quality of communication is getting worse and worse. And in a world with 7 billion people, with endless problems to solve and new challenges to take on, is there anything more important than communication? Can we afford to keep misunderstanding each other?

Neither the all-knowing internet nor the smartphones can be blamed. It’s the human being who is stupid! The solution? To simplify life again by doing one thing at a time. Monotasking instead of multitasking! If you skype, skype; if you email, email; if you listen, listen. In this way we’ll have less stress and more quality time. We’ll lose confusion and gain clarity – not by paying money for another fancy device, but by paying attention!

Thanks to Anthony Amrhein for the continuous inspiration!