Minimalism

As far as decorating your home, what kind of culture do you belong to?  I belong to the culture that normally overstocks our dwellings. The bigger the room, the more the furnishings. Maybe we believe that open space means that we haven’t got around to putting something there yet.

How do you feel about minimalism? Minimalism takes some getting used to. At least for my generation. And if we do get to jump the gap, we find freedom!

What parallels do you draw between house furnishings and life? While we enjoy the trend of well-chosen furnishings balanced with open spaces, light shades and just the right textures we haven’t made the leap in our schedules. Not all of us have.

What is the significance of what you are saying? A man I met a few years ago was about to leave on holiday. His destination was an interesting one. The Karoo, a semi-desert part of the Western Cape province in South africa. I knew the area and suggested a few adventure things him and his family could do to spice up a potentially boring location. Looking at his face I could see the displeasure as I rambled on. “I just want to walk a dirt track” he answered after a long silence. His reply made me think. Could a walk in the Karoo be enough? My mind was going deeper. What do I need to rest? To be happy? How much stuff do I need to prosper?

Can you make this more practical? To me there so many times is a world of difference between wise words and deep convictions. So, what am I telling myself deep down? Just look at the way I live, that will tell it all!  I do not always work through the implications of important truths. Neither do I always know my own motives! Someone may confess to believe in something while her life says something else. A man once said the following: If you want to know what you believe in, look at what you did in the past week. We may profess that less is more, what do our lives say though? And a good thing is to let a wise person be the judge.

So, where are you going with this? I am an abundant kind of person. I believe in living life and taking deep breaths. In not ignoring an enjoyable moment. I believe in laughing out loud and taking a nice helping of my favourite food. I have an awesome hobby. But here’s what I’m trying to determine. Will less of the clutter and variety and complexity and kitsch make me more focussed and happy and fulfilled. Well there is only one way to find out. Start trimming!

Status quo

Yesterday I read something from Brian McLaren’s book: “A Search for What Is Real” that just stuck with me.

It boils down to this. What God gives comes both free and (hear it comes) it will cost you your status quo.

My status quo.

Some of us seek God but we don’t really want to find Him. Because some of us have secret things. Perversions or dark secrets of things packed in closets that will shock our friends and family. Addictions maybe. And we’re not going to give them up. Not for any reason. So we seem to seek.

Fact is, the one we seek becomes the one we steer away from. The one yearned for is more the one despised at.

Are you there at that place were you find life and give up your status quo, as Brian calls it. Hey? Where you come clean, or come out of your own “closet”? Because you want God more than you want an image.

God is both free and will cost you your status quo.

That’s all for now. Till later ….

Getting There

When I’m small, I just want to grow up. Time can not pass by soon enough, that is till I turn thirty. Then I work at life. I put my soul into getting there, whatever that means. I dig in. And when I’m done, I get to the point my friend so aptly described, where I hate my life.

By the way, my friend is really rich.

So, lets open those blinds and let the light flood in. No need to get all dark and gloomy now, cause in life’s bouquet there is a sweetness too.

What role does time play in life?

A  mentor of mine, Stuart Briscoe in a talk on priorities once said something to the effect: that he ran for exercise, with one eye closed, so he can pray, the other open, so he can read the morning paper. In the process he tags his family along on the right hand side for quality time while he has his co-leaders on the left for a quick meeting. He does all this dressed in a white shirt and jacket for the formal side of things and for the festive side, he rounds everything off with baggy shots and flip-flops.

Time.

without ample time you wont succeed.

Do you love your kids? You need lots and lots of time with them to show them just how much you do.

Why are you their parents?

To one day send them off into this world as successful adults. There is ample space in life to just be human. To be imperfect, because that represents being human. we all er and we all have moments we wish never happened. But there is no space for not being there for them.

Think about it. Everything worth while takes time.

Reaching God takes time ….

Deepening a relationship takes time ….

Becoming lovers and soul mates takes time….

Building a bond strong enough to last through the communicationless teen years takes time.

Becoming good at anything like golf or fly fishing or understanding people takes time ….

Time we don’t seem to have any more.

Or do we?

At half past six when we need to do everything at once before bed time.

My sons, three of them, did not have an easy teen life. And they suddenly started asking me very embarrassing questions about girls. But here’s the thing: they came to me and they asked me. And I had the privilege to blush and to stammer over my own feet and to speak intimately with them.

My availability said something to them.

My youngest son is a very bold outspoken kind of person. He will challenge me anytime if he sees me compromise. And like clockwork he will call me asking for my guidance. “Hey, dad, dude, what do you thing of me trying such and such”?

To provide the time necessary, I did things that maybe tarnished my corporate position a bit and in other areas I had to pay a hefty price. So be it!

Since when have we got this calling to be so busy, in any case? Be honest? Who called you to the altar of over exertion? That is exactly where the gears of post modernity is taking us.

And you can step out and say “No more!” Don’t expect others to cheer you! And your choice may need to be VERY radical, so be it! Some couples choose a life of less affluence in the country side, some choose another carrier. In the end, it will be all worth it!

Make time.

Soul soup

A friend of mine once tried clearing up my foggy perception of my inner self. He was very technical about the whole thing. Dividing the innards into body, mind and soul and spending much effort on dissecting this weighty matter into comprehensible morsels. I can’t remember much of what he so learnedly uttered, but I do know some things that are imbedded in my soul.

One of them is fishing.

I should actually write it like this: FISHING!.

My fishing friends, therefore are close to my heart. They are my soul mates. Our eyes widen for the same things, so do our nostrils flare for similar experiences.  We get the jitters when a large trout turns for our dry-fly or when a garric chases bait fish around. We know the agony when a trophy fish spits our fly. They are to me like a hearty soup at night after a chilly encounter with some trout.

Some of my friends have chosen to make their hobby, their business, and like most businesses nowadays are now finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. It really is becoming tough for us small business owners.

What should we think of it?

Is God cross with us?

Should we have saved up more in the past?

Must we dig harder in the present?

Do we need to re-invent ourselves?

I do know one question we need to ask ourselves right now: What should we learn from tough times? We are in a race, aren’t we? And it has turned way tougher than in the past. Compelling us to trim back and reduce the weight we carry. That is the one side to the economic coin. The other is, we learn to travel light which brings a joy of its own if we are wise enough to savour the hidden blessing.

We get un-cluttered. Like a young sjef learning to elevate great dishes into exceptional by making them less complex.

We learn that complexity can be sole destroying.

My son loves gardening. He planted some wild grass in two of the flowerbeds. They are in seed now, just like last year, and the year before. This year though, I can’t get enough of seeing them gently waving, bathed in the golden glow of the setting African sun.

I’m being forced to live with less, at first reluctantly. Gradually the joy I have lost is returning though. An appreciation is being re-born inside of me. My soul is more alive than it has been in a long time. Suddenly I want to savour the moment. Don’t think I don’t feel the agony of tough times! To the contrary. But I am happy to be where I am, right now.

Should I call it soul soup?

Satisfaction

“He is in his sweet spot, doing what he was designed to do” Doesn’t it make you nauseous, hey? Well, that’s if you are anything like the average person around. I hover between finding my job acceptable and hating my work depending on how I feel at the time.

Living the life under the sun, someone once called it. Do some jobs come with instant gratification? I don’t think so. And, why is it that some people with the most crappy jobs, are so nauseatingly happy? Years ago towns had what was called a night bucket system. All the toilet gunk went into buckets which were then emptied by manual labor at night. How can some people find handling other people’s excrement joyful and other travel journalists visiting the pearly beaches and sapphire beaches hate their jobs?

Are we meant to have job satisfaction?

Isn’t it more mature to just get on with it? Just do it and stop moaning … Welcome to the real world. You have to eat, get on with it.

I don’t think that work can stand on it’s own feet, as far as happiness is concerned. Do you? I believe that joy at work is joined, fused to personal identity at the atomic level. And if we need to find our identity from what we do, how much we own, or what people perceive us to be, we’ve lost it, haven’t we?

If there could be such a being as a God. If it was possible that He deemed you to be His beloved child … irrespective of your personal performance …. and you could know it deep down in your guts. Would that maybe cause you to find a kind of release, a freedom to do seemingly mundane or uncomfortable things with great joy?

Job, satisfaction. Maybe it could be called God satisfaction!

Living On The Edge

Tomita reworked Rafael’s Bolero for electronic instruments. Being a purist, I tend to favour original compositions, but for me, Tomita did a good job.

It starts off in the usual way but towards the end speeds up like a runaway car going on a Nascar track, round and round, heading for destruction.

You know were I’m heading, don’t you? Life has sped up out of control. Like an out of control car and the wheels are coming off.

We all know that life changes all the time. The tempo of this change has just gone way up and it’s not slowing down. And we are loosing it big time.

The other day I was watching a TV show where first world executives are taken to undeveloped villages in far off third world countries. They then stay there for a month or so.

This bright young woman executive was staying with Amazonian indians. And she was so emotional all the time, crying because she was realising how much of the essence of life she has lost. She needed the comparison of lifestyles and she got it amongst the mud houses out in the bundus.

The wheels are coming off and we don’t know how to fix them. And we are breaking to the core.

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Dullstroom

You can’t run from your problems. Says who? I can. The moment I closed that front door and headed for the highland meander, I was free.

There is something about going away on holiday. I have a hunch that more of us leave nowadays out of a sense of survival. Depression has made many of us tread water for way to long now. With only our noses barely surfacing.

Going away for a while.

So we chose Dullstroom this year. That is me, Ralie and friends. There we were amongst the hills, streams, nyala, hyraxes, fish eagles and so on. And here we became human again.

One morning our friends fed the birds some bread crumbs. We took time checking them out as they feasted outside on the frost covered lawn.

Later on, heading back to our cottage, my fishing buddy remarked: “beats any day at the office”. If you fly fish, you will know where that came from.

So how do you stay sane in this crazy world?

http://www.strimoo.com/video/10494150/Fishing-MySpaceVideos.html

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