Yesterday I watched the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? (aff). It’s out there for 2 years already, but this was the first time I watched it. It contains a lot of concepts to think about, and I will write about it in a couple of days (need to digest it some more).

This morning (at 5:45 am) I watched the extras on the DVD and several parts of the Q&A section struck me. In one of them someone in the audience asked Betsy Chasse the question: ‘Why are you so successful?’ and she answered almost instantly ‘Because I create my own reality.’ That’s powerful isn’t it?

This is usually said by people that actually are successful (or will be soon). Success doesn’t just happen, it’s a deliberate creation. But successful people haven’t always been successful; they have experienced setbacks and failure as well. But their mindset is a mindset of creation. They see failure as feedback and ask themselves ‘How did I create this?’. It’s this mindset of deliberate creation that propels them forward. They happen to reality.

On the other side are people that are not successful. Somehow reality happens to them, and they are not to blame for their current situation. When they experience setbacks or failure, they were just unlucky, and somehow that always happens to them. They try to succeed the next time they take up a venture, but they keep butting their head against the same wall again and again. Reality happens to them.

How do you create your own reality?

“There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.”
- Henri Matisse

Inspiration can be found in all the (un)usual places. I like the quote by Henri Matisse very much, there really are flowers to be found in all kinds of everyday places. We tend to filter them out, because there’s no use for flowers in our present mindset at that moment. This week I’m getting up at 5am and on Tuesday I took the time to really experience sunrise with Matisse in the back of my mind.

Sunrise
The air is fresh, but the night still rules the sky and keeps it covered in its dark cloak. Somewhere in a tree a bird starts singing, anticipating sunrise. Slowly the night sky starts fading from black into darker shades of gray, the outline of the world becomes visibly as a placeholder to be colored by the sun. It’s still hard to see colors, there’s not enough light yet to really see colors. Remarkably I think I can see colors, but I suspect I’m being tricked by my mind filling in the usual colors.

Over the next couple of minutes the clouds become visible as pinkish spots on the fading night sky. Looking up I realize I’m looking at the bottom of a satellite picture that will be shown on the breakfast news in an hour or so. Thinking about the satellite I decide to travel up there in my mind, and along the way I look at earth waking up. Scattered around movement is visible when animals and people alike start the day.

Once up there, I look down from the satellite. There’s only a small piece of earth experiencing this magical moment of sunrise. I look around and gaze at the stars in awe, I always find the vast infinity of the universe overwhelming. The light I’m looking at is millions of years old, maybe that star is not there anymore at present. Quite the paradox: I’m an important part of my universe, but so insignificant in the total universe.

More birds start to sing, and I return to earth. A rabbit hops on the green field in front of our house, nibbling on grass that’s wet with dew. I remember Matisse and look around, there really are flowers everywhere…

It’s been over five years since I first read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Three weeks ago on holiday, I re-read it for the fifth time, and I plan to re-read it every year for a long time to come. This little book about a shepherd traveling to Egypt to find his treasure is so full of wisdom that I learn something every time.

If you read my bio you know that I have been idling along in life for a long time. I didn’t know what I wanted with my life, I didn’t know what to do for education or work, and I didn’t even know who I really was. But these questions were on my mind, and by thinking them over you position yourself to be ready for answers. An old Chinese proverb says “When the student is ready, a teacher will appear.” The Alchemist, or Paulo Coelho if you will, has been a teacher for me.

Here are seven lessons, illustrated with quotes from The Alchemist, that have the power to change your life for the better. Click to continue »

Jesh de Rox is an artist. He makes art with photography, more specific: experiential photography. Not experimental photography (that’s what I read at first) but experiential. And the term is exactly right for the works he makes.

Jesh has a gift to capture emotions and feelings in a very subtle and delicate way in his photographs. The photographs in themselves are best experienced, not merely viewed. Add to this a beautiful website that is customized to how you feel, and music that underlines the atmosphere of it all.

On his about page he has a section that has me thinking. I would love to talk to him sometime to learn how he came to formulating this part:

He has come to believe that the most important and precious parts of life are found in small truths, easily missed - that the world within is the root of the one without - and that the search for meaning is more about the search than the meaning.

I’m not going to show his pictures here, as they would be taken out of context. Go visit Jesh de Rox’ website and tell me what it made you feel…

Yesterday was the airing of the highly controversial show “De grote donorshow” (The big donor show) on the BNN network in the Netherlands. The show was about three candidates, patients suffering from kidney failure, contesting for one of the kidneys of a dying woman. The audience at home was able to give advice through text messaging in an
Idols-kind-of-way. Pretty macabre TV-show, right? It would have been if it were real. Thankfully it was a hoax, and more a publicity stunt and a cry for action to our government to do something about the donor registration in the Netherlands. There was no donor (the woman was an actress), and the patients knew that beforehand.

The publicity they got was overwhelming. No less than 85 international news crews were at the show, and all the news shows and talk shows this evening on Dutch television had this show as a subject. Our politicians discussed it all week, and condemned the unethical nature of it. It lead to a great deal of questions in our Tweede Kamer (our house of representatives).

Dealing with an uncertain future
What struck me in the show, besides the issue at hand, was the enormous difference in vision of the future of the three patients. All three were bound to daily dialysis,
so they are severely limited as they depend on these machines for their life. Life expectancy for patients with kidney failure is also an unknown, and they handled this in a very different way.

One of the patients did not really think about the future. She seemed to think about it as a concept, something that might be. The future was today, maybe next week. She seemed to be very present, and very aware of everything she experienced, and had hopes for a better health. One of the other patients however was very ambitious. He had big plans, and regarded the future as a time where he would achieve great things. His kidney condition was something that was holding him back, but it did not stop him in making plans and believing in them. The third candidate was very much focussed on experiencing things, now and in the future. She would drink a lot (not alcoholic beverages) when she would get a new kidney (in her condition she was only allowed to drink half a liter
a day). And she would instantly travel to Australia (great country!) to experience life there.

Lessons learned
All of these strategies have their beauty. They were somewhat extreme in nature, but when you’re facing an uncertain future with a shorter than average life expectancy, what can you expect? One of the techniques to learn what values are most important to you, is a visit to your own funeral. For most of us this is a shocking and (hopefully) enlightening
experience, for them it’s a reality. I learned the following lessons from them:

1. Value what you have now
2. Always make plans and believe in them
3. Don’t procrastinate! Plan, Do, Experience.

And the last moment of the show, before they announced the real nature of it, reminded me of a scene in the movie Sophie’s choice. The “dying woman” had to choose between two people to give one kidney. Making a choice between life and death…

The founder of BNN, Bart de Graaff was a patient with kidney failure. He died on May 25, 2002 aged 35. Only 5 years after his second kidney transplant.