Final Destiny

Today was the last day in school.
Anton has finished seventh grade and passed. They went to school with their white shirts over their casual clothes for everyone to write on. He will be going to high school next year and that will be a big change. For all of us. Because there is no high school in Stanford and he will not board. We might all move. To the city.

This thought kept us busy the whole week. We went to the German school in Cape Town and liked it very much. I am soo excited thinking about living in the city. I think I had my share of country life now. It was great, I will miss it, but it is time for a change. Nothing is sure for now but we have to decide within the next six weeks. Than school will start. I must hold myself back not getting too excited.

We thought about all the plans that we had made. One of them was to travel the world with the children when they are still young and living with us. Our friend Michael said, while we were waiting for our children: “Yes, traveling the world would be great. As long as it is still there.”

This evening I watched “Edmond” on dvd. It was still light outside. I usually don’t watch movies during the day. I feel guilty doing that, but today it was a lazy hot day. The beginning of the holidays. Luzie was sleeping next to me, exhausted from the school year that has just ended, the sun was shining through the open door into her face and I hang a blanket up the reck where a curtain should be.

David Mamet wrote the screenplay to Edmond. It is not an excellent film, but an excellent script. It has got the best ending I have ever seen. I usually forget every ending but this I will remember forever. A burned out white business guy finding his final destiny in a prison cell in the arms of a black prisoner with a rotten front tooth who had sodomized him. Now I spoiled the movie for you but you might have never watched it anyway. Have a great holiday!

Dieses Buch wird Ihr Leben Verändern!

Für alle, die es noch nicht haben oder nicht wissen: Unser Buch “Was wir von der Liebe verstehen” kann man jetzt kaufen, leider bisher nur in deutscher Sprache, aber das wird sich bald ändern.

Es ist in der Tat lebensverändernd, man kann es immer wieder lesen, viel lachen, manchmal auch weinen, es ist offen und ehrlich (vielleicht zu ehrlich), was man heutzutage so selten findet wie eine unverbaute Aussicht.
Deshalb kauft es, lest es, vorallem verschenkt es an alle Paare die ihr kennt und solche, die es werden wollen. Und vorallem an die, die ihre Hoffnung an die Liebe glauben verloren zu haben.

Wir haben auch noch einen Blog dazu eingerichtet, in dem wir abwechselnd über die Freuden und Leiden der Liebe schreiben. Sven hat ihn mit einer Geschichte über Vertrauen eröffnet und ich werde bald darauf antworten. Außerdem gibt es Textauszüge und ein Interview zu lesen und kleines Video zu sehen.

Unser Wunsch ist es, noch mehr Autoren zu diesen Themen zu gewinnen so daß ein möglichst vielfältiger und anregender Austausch stattfindet, zu dem wir auch die Leser einladen wollen.

Außerdem schreibt Sven auch noch einen Blog!
Sven also started a blog. Don’t miss it. Yes, we are living in blogworld now!

Laziness

View from my friend’s office in Cape Town

View from my friends balcony

My friends in front of the window

I could easily blame the slow internet for not blogging. Or the heat. Jetlag. Lack of inspiration. All of it is partly true but actually it is my laziness.

I wrote a lot though but nothing anyone would enjoy to read. I tried to catch up with last week but it was all boring and than we did this and that…

I went to Cape Town on Saturday. Enjoyed the city and my friend as always. Ate Thai food, went shopping and for a walk on the promenade. Now I am back to normal.

I spent the day with succesfully doing nothing. It is amazing how one can keep oneself busy from 8 in the morning untill now, 3.33 in the afternoon. I haven’t left the house. Haven’t even showered nor washed my hair. Nor dressed properly. Only washed and creamed my face, brushed my teeth and hair.

I started the morning very promising by editing and completing a story about crime for the new book. Got stuck because I needed an article. Went through all the Sunday Times supplements but couldn’t find it though I had only read it two days before. Ate in between searching three rice crackers with delicious jam a gift from my friend in Köln. Drank tea, chatted with Sven. Watched him operating the slow internet. Found a Neon magazin that i hadn’t read yet and went through it. Sven showed me the new site he had built. We tried to change some things together, which took hours. I checked emails, wrote a birthday mail to Nana. Happy birthday Nana! Checked emails again. Read in Goethes Wahlverwandschaften. Wrote a blog entry that turned out to be absolut boring rubbish. Thought some thoughts about blogging. Thought some thoughts about dieting. Thought some thoughts about wasting time and I came to the conclusion that the set routine of every day ist to blame.

Every day starts at the same time. Not that i have to get up. But I wake up and even if I ignore the time everyone else gets up I can’t deny it. We have time to write and work untill two or three. Than the kids come home, lunch has to be made, we eat. Than rest, homeworks, everyone dissapears in their rooms. Than evening, eat, do whatever, i don’t even know what. Bedtime. Read. Sleep.

This routine cuts the day in little pieces. There is a piece for this, a piece for that. Every piece has a set amount of time and things to do. I wake up in the morning and I know what my day will be like.
I try to get out of the routine, sleep late, do not work, read when I am supposed to write, but it makes it only worse. Does anybody know what I am talking about or is it only me?

Please come back. Tomorrow I will share my thoughts on dieting!

Miss Selfrighteous

Today I was again the bad guy. The really bad guy. I am again confronted with myself confronting people in a not so friendly way, because I can get very upset and when I am upset I can hardly control my feelings and so I upset the feelings of people who upset me.

It doesn’t happen often and maybe this is the reason why I have difficulties to get too close to people, because if I see something wrong it is hard for me to hold back and I can not really discern whether it is controlling or caring, but most of the time there is a caring aspect, even when it comes across quite controlling. And selfrighteous.

I have a very limited imagination. I can’t even imagine to ever eat again when I am full, and after a hot and sunny day I am almost startled when it is rainy and cold. How should I imagine how other people feel? Most of the times I am not even trying, because I know I will fail. I believe things that work for me also must work for others.

It irritates me and I want to see myself clearly. I know I have little empathy. And my homeopath once told me I lack grace. That is true. Aber woher nehmen, wenn nicht stehlen? Where to get from and not steal it? I am praying for it, but sometimes there doesn’t seem to be enough.

I am not very compassionate, nor understanding. I try to be more tolerant, but I can’t hold back because it makes me sick. What I obviously have to learn is to confront people in a loving and understanding way. To get my heart right first.

I hate to know that I didn’t do things right, that I failed, that I could have done much better. I am not even a perfectionist. I am confused not knowing what is right or wrong, but I am getting more at ease that it is ok to mess up, admit my mistakes, try to learn and hope to do better next time.

Loosing Myself

Sven found our video tapes the other day and I looked through all of them. The kids dancing in our Berlin apartement, on rollerblades on the Gendarmenmarkt, Luzie missing her upper front teeth and so much blonder than now. 5 years ago, before we moved to South Africa.

I enjoyed going back in time but it also made me sad. I thought it was because these children are gone forever, these times will never come back, but I also remembered how desperate I was at that time. I saw all these happy moments on camera, the beautiful children, summer in berlin and remembered I wasn’t really there. In my memory, I am absent and I remembered how much my life was determined to wait for something to happen: A new book, a new place to live, the children to get well again, winter to finish, summer to start, the children to grow up.

It seemed as I was always at a place where I was not. Was not or if not. If only… I could be happy, if not… I would feel much better. I had an overwhelming feeling of regret not having enjoyed every moment, realizing how happy they were and that they will never come back. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my life, we had a great time together, but my underlining feeling was that of being somewhere else in my mind, not being where I should be, not enjoying what I should have enjoyed as much as possible. I worried too much. I looked into the future or into the past while I missed the moment.

It was painful to realize that, but it is also freeing to know that I live differently now, that I have learned to be in the moment and appreciate more what I have.
It was so sad looking back and realizing what I actually had and how little I was able to enjoy it. What a waste. At the same time I was grateful for everything I have right now and I told my husband how much I love him and appreciate him and I know how much he missed me in all these years where I withdrew myself.

Life now feels so much more real to me, I feel soaked, drenched with life. I stopped waiting for things to happen and I think it is because I came out of my snail house, where everything was about me and where I thought I had to take refuge to not loose myself, and instead opened myself as I never did before. And taking the risk of loosing myself, I did find life.

Truth Hunter

I woke up tonight with the sentence: I am a truth hunter. A truth collector.
I don’t remember the exact words. I didn’t write it down, because it was so clear that I thought I wouldn’t forget it.

But it is true. This is what matters most to me. This is the purpose of everything I do. Finding truth. Collecting pieces of truth, looking for them wherever I go and putting them together like puzzle pieces, hoping one day the picture will be complete. And what a picture this will be. That’s what my life is all about.

Nothing gives me more joy than finding truth. Nothing leaves in me in greater desperation than walking in the dark, not knowing right from wrong.

Maybe this is the reason for my “fiction crisis”. I am still searching for a way to put truth into a made up story.

That night I had another dream: Sven came into my room and walked with his big, dirty boots across my sacred carpet, leaving heaps of sand. As I mentioned it to him, he didn’t care at all. It’s true. So much about fiction.

The Ramification of Procrastination

I finally filled in my vocabulary book. I started to write down the words I don’t know and looked them all up today. I know, it sounds boisterous (angeberisch) and I hope you don’t find that repugnant (abstossend) but I am quite proud of it.
The other resolution I followed through is to carry a notebook around and to write down every thought or insight that seems important to me. At the end of the week (I am at week two now) I went through my book and told Sven what I had learned. You know already, because I wrote it here.

It is enthralling (spannend) and invigorating (anregend) and creates indelible (unauslöschliche) memories. But it is also a sort of procrastination (Hinauszögern), because I sheer (ausweichen) to do the writing I am supposed to do. Hopefuly without insinuating (böse) ramifikations (Konsequenzen).
Now I used almost all my new words and haven’t got any left.

Confession I

I always used other peoples lives as an inspiration for my fictional characters. I had good reasons for that: I can only write about what I know. I am an artist and I have the freedom to choose my own characters from whatever source I feel is right.
I don’t choose, they choose me. If I have to restrict myself about what I write, because of other peoples feeling, the quality of my writing will suffer.
My freedom as a writer is above everything-else for the sake of art.

I did upset people. Not only people, but friends. People which were very close to me. I had excuses for that too. I wanted them to understand that it is not about them. That they are only actors in this play. I would borrow their looks, habits or character-traits and they will come alive as a fictional character with it’s own life that has as little to do with them as Spider-man with Tobey Maguire.

I still want to believe that, but people became really upset and stopped trusting me and it affected me. It blocked my writing. I knew I could not go on like this because as much I would justify my pure intention I could not deny that it would affect people and therefore myself and my writing .

I started to build characters in my imagination, but it wasn’t fun nor did they inspire me. Suddenly I had lost all purpose of writing. I even stopped reading fiction because it didn’t make sense to me to read about the imaginative lives of imaginative people. What should I gain from that? What can I learn from that?
I don’t know why I still enjoyed movies, maybe because they seemed to be more real than written words.

Finally I decided to end the crisis by exploiting my own life.
I wrote a novel about a woman, from the age of 17 until her 40s. I used events in my life and built the character around it. But I didn’t write in first person and I never revealed any insights of the character. Obviously, she lived parts of my life, but I kept her distant. To me and to the reader. Until now I don’t know who this person really is and I don’t want to know. That was the hardest piece of work ever. It is a very sad story. Because I was struggling writing, my character had to suffer a lot. Or maybe it was the other way round.
I wasn’t able to look at myself as I would look at other people. My vision was clouded by fear to reveal too much, to expose myself, to look ridiculous, to be recognized.

to be continued…

No Lukewarm Way of Living

One of my intention writing this blog was sharing one insight every day. No matter how little or insignificant. For me to remember and for others to laugh.

I started years ago to do this in my diary but I never managed to follow through.
I don’t know whether too few insights or too little discipline. Maybe both of it. But I am sure, no, I am determined, to learn something every day. It is more a matter of discipline and awareness than of opportunities
I also wanted to take one picture a day. Never did that.

What I realized yesterday was that maturity has to do a lot with conscious decision-making and sticking to it. Not letting things – not letting a life – happen to me that I don’t want. Knowing that everything I do has a consequence.
For example, if I want to have an excellent love-relationship, I have to do all I can to maintain it. To respect him, even when I think he is wrong. To focus on his good sides, to love him, even when I don’t feel like it, to make him happy and not nag him. Trying hard at the beginning, it becomes a habit after a while.

If I want to be happy and healthy, I quit smoking, don’t drink too much so that I won’t have a hangover the next morning, don’t watch movies the whole night, get up early, walk every day and only dwell on positive and productive thoughts. If I want good friendships I have to be a good friend. And so on…

There is no lukewarm way of living, I can’t do the wrong things over and over again, expecting good results.
That doesn’t mean that I have got it all together. I mess up a lot but I try every day again. Repent and move on is the right lifestyle.
Because I realized that I have full responsibility of my life with everything I do and every thought I think.

Yes, I am a late and slow developer.

The Hero of Curry Road

Sven gave me this book as a present yesterday. He thought I might like it and he was right. It’s called “complete collection of short pieces” and that’s what they are. Short short stories, some only two pages long. Clear, deep and simple.

Alan Paton is a well known South African writer. But not as well known as he should be, they say. I had never heard of him. He lived from 1903-1988.
He wrote about himself: ” I am something more than a writer; I am a member of an imperfect and unjust human society, which has it’s home in a most beautiful country”.
He died shortly before apartheid was abolished. It pierced my heart when I realized that the never saw that the struggle wasn’t in vain.

Isn’t that the coolest cover ever? Alan Paton sitting on a folding chair near Botha’s Hill in the Valley of a Thousand Hills photographed by David Goldblatt in 1988, the year he died.
What I like about this picture is that it is completely unpretentious. It shows an old man with big glasses and a Casio watch on a folding chair. Not trying to make him look like a writer, but at the same time giving him full respect for who he is.
It is, what it is and that is they way his stories are, stripped to the core from any pretension.
I would love to see myself on a cover like this in 40 years.