I've spent the last five days in bed recovering from a cold, a very heavy one. I'm still not very good at 'taking it easy' and I wonder if that's something I will ever learn. However, spending these five days at home have made me more aware of the fact that I feel like 'taking it easy' is not always the answer.


There is something I want to explain but I struggle to find the words. Five years ago, only five years ago, my life and my world was a 10 kilometer radius around Dordrecht. That was my world. Going to University and spending time with people from different places in the world, from different cultures, with different beliefs and different ideals made me realise how narrow minded I had spent most of my life. It confronted me with the fact that I simply did not know much, about the world, about myself, about differences, about making it work despite the differences we all have. I recall a friend telling me, around ten years ago, after I had told him that sometimes...

'I just feel a little stupid.'.
'You're not stupid, you just don't know that much.'

And I think that's a fair truth and a fair thing to say (when the situation calls for it.). 

We can all learn. From each other, from our similarities and from our differences. All it takes is to spend time with each other and listen to each other. I feel like we're all so busy, so very busy. Serving, working, scrolling, posting, playing, creating. But do we spend enough time 'looking'? Observing, analysing, understanding, listening. Not just looking at the numbers and creating an average to base our whatever statistics on. But truly looking at what all of us are doing. How we feel. Why we feel that way. What we do and why we do things that way.

Dare to ask yourself questions. Dare to ask others questions. You might not always get an answer, but show that you're interested and want things to be better.

Just allow yourself to feel stupid for a while, and learn. Keep trying and accept that you'll have a part of you that's always going to be afraid. Try to look at the prejudices that you've been carrying with you throughout your life and identify if those are things that are actually helping you at all (I dare say they aren't. They might even hold you back.) There's a likely chance that there are things you'll find out about yourself, and suddenly, it will make a lot of sense why you've been doing things your way for so long without realising there was so much you had no clue about.

Rant over I suppose.

Liefs, x.