Germany from a different angle?

From time to time every one of us, who stays just long enough away from home, wants to return to his family and friends. Especially to occasions, such as Christmas when the whole family gathers, the desire to see your love ones grows.

Hence I packed my things and returned for a holiday trip back to Germany, Dresden. It was great to see most of my dear friends and my whole family for almost three weeks. I spent Christmas in my hometown Dresden and new- year in Berlin with friends. In between, I visited Köln, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Krefeld and Soest to give a visit to friends in other parts of Germany. To have a bit of snow before every little rest of it melted away right before Christmas was nostalgic as well. Especially as I spent the time outside with my friends in the valley and rock tops of the Elbsandstein Gebirge during a hot wine (Glühwein) hiking tour.

In many parts of Germany live is indeed wonderful: (cultivated) nature, parks, cheap food in a huge variety, a lot of space for relatively cheap rents, very good health care, and an almost free education system. Germans should be a happy folk, but when you wander through the streets of cities in Germany you immediately notice the absence of smiling people or anyone with a happy face expression. I don’t want to generalise, but as I spent most of my free time outside of the house I couldn’t avoid noticing this. And it is not the first time. Whenever I came back in the last three years, from Japan or Australia, I realised how unhappy people seem to be, or at least how unable to express their happy emotion, if there is one. It made me sad to see, that so many people in the country where I grew up, were apparently not happy. Instead of compliments I heard complaining! 

I can only hope that people start to value what they have and will be happy and thankful for whatever they got! Life is too short to be grumpy and unhappy. Death can be always around the next corner!  

 

About the aim

Lately I’m thinking a lot about the aims we have in front of us, our physical or mental eye. Before I left Japan, my first Kyudo sensei, Tsuzui-sensei, from Tokoyama Dojo gave me a couple of advices. One was, that I shouldn’t mind whether I hit the target or not. I should only concentrate on the technique, on what I’m doing and if this is right, I will hit the target anyway. In other words, I should mind the way, not the target.

As it is with words sometimes, you forget them and you remember them. Some other time. Besides the times, when I was back in Dresden, I heard the words of my German teacher first and remembered finally the words of the old teacher from Japan. I think they came back to me, because I was missing a teacher for Kyudo in Australia and my mind was trying to educate itself by remembering things it once had learned.

It’s a strange thing with the aim. I keep records of my hits and misses, which doesn’t make it easier for me. Even though I try not to think about the aim I will count hits and misses in my head: one hit, one hit one miss, one hit two misses – I have to hit now – and there it is again. The thinking about the aim and the forgetting about the way. It’s with so many things in life: we forget to remember other things on our way to our goal, our personal targets, things we want to achieve. Since we don’t care the way we walk, we miss a big opportunity: every single path we step on is a trail, is time, we can use to complete our self; master our self. The aim is nothing. You can not even fix it in time. It is not before you have not released the arrow and it is gone as soon as it has hit the target. A tiny moment, gone and you have to go on. Next arrow, and forget about the last one. Sometimes you can’t forget it and you live in the past, forgetting the present. If you only mind the aim, you will only walk from tiny moments to tiny moments, but if you concentrate on your way, our aim becomes every moment, and every moment you might become better in it. Mistakes will help you a lot. And the time might come, that I don’t need to think about the aim any more, that I will just go the right way, always hitting.

remembering: Tokuyama Dojo. Photo taken by Charlie Chayatan.