Two happy days

Our dog Joris is jawning, sooo boring! (picture taken a month ago, now we had to wear jackets)

Last week Sunday we celebrated the last day of Menno's "birthweek". His official birthday is September 3, and on that day he became 10 years! During the whole week the guirlands were hanging from the ceiling, as a welcome to adults and children. This last day we went with a group of little friends to the movie, made cheap by the supermarket chain of Albert Heijn: for every x Euros spent, you got a free second movie theatre ticket, so we only had to pay half the total price. We watched "The Simpsons" so the adults among us had also a good time and didn't have to watch computer-made "plastic" puppets experience adventures liked by children alone. (At least it's not my first choice for a movie).

Yesterday the weather was 1st choice for a sailing day: wind force 4 and a brilliant sun, so the three of us spent the day on the water. Up to then, it was one of the nicest sailing days. Janine took sailing lessons from me and Menno kept himself busy with all kinds of little jobs such as taking care of the "willen" (cushion-like devices to protect from bumping - most younger sailors use the English word for it but the older people still use the good Dutch word for it, I forgot the English word) and other things that had to be done.

This week I have to make an appointment to have the boat put on land, at a shipyard owned by the son of the designer / builder of the boat, Lodewijk Meeter. He built only around twenty of these boats in the 19seventies, and he still has the original drawings. Then it will be much work to get the boat in a better condition by sandpapering (rust!), painting and improving the rigging! Everything advised by Lodewijk, and if craftmanship is involved, he could help us very well.

Photoblogging and psychology

I always admire people who can make an unequivocal choice: they choose their profession at ten years old, at fourteen they make a CPM network schedule for the rest of their lives, they are always optimistic and motivated, are creative, and a pleasure for their family, friends and colleagues.
They always have been working at some project(s) in Africa or India (“they have fallen in love with it”) and know what poverty and self discipline is, but at the same time, having passed their 40th year of age, they drive a USV 4-wheel drive, own at least two houses and a yacht.
Because of the success they had in their career, they are often asked as a keynote speaker on conferences. They have been asked to become a politician many times, but they preferred the business world with network connections to education and universities.
Next to their business positions they are chairperson or board members of at least one charity foundation.
They have written and published at least one book, mostly a book about how something can and must be improved (your career, your personality, society, business, management, always “spiritual” and are now busy with a second bestseller. They are wonderful parents and their children are proud to have such a father / mother.

This is what they do. Now what they don’t do.

They don’t waste time with irrelevant hobbies such as fishing, cooking, horses, dogs, collecting stamps, etc. Of course they have a hobby (cooking when they cook once every three months, or dogs if they own a dog they never walk with – ever seen a celebrity walking with his/her dog in the park? They never do useless things such as counting the tiles in the bathroom while doing what they have to do, maintaining a photoblog, watching TV, doing the dishes, searching the whole city and Internet for a special item they need for a repair job, and other dull John Doe activities.

They don’t read articles about successful people, instead they call them for appointments or simply a chat.

I envy these people because of what they have, not because of what they do. I would also like to have all these things: celebrity, houses, yacht, charisma, the skills to immediately know what the trends are and knowing how to respond on them, clearly visible in word and image. I don’t like doing what they do and/or I don’t master the competencies needed for it. Having your agenda completely filled with appointments, meetings, travels, storing everything in your or your secretary’s memory, always showing strong motivation for things I find taken for granted, boring repetition or fashionable hot air. Hot air? What a disdain! Look how much money you can make out of hot air!

But sometimes… I read about somebody who actually HAS all these things, and also hates the things I also hate, and also does what John Doe also does. And then I get an indescribable feeling of failure. Why not me? Oh, I should have lived like he did! If only in 19.. I wouldn’t have done this-or-that, if only I wasn’t so stupid to…, if only …

And I fall in the trap of relentless ego-lamentation. Poor me! And I look helplessly around me. And then I discovered the photoblog. It really helps, you feel accepted and sometimes even admired! Make a good picture, look around at other pictures, discuss the content, admire other people’s products and get admired, enjoy visual beauty, get stunned about free and super-fast communication, get hooked.

But then, after half a year of photoblogging, the old feeling comes back. You see that somebody owns a couple of Canons and Leica’s. You have started with a mobilephone, and now you have a small pocketcamera. You see that these Leica’s produce better pictures. You hate Photoshop, because it’s fake, you think. And you see how Photoshop can make a piece of art out of a bad picture, and how these artifacts are admired…. The little devil whispers: buy also such a beautiful camera with a couple of lenses. Why? I think I postpone it, I know it’s the old feeling again and I don’t like that. It’s all psychology.

Stephen's challenge

Stephen has decided on the photochallenge of September for the Sears family and their visitors who are also invited to take the challenge. The theme is "harvest". This word (as a schoolmaster I can't help teaching) is closely related to the Dutch word "herfst" and the German word "Herbst", both meaning "autumn". For harvest the Dutch have the word "oogst" (requires long practice for non-Dutch for the proper pronunciation), and the German say "Ernte" when they mean harvest (requires for English speaking people also a lot of practice to be pronounced the right way). So I think that the English simply took herfst / Herbst and chose a variation that suited their tongue and cheek movements, to indicate the collection of fruits and cerials in the Autumn, which they called "Autumn" because harvest / herfst /Herbst was now reserved for the fruit-and-cerials collection.

This theory will soon be published in the Hurdegarypster Journal for Historical Linguistics.

Anyway, cycling home from school I found one of these mini-stands along the road that pop up here and there around this time, offering fruit, marmelade and vegetables from the home's gardens. Alongside the products you find a price list and a jar in which you are supposed the money. Unfortunately this one was already nearly sold out, I already had marmelade, beans and red beets from them. I'm proud to live in a region where people trust each other this way!

A day on the water and with family

Yesterday we went sailing; my boat never went so fast, aroud 2 PM the windforce wasn't 4 but 5-6 and on top of that the main sail lacked a reef possibility (which I'm going to change this winter). At the end of July we had also this kind of wind, but then I improvised a reef by binding the hind-part of the sail to its bottom bar ("giek" I don't know the English word), but although it worked, it didn't satisfy because of the loose sack which it causes at the sail bottom. I don't trust the boat 100% because of its old rigging - I heard too many stories about broken masts etc. - so I only dared sail with hoisted sails with the wind blowing from behind. Janine, Menno, my brother Peter and the dog were with me on the boat and Janine and Peter (who don't know much about sailing) encouraged me not to put on my improvised reef (why do we need that? - this is not a storm!). After the trip, when we were at home Janine told me that I should be more bossy and a real captain so when people wanted other things than I had in mind, I should overrule them and make my word law. That day she got familiar with the forces that a boat has to endure at windforce 5-6 with full sails. I was on the other side happy to got familiar with how the boat behaves under these circumstances, nothing was damaged but I was sure it would have been very difficult and probably impossible without severe damage, to sail with the wind from 45 degrees in front of us(in Dutch: "sharply to the wind"). We went that fast that after having dropped the sails and started the engine I thought at first that the engine didn't work because of the difference in speed with the sailing movement. Under more normal circumstances we could sail the whole route until the home marine, but this route leads us through rather narrow canals, and with that speed this could have been dangerous because there were more boats and collisions are not easy to avoid then. Apart from this: the big number of motor boats nowadays annoys me sometimes because these people often lack knowledge of (1) traffic rules on the water and (2) sailing, so one cannot rely on traffic rules because you don't know if the motor skipper knows them and I most of them are not familiar with the possibilities and restrictions of a boat with sails, so they simply keep their course and take priority also if they haven't. I suspect that many of them think that a sailing boat is more "primitive" and never have priority!

The late afternoon we spent at my brother's new house in a village in the Eastern part of the province, and we admired the way he has (re)furbished it. He has a son (17) and two daughters (I think 14 and 12), he and his wife working and still studying so their life is one big agenda without holes. He shares the photo-hobby with me. They went to the Czech Republic on holidays (formerly part of Csechoslowakia, what a shame that this small country has been split up in two still smaller parts!) and he showed me a number of pictures he made over there. Two of them you can see on my photoblog (4 and 5 September).

As for my thoughts on the subject I wrote about the two previous times: I don't think we have tot take this too dramatically. It's true that many Christians and Liberals in the West on the one hand, and many Muslims in the East on the other hand, mistrust each other. It's true that many Muslims adhere more strongly to family- and respect-values than Westerners do (translating respect by adherence to tradition values and not to achievement values per se) and that in Western eyes there's not much difference in their perception of a Biblical desert-society and a rural Muslim society nowadays, but it's not true that there are no liberal-thinking Muslims. Just as is the case with Christians, what people hear, read and see are the loud preachers and the Truth-owners, not the silent spiritually-inspired or the hard-working and modest contribuants to prosperity and welfare. Preaching that people who have another belief must be fought, or must be converted by all means, means that one is scared: there simply MUST be one concrete and tangible truth with all rules and regulations attached to it, otherwise earth (and the preacher / converter!) will end in hell. I don't hesitate to say that the Liberal truth is also one of many truths, although I love the heritage of Goethe, Spinoza and Kant.

This is a view, a vision, and one cannot do more than living according to this view as much as possible, although emotions often challenge you. I hope and trust that eventually Reason will win.

One of today's questions

Tomorrow’s program tells us that we’ll have a sailing trip with my brother. There will be windforce 4 and a reasonable chance of some rain. We are not sure whether Janine and Menno will join us, we decide that I think this evening. The school will take its normal course again. I just have sent an e-mail to a student whose dissertation concept was awful, I’m afraid that he will require very close guidance, according to the famous 8—20 rule: 20% of all cases ask for 80% of time and attention. He hasn’t been guided up to now by me and luckily these cases are rare. His study pace is slow because since 2 years we have team-dissertations: groups of students study like consultants company problems for which they design a solution, a very successful formula; the only disadvantage is that it’s not individual, but individual contributions within the team are weighed and included in the final assessment. A problem is also that there must be sufficient co-operating companies, and that the cases are sufficiently serious to reach a dissertation’s level.

Something else: last time I asserted that when you ask an Afghanistan opium-growing farmer if growing opium is in accordance with Islam, he would answer that such a question wouldn’t suit me, because the Western world causes much more problems than he does with his job. I gave it a second thought and I think I have to adjust this: probably the farmer would take his life and world as it is, without such “Western” questions, even if he could read and follows the news. So many people everywhere in the world take everything as it is. They follow the tradition of their cultures and clans, and when these traditions have been weakened or are threatened by Western influences, there is always the daily struggle for food and living which will be done by means that in our eyes are less moral or objectionable.

Many hundreds of thousands of these people have immigrated into Europe, or try to immigrate. Of course, they bring with them their traditions and leaders who try to keep them on the right track, which is often contrary to the Western right track which they often consider to be sinful and despicable. Their world of views and truths are often diametrically opposed to values we find important: women and men treated equally, own choices in marriage and education, freedom of speech, variation in clothing, loose family bonds, rewards for achievement and not for kinship or tradition-adherence, etc. etc. Ten years ago I was very surprised by what I saw as arrogance, the way some of their leaders preached hatred against Western society, at the same time receiving social welfare benefits. I thought: “Why are you here then?”, a very obvious question in Western eyes. In one of my lectures I showed in my ignorance a portrait of their prophet in a Powerpoint presentation, the same week I got reprimanded by a Muslim colleague because Muslim students had complained to him. I got flabbergasted because female teachers refused to shake hands with men (parents, colleagues) because their faith forbade them to do so, and a Muslim priest (imam) refused to shake hands with a Minister (State Secretary) visiting their mosque. I asked myself if Muslim ministers would visit Christian churches in a Muslim country, even our queen did so once and she wisely avoided trying to shake hands with the mosque leaders. In a TV program a Muslim leader refused to sit at an interview table together with seven other partners in a debate, because one of them had a glass of wine before him. His son, also a Dutch “celebrity” walked away from a program because one lady’s skirt was too short according to him.

I just read a wise article in my paper which brings me back to my rational senses. It says: let’s stop arguing and debating about how Muslims should adjust themselves to our values. Don’t pay attention to it anymore. In another newspaper there was an article discussing an American philosopher, Lee Harris, who has a more pessimistic view, he is right when he says that our values, based on philosophies by people such as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Voltaire etc. is very rare in the world. Only a few countries have succeeded in overcoming the all-embracing power of tradition, clan and family, trying to defend themselves with all thinkable means. In our laws and legislation “tolerance” is a main virtue, in most other countries it means weakness.

The way Muslim groups and leaders link their values and views to their fait is highly questionable. Many Muslims adhere to tolerance, reward according to achievement, respectful treatment of everybody, etc. but most of them live in the U.S.A. or have positions requiring high education in Europe, they are only a small minority, often considered as non-Muslims by their own brethren (sisters don’t have a say). We in Holland have a Muslim Minister and many Muslims are in local or regional governments.

After reading and thinking, I was left in confusion, there are still many questions, or maybe one or two very big questions, left to be answered.