Author: Christiaan van Gaal

Day 2482, don’t understand.

Daily picture, Poetry

I hear people say that the world is in a bad place

and then I feel so left out

no one has ever told me where the red line is

where the world is good on this side

and bad on the other

Is there an objective way to determine if we live in a bad time and that there were good times in the past? There are bad things that we can agree on; if you have two answers right from the ten questions they asked you, you did poorly, but you can’t say that that pizza is bad because you didn’t like the taste, someone else might love it. There are, of course, exceptions, a pizza with a layer of sand is probably universally bad, and Hitler also falls in that category but if you talk about Trump, for instance, is he universally bad? I personally don’t like what he does, but he has not murdered millions of people as Hitler did, and he is probably nice to his wife and children. He didn’t step out of the womb and thought: “now I gonna be an asshole.”  His genes might have paved the way for that role, and his surroundings gave him little chance to adopt a more… cherishing role in life.

As far as I can see, people call each other evil because they use their own personal standards and not a more universal one. This is why I don’t understand why people say that we live in bad times. Compared to what? The past is gone, and we don’t know how those people felt, lived and thought especially if they could compare there lives with ours. We now live much healthier and have much more comfort than even 50 years ago, most of us would not last in those times, especially woman and minorities. There is no reason not to know that we humans are not so good at remembering the past, our own past or that of the country we live in.

 

 

 

Day 2480, joyous.

aphorism, Daily picture

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

173 Laughing and smiling. -The more joyous and self-assured his spirit becomes, the more a person forgets how to laugh loudly; by contrast, a spiritual smile continually wells up from within him, a sign of his astonishment at the countless concealed charms of a good existence.

Day 2477, at work

Day's pictures, Video

This is a window I work on now. It is from a church built in 1936 that got partially burned down 2 years ago. They will replace most of the old windows with new, better isolated ones, but my task is to preserve 3 of the original windows. In the two little videos below, you can see how I put in the glass panes, something I learned not so long ago when I started working here. It is satisfying work to preserve something that was almost given up.  

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Day 2475, pipe dreams.

Daily picture

My resolution last year was to write more constructively. I want to write a book, but I have difficulty focusing on one goal. Instead, I get distracted fast and follow many small ideas while never following one to the end or stringing them together.

I also struggle with doubt. I doubt my ability to learn how to write, and I doubt my message.

I know I have to be patient. I sometimes write longer pieces on my blog and re-read them once or twice before posting it, but I always notice many more mistakes when I re-read it a couple of days later. I also know that it is important to plan ahead and not, as I do, just write what comes up and see where it ends. Anyone that writes knows that it is not easy to delete an hour’s worth of work when you know it’s going in the wrong direction or nowhere.

But writing is one thing. In a couple of years, you can just tell your writing program what you want the text to be about, and it does it for you as GPT-3 does now already in a certain way. My biggest problem is that I want to write about life, and not just in a cold way how I see it but in a way that you can get some meaning out of it. I struggle with the thought that for thousands of years, people have written about life and what it all means, and though we have come a long way in understanding it in the sense that life for more people is now much better than it was 3000 years ago, we still have not come closer to a possible answer. Thousand of really smart people have written and preached about it, but with little effect besides some more tolerance for each other’s differences. After all, we don’t burn our witches anymore with fire but on social media, and we also no longer advertise the slave markets as they did before. Now you can at least say that you are free no matter where you come from.

I feel like a musician who hears a cool tune in his head but is unsure if he has heard it before or if he has the time to learn a musical instrument to let others hear this song so the listener can decide the value of it.