Everybody can sing...

I am back in Arad, my hometown, for a few days. I sit in my parked car, while talking on the phone and observing the world go by. Two people catch my attention.

A homeless man, a few meters in front of me, sitting on the sidewalk and reaching into a pond on the street to wash his hands and arms. From where I am, I can see the grey dirty water glittering under the hot August sun. I turn my head away. What a miserable condition…

A girl passes by on the sidewalk: blonde hair, incredibly short and tight pants, strident make-up, golden flip-flops. I instantly recognize what we’d call here a “pitipoanca” - an untranslatable derisive term. I know there’s likely not much about her besides her appearance… She looks at the homeless guy and enters a store.

I finish my phone conversation and go to retrieve some cash. As I exit the bank, the girl comes out of the nearby grocery store with a bottle of water. She goes to the homeless man, talks to him, and then starts pouring water so he can now clean his feet.

I am humbled.

I once read about three of the explorers that attempted to go to the South Pole. Very different people and approaches:

Shackleton - although tried several times, he never reached the south pole in his life. at least once he could have made it but did not want to risk. in fact, he never lost anybody from his crew in all his trips.

Scott - he set up his base camp more to the north than initially planned. he added one man more to the expedition without increasing supplies. he continued to the south pole even if he realized that he can afford no margin of error on the return trip. he died on the way back together with all the members of his crew.

Amundsen - he planned throughly the expedition. studied both Shackleton’s earlier attempts and innuit techniques. got to the south pole and returned back safe with his entire crew. in fact, some of the crew even gained weight during the return trip. 

(scavenged from the blog I was keeping while at the University of Lugano)

It’s 4.46 am and I can’t sleep. This has been the most terrible jet-lag I’ve ever experienced. Maybe the fact that my trip from Los Angeles to Bern took about 48 hours door to door, time in which I couldn’t get too much decent sleep is part of the reason I slept the entire first day and stood awake the entire first night. This second night was better: I slept until 3am, but now I am awake again.

So what to do? I started by browsing a little bit Facebook… and then I decided to resurrect my blog.

One of the reasons why I decided to restart writing is the danger of making my way through the information age by “liking” (and more recently “plusing”) links to funny videos, and random pictures of happy people out of any context. The most creative thing I’ve been writing in a long time are short aphorisms and ideas that rarely go beyond a few sentences. In an age where we are all almost as literate as Dostoievsky (this might be pushing it, but it would be interesting to compare the number of words the great russian read in his lifetime with the number of words an average person has read nowadays) it is a pity that our creative output is sometimes limited to 140 characters. 

Sure my essays will never be as well-written as the ones of Fyodor but then again, I don’t even aim there, so that’s ok with me.

This reminds me of a scene in the Johannesburg airport. I was flying back to Europe. The lady that was checking my passport was singing while browsing it. I told her “you have a good voice”. She laughed at me and said, “no I don’t have a good voice but i like to sing. In fact there is something special about our culture here in South Africa that you should know - we always sing: be it at a wedding, a funeral, a party, or in any other circumstance. Sure, there are many people that can sing beautifully, and some of them make a career out of it. Not everybody can make a living singing, but everybody can sing while living”. I’ll never forget that lady - she expressed so well my perspective on music. And on creativity in general.

Now, one condition for becoming more creative is being able to find the time to do it. And this might mean, reading and following less of the other people’s output and closing your eyes to many things that go around you so you can dedicate time to be creative yourself. But I think it’s worth it.

If you decide not to read my musings, in order to write your own, I’ll not hold it against you.