When Einstein was asked to explain his theory of relativity in simple terms he said: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
I love this quote, because it applies to just about every walk of life. We tend to think our perspective is the truth. But what it actually is, is just our perspective.
The other day I read a beautiful story, told by a lady that is providing outdoor adventure camps for teens. Every evening they have this culture of sitting together at the campfire and talking about the day and their personal experience.
One evening a kid said, that her tent mate said something hurtful, a loose comment that caused pain. The lady then walked to her tent and brought a tube of toothpaste with her. She squeezed the tube and out came a little bit of toothpaste. Then she demonstrated that it was nearly impossible to get the toothpaste back into the tube.
The renowned German Stretta Music, well known specialist and a worldwide leading online store in sheet music asked me for an interview. What an honor and privilege for me to give some of my lousy ideas and to manipulate interested folks towards being major bassoon fans! :o)
Here some parts of this interview. I hope it makes you smile here and there! I had the greatest fun answering :o) Please find the whole article HERE.
With so much love,
Anselma
In the eastern way of thinking, we are better off in life when we stay away from extremes.
I have to admit that I initially did have trouble grasping this.
First, because in many cases only extremes lead to progress.
Change is hard. Think practicing more or eating less.
We do have habits and they get a life of themselves and don’t want to be eliminated. Only if it gets really bad, only if we experience an extreme, we are motivated enough to move our butts and invest into making progress.
When I was in school, we were forced to write about super boring stuff. Our assignments were something like this:
How do you interpret the first two lines of this experimental poem by the experimental postmodern existentialist Marc Peeperboozle (and it followed some nonsensical or absurd text no one would ever read voluntarily).
Of course – you guessed it – I never wrote what we were asked to.
Instead, I wrote what I was thinking because, hej THAT’S what writing is all about. Expressing the heart, sharing ideas and cultivating creativity. And sometimes calling a spade a spade.
When I was a kid, I was quite a lousy violin player. People kept telling me how talented I was, but at times this made me feeling really bad. My bad conscience grew bigger and bigger because I was only practicing once a week (right before the lesson!). It almost felt like a betrayal of some sort. I got laurels without making much of an effort.
When I was a kid people kept telling me that I would be talented. Of course, I liked that. Who would not? And I did more of what I seemed to be talented in, clever little me :o)
Pawlow’s dog was fully alive in me: Make music, get some cookies.
When I got older something started to shift. Suddenly – to my disliking – the label “talented” somehow faded. All of the sudden it was not enough any more to be talented. That was too bad!
What increasingly counted was something not so cozy: WORK.
I kind of resisted this. And I had to put in more and more effort to keep the glorious myth of a talented girl alive.
My epiphany really struck when I talked to a Russian piano teacher.
He told me: “In Russia it is simple: the one who practices most is the most talented.”
Some years back, a friend asked me if I wanted to help translating some Japanese Haikus by the famous buddhist master teacher Daisaku Ikeda into German. These were small poems, each conveying a gem of wisdom, beauty or philosophy.
I was not sure if I was the right person for the job. Having been in danger of getting kicked out of school – believe it or not – for almost 8 years of Gymnasium because of bad spelling. I was a lousy student at school that struggled in many subjects, German being the worst.
My brain was simply not wired for this type of school. Repeating after others has never been my thing…
There is this story of a large shipping company. Their most important ship stopped working, the engine could not be turned on.
The company gathered all the technical experts to fix the engine but nothing seemed to work. The technicians could not repair the engine.
Finally they brought in an old man who was no expert, not even an engineer. But he had a small repair shop in town where he fixed anything from a broken egg timer to trucks.
He looked at the ship’s engine, turned one little wheel and then successfully started it. He had fixed the engine in 2 minutes.
There is this fabulous story of Franklin D. Rosevelt. As the president of the United States, he had to endure endless receptions that seemed to steal his precious life time.
What he could stand the least was the feeling that everything was very formal – but empty. Waxy faces, fake smiles and huge amounts of meaningless phrases.
It bothered him that very rarely anybody in the political circus would do what a genuine person does: really listen.
Listening after all gives birth to empathy, which is the one and foremost quality of an impeccable human being.
Listening with open ears and an open heart brings the best out of us.
