Grateful for the taxi to Paris!

Grateful for the Taxi to Paris!

What am I grateful for? Pffff... where do I begin? In my previous blogs, I have extensively discussed gratitude and how being grateful can positively contribute to everyone's mental, physical, and spiritual health. It reduces complaints related to stress, burnout, relationship problems, grief, or anything else. This has been scientifically proven and personally experienced in my own practice and life. Life is a journey! Along the way, during my parents' journey, I joined. Or maybe you could better say I stepped out of the dark and cramped world of my mother's womb. Heading towards an unknown future for me.

Like almost everyone, I was mainly dependent on my parents during the first years of my life. A very defining period in which I received much love but also had a very protective upbringing. An upbringing so restrictive at times that it was noticeable to the outside world. This led to me being bullied at school and by children on the street, which resulted in insecurity and introverted behavior from me, further fueling the bullies. Painful moments of despair, loneliness, and helplessness, moments when I wanted to disappear into the ground, were unavoidable. What I could do, however, was influence how I dealt with it! And I did that by staying true to myself, increasingly choosing my own path. And that was certainly not always the same path my parents wanted to take, but there are many roads to Paris, the city of love! Because everything my parents and I did was out of love, love for me as their son and love for myself! Or was it not out of love but out of fear?

More about the two basic emotions, fear and love, in another blog later. Today, in this final blog about gratitude, I want to reflect on what gratitude means to me.

After my childhood years, I made many stops, transfers and detours during my further journey. To this day, I have been able to undertake many interesting activities where I could continuously challenge and develop myself and others. I have been able to work with a great diversity of people, our strength lies in the collective. And I have been able to have relationships to this day where I could give and receive love. The greatest love, however, is my son, who is now embarking on his own journey. Many experiences have made me a richer person, with more insight into who I am. Sometimes quite confrontational but certainly educational to discover this, often at a later stage. It seems that the older I get, the more aware I become. And as I consciously look back on the journey so far, I see that I have actually lived quite often unconsciously consciously. I have been good to myself (and no, that is not selfish), made choices that were not always pleasant, even for others. I have also often gone with the flow of life, relied on my own intuition, and always wanted to keep developing myself. Through a positive attitude towards life, a life purpose, and belief in myself and a greater 'something' that connects us, I believe my journey is going well. Am I finished learning? Never, not even at the end of this journey.

My gratitude lies in all the experiences, positive and less positive, that I have encountered during my journey. Everything happens for a reason and is inseparably connected to a greater whole for me. It may sound vague, and sometimes it is for me too. But I no longer want or need to explain everything; my feeling tells me it is so. A well-known expression is, 'Seeing is believing'; I have turned it into 'Believing first, then we'll see.' I want to trust more and more in my internal compass, my feelings, my intuition. From reason to feeling, from head to heart! Up here in my head is everything that has been programmed in my youth and afterwards, conditioning by my environment and myself. I experience reason as the hard drive of a computer and it is nothing more than a fleshy tool, a translation machine, to help (survive) in this earthly life. In our heart and body lies my feeling, my inner knowing that is connected to the cloud, the collective consciousness, God, the Universe, or whatever you want to call it. I am so grateful to become increasingly aware of this and to feel it as well.

During 'my journey,' I have also traveled a lot. I have been able to visit more than 60 countries around the world: Venezuela, Colombia, Iran, Lebanon, India, Iceland, Kenya, Tanzania, and so on. Each country with its own customs, traditions, and beauties. 'We just have one world, but we live in different ones!' Through these experiences, I have started to look at the world very differently; I can, for example, put things into perspective much better. It is interesting to see how people everywhere deal differently with faith, death, or other aspects of life. But what is the truth, what is right, what is wrong? Or are there multiple truths, is there no right or wrong? Why, for example, are we informed about the same topic in different ways by the media worldwide? I am convinced that you can view everything in life from many more perspectives than we do. Everyone views everything from their own perspective, and for that person, it is their truth, their right or wrong, their world of experience. If we were more open to expanding our own world of experience, showed more respect for each other's opinions, more empathy, and willingness to change, the world would look much more harmonious.

I also regularly get confronted with my own world of experience. Some time ago, I was in a taxi and had a conversation with the driver. A month earlier, he had the opportunity to drive from The Hague to Paris. Besides being a profitable taxi ride, the driver was so enthusiastic and proud of his experience of being in Paris. That he drove his car past the Eiffel Tower, along the Champs-Elysées, and by the Arc de Triomphe, his eyes were shining, and he stumbled over his words out of joy. It was the journey of his life. He was so grateful, grateful to have gone to Paris by taxi. This story and how the man could not stop talking about it deeply impressed me. I was absorbed into his world of experience. It made me realize once again how good I have it, that what is normal for me does not have to be normal for others. The gratitude and positive energy of this taxi driver found their way into my world of experience, allowing me to feel an immense sense of gratitude as well.

But even now, as I write this blog, I get that feeling of gratitude again. Grateful for everything I have experienced during my journey, grateful for the insights I gain, grateful for the means that make these journeys possible, grateful for... At the same time, gratitude for me also lies in the small everyday things. That I have the time and inspiration to write this blog, in an inspiring environment, with a nice coffee and the sun shining in. Gratitude is in everything! It is certainly not always easy, but practice makes perfect. The more and longer you focus on the positive things in your life in silence, the more intense the feeling. The feeling of positive energy that flows through your entire body. This positive energy helps, helps you and me to live with more health and joy. What are you grateful for?