Location independence

First posted on Instagram this part had to be heavily edited. I have laeft it as it was posted as I think that if I’d go back to re-edit the original I will tangle myself into a pretty nasty web and spend too much time for little return. If you are super super super interested of hearing the full story, send me a message and I’ll see what can be done. Much love. /TTV

Have you heard the story about the man who woke up in a small boat in the middle of the ocean? He had no idea of where he was or how he got there but decided it was not an ideal place to be. With no land in sight nothing but the sun to give him a sense of direction he figured since that thing seemed to know where it was going he might as well follow it. He began to row in hope the sun would lead him to land, or as he put it “anywhere else but here”. It was a relentless race in hope to see land on the horizon by dusk but as the sun set on the first day and with no sign of land in sight he second guessed his decision and feared he had gone in the wrong direction. To him, where he was now looked very much the same as where he had started. Still in doubt and with a morsel of regret he prepared a space to rest for the night. He was awoken from his sleep by heavy rains that battered his skiff but he managed to make a shelter to protect him from getting wet. In the morning he saw that the rain had brought fresh water to quench his thirst. “Good” he thought “with this water I can row even harder than I did yesterday and make up for my mistake of going the wrong way”. He turned the boat around and rowed with double the strength as the day before but when evening came and he found nothing but the same vastness of water surrounding him. Once again he was filled with doubt of where he was supposed to go and the stress kept him awake long into the night. When he woke on the third day the sun was already high in the sky and the man was ready to curse it for its confident strut, seemingly knowing which way to go but refusing to share. Bewildered he looked at his surroundings for other signs but all he saw were the same frustrating dance of ripples on the water as always, stretching out to infinity. “Everywhere looks the same” he thought in hopelessness “I guess I just have to keep on going, anywhere else is better than here”. Determined to reach “anywhere”, which he came to imagine contained at least a little piece of land. As he kept rowing the piece of land grew in his mind and soon his vision of where to go had changed into “somewhere”. 

This man kept rowing for many days driven by the ever clearer idea somewhere was land hiding behind the the horizon. When rain fell he drank, when fish bit his lines he ate, when night came he rested and at any other time he continued his mission to get somewhere. Not once did he waste time by diving off the boat and feel the pressure of water caress his body. Not once did he miss any sleep by staying awake and witness the constellations parade their myths to his tired eyes. Not once did he let go of his vision that somewhere was better than here. With no means to measure his progress he instead kept track of time by measuring the length of his beard as it grew longer and it stressed him out, reminding him he wasn’t getting any younger in the process. 

Now, originally this story is much longer but since you’re probably busy swiping up the Instascreen we better not keep our unidentified cast away rowing much longer. We could admittedly allow him to find a safe harbor and say that all his hard work paid off but since this is a person who apparently is unhappy with where he is it is likely that this discontentment will continue even when he finds land, which would make the story even longer, and more complicated. So let’s make it a happy ending and say that he lost one of his oars, the rain began to miss his skiff and his shelter was blown away by a storm. 

After curses and cries of despair our sailor found himself exhausted laying on his back on the deck of the boat feeling helpless without any means to get somewhere he thought would be a nice place to be. The fact that his initial intention to get “anywhere else but here” is by definition impossible had not crossed his mind yet. According to him each day had been a chance to better his situation and although his destination was really nothing but an uncertainty it had comforted his motives and convinced him that the struggle was worth it. It wasn’t until he came to notice how the sky had become isolated from the sea from where he laid that he truly felt that he had no idea where he was. With the water screened from his view he realized that at that very moment he could not be certain if he was on land or still at sea, all he knew was the sky above him. He chuckled, slightly perplexed: “Right now, I could be anywhere” and with that his vision of somewhere that all this time had been so far away arrived to be as real as the clouds above, intangible but definitely existing in that moment. For so long had he relied on his belief as motivation to stay alive but from where he now laid he could clearly see that the truth was rather that the fact that he was alive was what had created the belief. 

And that is the story of the man who found his place in the world. There is a lot more to the story but perhaps we’ll come back to that at a later point, for now let’s just clean up some of these seemingly ridiculous allegories so we can go on with our day. I am not saying that it is a bad idea to start rowing towards a goal but if we do choose to chase the horizon being able to measure and notice our progress will make the project so much more rewarding. If we can stop and appreciate where we are, not because of what we have accomplished to get there but simply for what is there we might come to find that the chase is of our own choosing and is most often driven by the imaginations we also know as: hope, expectation and belief.

Don’t panic, we are all drifting on that sea where we have no idea of what lies ahead. Perhaps it looks like not all of us drift as aimlessly as some others but don’t think for a second that the person next to you is any wiser of where they are going or how they will get there just because they all of a sudden started to row, that still doesn’t make them the sun. It is true though that wisdom can be attained from that which was and from that which is but it is yet to come from that which has not yet been. Just make sure that you pick up on it when you come across it, whether drifting or rowing and let that be your intention of why you do what you do. 

It doesn’t matter where you are as long as you can allow yourself to be there.