What if you were given a year and a half off, with a roof over your head, food in your fridge, but you were not allowed to make any money, or leave the country.

Imagine. Would you sleep in and enjoy not having to get up early in the morning? But that gets old right? Or would you work out, to get super fit? But you can’t work out all day every day…

It’s like a never ending COVID lock down, but this time, you’re the only one in it. Those rules don’t apply to anyone else. No, the people around you move on with their lives, they go to work and raise their families.

This is what happened to me.

The first couple of months volunteerwork seemed like a useful way to spend my days. YouTube and Netflix filled the evening, until I went to bed. But deep down inside I was hungry for more. Except, I didn’t have any money, so going for dinner and a movie wasn’t an option.

To me, this time that was given to me, was a curse. I had to wait for yet another year before I could finally start living. Because living is whatever happens after you have a place of your own and a job, at least, that’s what I thought.

But then I spoke to my therapist and he’s like: you need something that tickles your mind. What interests you, what do you really care about? Find out what it is and write about it.

This is when my search really started.

I had been writing all my life, diary entries, school papers, I even had my own blog, which, except for a few friends and acquaintances, no one read. So that was safe ground. But now I had a new challenge: write a piece that would generate some real traffic, before the year and a half were over. And since the time I was given started two months ago, I have one year, three months and nineteen days left. Starting today.

A few years after I returned from the US, I got the unsettling feeling I was doing something wrong. Nothing went the way I wanted it to. I wasn’t so much on a quest to my self proclaimed ‘rest of my life’, but on a quest to finding myself it seemed. I moved around so much, I didn’t understand people anymore and they didn’t understand me. I was a foreigner in my own country. I didn’t belong anywhere. So I saw a psychic and she said: ‘You have to stop lying’, and by that she meant ‘Start telling the truth about how you feel’. Wow, how do I feel?

Today five years ago I started this blog. So I’m happy to announce it has reached people from Holland to the US and from China to the UK. On an annual basis it had 900 views and 305 unique visitors. It is a work in progress, but who knows where it will be in another five years.

Check out thesurfoflife.com

‘Life is a series of ups and downs’ – Impact Theory (Tom Bilyeu)

[Read after you have read Bamboo tree and The monkeys up in the trees]

When I returned from the US in 2018, my old friends had all moved on with their lives. I was 35 and what did I do, since I was not raising kids or making a career? I joined Tinder Gold, because sure, that was the solution to my existential questions. But soon my naive little self found out it wasn’t easy to find a man without an ex-wife, kids, or fear of commitment. With an education, a job and hair on his head. I thought these were the basics (but they turned out to be the exceptions to the rule). And listen, Holland is not a tropical resort, so that one week a year you went scuba diving on de Maledives or kitesurfing in Brazil with your shirt off says nothing about who you are. So you had fun that one time, but what do you do the rest of the year on a Tuesday night? So much for Tinder.

In the years that followed, I took a vacation, a vacation from life, during which I learned valuable lessons, like: ‘God turns you into a wife first and then you’ll meet a man’. Or ‘You shouldn’t compare yourself to other people. Their success is not a reflection of your failure’.

My coach called me a bamboo tree once. Which I found peculiar at the time, but did you know it takes five years to grow, years underneath the surface and then up to 30 meters in just a few weeks?

[A compilation of thoughts: June – September 2023]

I’d like to believe that when I do the right thing, I can make something of my life. I meet people who are unemployed knowing they’ll never work again. Sick, knowing that they will die young. In their case I can understand one digs deep into the Bible, holds on to mindfulness or practices meditation as if it were a religion, because that’s all there is left. But I’d like to believe there is more.

A friend recently said to me: There are not many people our age who have to wonder whether life can be made or not. To be honest, I believe in what Oprah calls co-creation and Lao Tzu called Wu Wei. I call it ‘The Surf of Life’. Going with the flow of life’s waves. Don’t try to resist. Work with the waves, so you can ride them. 

I miss the nineties though, when the sky was the limit and movies like Jerry McGuire and Romeo + Juliet still moved me. When life was simple. I hadn’t seen the world and marveled at the Twin Towers or the Burj al Arab yet. I was nobody and still had to become someone.

But today, twenty plus years later, life is simple once again. 

I promised myself to be more thankful the other day. Who gets to go to the movies in the middle of the day? There art thou happy. Who gets to still see their parents every day? There art thou happy. Who doesn’t have to go to work every day, but still gets a paycheck at the end of the month? There art thou lucky. Right? 

Well, don’t get too excited. It’s still raining out, in the middle of Summer. 

There’s your business, other people’s business and the Universe’s business. Anything happening in another’s life is their business. Anything affecting the world and its complexity is the Universe’s. Mind your own business, it’s the only thing you have control over in life.

It’s easy to celebrate and congratulate yourself when life treats you kind. But when the going gets tough, can you still cheer yourself on? Life has been no picknick over the past ten years. But life is the best school. Some things you simply can’t learn from books, you have to experience them.

I am on a mission far beyond earning a living and raising a family. Forget about living happily ever after. All that is so once upon a time. I am a bamboo plant. Slowly growing under the surface. Question is: will I grow sky high one day?

‘My Leonardo’ is not one guy forever, he’s a million guys in a lifetime. I have travelled the world and lived in different places, therefore I have met many men. Some I remember, others were just passing through, because people come and go.

For a while I was the one night stand, the rebound, the friend with benefits. But is that who I want to be? They all want to hook up at five in the morning, but I’m still home alone on Saturday night.

‘It’s not who you want to spend Friday night with, but who you want to spend all day Saturday with’. – No strings attached

Also read [Finding Leonardo]