How many tears does a butterfly cry when summer is over?

Cry Baby!

Questions as a way to discover and change the World

Questions are a way of obtaining knowledge. Being a person with a wide range of more or less shallow knowledge rather than a very specialist expertise in one field (i.e. a generalist) questions are ideal for me to find out things about other people and learn from them. I get to engage people in a conversation and learn from them at the same time. However, humility is a crucial condition for this to work out of course. Pride prevents you from asking questions and learning from others. Acquiring knowledge by asking questions also requires one to be a peace with oneself and the world. If one is not at peace but feels the urge to assert oneself over ones surrounding - for example by telling others how something works, rather than asking them about it - then it is very hard to find good questions to ask and to be successful in learning this way.

Asking questions is also a very important trait for working in community development as I want to do. The danger for community development is to approach it like a teacher - to lecture people about what one thinks is the right way to run a community and then be surprised about the lack of enthusiasm. What should rather happen is that one enables a community to realise its potential and maybe go a bit beyond that. Asking questions to the members of a community is a crucial way to explore their perception of reality. At the same time, the process of thinking about the question might increase the consciousness about the reality around us. That opening can then be used to engage people more in their community and to increase overall community participation.

Therefore, I have to learn to ask the right questions and not being afraid of asking them.

Who paints the grass green every morning before dawn?

Warum gibt es Schoenheit - Why is there beauty?

Finding good questions is hard work I realized today. It is a philosophical task to find questions you do not know the answer to. Questions which make people stop in their walk and think "I had never really thought about that." Questions which strike you as much as the impossibly floating rocks of Magritte. Children, philosophers and artists are the ones who usually ask the best questions. Why all this fuss about questions? Questions dare the mind to move, questions ask for something and we might have to go out of our way to get it. The path is the goal and not the answer is the important process here but the act of searching for it. That creates mental awakeness and consciousness of the world we live in and the choices we make to maintain it as it is. I am currently in a state in which I have a lot of problems with what is going on around me but cannot confidently say how it all should be improved. In fact, maybe it could not be improved at all. That is what I want to find out and questions are the tool of my pursuit.

Question of the Day

Asking Questions - is that not the best way to intellectually and morally survive in this world? Only as long as we do not have to answer them though.

Here is my question of the day: What would make one warthog think it is better than the next warthog?

Beyond the Jesus-Way

I am here in Canada since 2002 and usually I am pretty adabtable person. Yet, since I am working, my cynicism about this country and its people is becoming worse and worse. Riding the bus I cannot help but think that people here are extremely vain and only interested in material things and neurotically afraid of even considering talking to the person next to them. My authoritarian side says they should all be forced to be more open minded towards the people around them, less interested in material things and more in their spiritual well being. But of course it is easier to leave things as they are in this democratic society and complain about the decay of morals. Reading Mahfouz' "Children of the Alley" in which he describes humanity's spiritual journey from Adam and Eve onwards, I come to think that people in undemocratic societies were not necessarily less happy and something in me says that they might have had more dignity. But probably they would have been just as egoistic and materialistic as the people around me now. I guess the communist experiment went down to prove just that.

Now the trick is that I am sure some of the people around me have similar thoughts. If only I could know what they are thinking I would see that they are also concerned about their fellow humans and their spiritual growth. How to know that though? I guess I am trying to smile to people around me, to start conversations but it's pretty fruitless for sure. And all this thinking makes me go crazy - I guess I am thinking too much about the people around me. Tell me - am I crazy?

Well, the thing is that I want to work as a community developer and my feeling is that I should be a lot more at peace with all the different types of people which are hopping around. A community developer should help people help themselves to reach whatever goal they determine to be worthwhile. If that happens to be the plasma TV bigger than their very big and wobbely belly so be it. That's what a community developer should be able to do. I however, am very judgemental and underneath a facade of liberalism believe that I really got it all right and everybody else is wrong. More like a teacher than a community developer. But I want to be anything but a teacher. Please tell me: how can I find peace with myself and everyone around me? How can I accept that there's as many ways to happiness as there are people? Here again lies trouble - I do not think the majority of humans TRULY accept everyone around them as equal in every way. So why do I want to be special again and accept everyone as equal - even those who do not grant the same generosity to their fellow humans. I do not like holding the other cheek after the first slap and I know how impossible it is to love one's enemies. The Jesus-way is not sustainable because it makes Man indulge in their victimhood and suffering and it does not give them pride in themselves. It does not teach them how to walk upright and be beautiful. In fact the only way Christianity can imagine humans living together in peace is if everyone forsakes their pride and walks in humility. What a dull world. What we need is a world where we all can live in pride yet also duly respect each other.

Hello World

Finally I am taking a step out into the open world by creating a blog. It's a daring venture I think. Why am I starting a blog? Too improve my communication with friends. Too say hello world here I come. There's so many thoughts in my head I think I will go crazy if I do not let them out, one of those muttering hermits, you know. I want to hear what other people think about these thoughts, I want them to tell me whether I am crazy or what. Reality check so to say. Yes, I am taking this rather serious. I am German you see.
Cheers, mr T