Month: February 2020

There is one difference between the road trip and life trip. You can’t reverse the life trip. Whichever decision you make, you need to stick with it. There is no way back, even if it was not you, but the (mis)fortune making the decisions – and I mean things like dying of the loved ones or life threatening illnesses.

There are also other life changing events, which we can read about thanks to the internet. There are counselling sites, scientific sites, insurance companies sites … and you just wonder. Are all those people concerned about my life changing event?

Well, not exactly. Everyone is (and should be) concerned about his/her own survival, especially if he/she has some dependents. But not everyone knows, what you need without asking questions. Nowadays all counseling sites presume you look for some counselling, scientific sites may presume, that you know some basics and insurances just want to insure you for whatever can happen.

In a way, it’s like nearing the crossing, making your decisions where to go and all passengers giving you their own advice, how you should behave – turn left, right, slow down, accelerate … the situation prone to a disaster.

I was once diagnosed with quickly growing Non-Hodgkin B-cell Lymphoma. At the time I was living in England, which was not my home country. I’ve read a lot about the illness on the internet. Also the comments, not realizing, that chemotherapy is just a type of the therapy. Everyone’s chemotherapy then depends on the type of the cancer, on the stage of the cancer and maybe on some other factors too. I remember I was fed up with the wording the doctors used – lymph nodes – which – being a foreigner – I didn’t connect to “cancer”. I even complained …

15 years later I’m still alive. I have three great kids, I was able to know my grand kids too, for which I’m grateful, on the other hand I needed to sign the divorce, for which I’m not so grateful. But as stated at the beginning – there is no way back in the life, so I will live my life as long as I’ll be able too. With all my memories – good or bad – from the past.

I tend to compare the life to the road trip.

On both we encounter a number of intersections. Then, on each of them we (or our brain) take into the account the Past and we (or our brain) make our decisions for the Future accordingly to our up to date experiences, whether conscious or unconscious, stored in our “data-bank” in the brain.

And now it becomes interesting.

According to Vera.F.Birkenbihl, our conscious experiences on a line would make 15 mm, compared to 11 km unconscious. As we’ve been born to different parents in different countries, where we’ve been attending different schools, learned some stuff, but also wasted a lot of our potential through the process called “education”, lived through different epochs, we have various experiences. Even two people being on the same event may have different memories, depending on the age, past experiences, living conditions … etc.

There is a lot of Vera F.Birkenbihl’s lectures on youtube which I sincerely recommend. For example “Gedächtnisprobleme im Alltag sind lösbar”.

I like the way she explains, that “misplacing” (keys, phone, glasses … whatever is important to us) has nothing to do with “forgetfulness”. We just need to pay more attention to what we are doing, slow down, be conscious or “present in the moment” when placing the keys, phone, glasses … or taking care of our priorities. Thus – imho – we can be better off than living on “autopilot”.

Enjoy!

Learning – especially if we want to learn 😉 – is enriching. Also one of the ways to prevent or at least postpone Alzheimer or other age related illnesses.