COLUMN JUST PLAYING AROUND
Sometimes you need to step at your own pace. With my dear friend Rachael we plan “F***-All Days”. Let me give you an example.
We had tickets to the concert of Patti Smith in Paradiso, Amsterdam. We were delighted to get hold of them. So we said we would plan a whole day of just doing whatever comes to mind. Be creative, and playful, and have no agenda. We started at noon with drinks on the Haarlemmerplein and got tattoos on the Haarlemmerstraat: the three crossing symbolizing Amsterdam, a gift of Who is Amsterdam. That took a couple of hours and we wanted to do a lot more spontaneous acts. I came up with the idea to buy new outfits – and so we did. We both bought the same trousers and shirts, kept them on, and went twinning downtown.
More beverages on the way to the venue. Patti was fab. My friend even bought me an autographed book of hers. After the concert, we visited different bars and we ended up after midnight in the only Chinese restaurant still open. Uber brought the both of us home. Memories were made – we had a blast.
A very good friend of mine – Erik from Slovenia – once asked me: “Do you flow through time, or does time flow through you”. A beautiful philosophical question. My vision is life is quite simple: time flows through me. If you are willing to mentally come to a standstill, opportunities (people, ideas, experiences) just pop up. Grab them if it feels right.
When you are young, the urge to move through life is bigger – you want to manifest yourself. But with age comes insights. You don’t need to move to experience. If you have your values in life straight, you can more clearly distinguish whether things are good or bad for you. Be silly, Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.
Good things might just happen if we would meet. Yes, you have to move and make the effort to mail Paul. That’s all. Give it a go and get in the flow.