Only the Big Dipper
For two months I have been living on a small island in the North Sea. It has not been so easy to find an apartment here, but I was very lucky: the house in which I live is surrounded by very large pastures and open spaces where cows and horses graze. In all directions it is several hundred meters to the next house and I have wonderful wide views from all windows. I can watch rabbits, pheasants, ducks, herons, very large pigeons, birds whose names I don’t know and a muskrat. There are no lanterns around, so it is very dark at night and very quiet. Very quiet.
There are 7 windows in my apartment. This allows me to see in all directions. For example, I can see the sunrise through the window in my guest room. These are sometimes very beautiful moments where the whole sky changes color. Through my living room window I can see the sun setting again in the evening. I don’t have a single window through which I can see both: Sunrise and sunset.
When I lie in bed and look out the window, I see the starry sky when it is clear. Pellworm was recently named a starry island because it is such a dark place. A lot of work was done to get this distinction. For example, special street lights have been installed, and the lights are very dark so that there is as little light pollution as possible. As a result, one can observe truly gigantic starry skies. In September, the constellation “the Big Dipper” was visible right in my bedroom window. The window was exactly so large that it showed the section of the sky in which this star image was currently located. I fell asleep quite often during that time while my eyes were looking at this beautiful image. Now the Big Dipper has moved on. I don’t see it anymore. My window is still in the same place, but the sky has moved.
Right off the bat, I can think of many things to worry about. My kids, my health, my finances, the weather, the fact that I live alone, that I might run out of clopaper, whether I’ll make friends here, whether there’s enough air left in my bike tire, and on and on….
And all these worries are only in my head. They could come true, it could happen, but none of that has happened now. My kids are fine, I’m healthy, I have enough money to pay for everything, I have good rain gear, I’ve chosen to live on my own, I’ve never run out of clopaper, and if I go to my bike in the morning and the tire is flat, I can walk. All of these scenarios of what could happen are not in my now. They are just stories. Stories are never true.
To go back to the window thing, I want to say that if the cutout in my window is the now, that what I can see right now, what’s in my life right now, then none of that worry is in the window right now. None of it is there right now. Maybe it’s before or after — temporally, I mean. Maybe some of those things happen once, and probably many of them have happened before, in the past. But in the here and now, in my window pane, none of it is there. Only the Big Dipper.
But I am not stupid! After all, I don’t just worry about it for no reason. After all, there’s a point to it. Everything I do has a purpose. Otherwise I could leave it alone! What advantage do I have from worrying?
For example, I can tell others about my worries, then I might get sympathy, someone listens to me, understands me and agrees with me. Maybe someone even cares about me, calls or writes again. Clear advantage.
I’ve also noticed that worries make me static. They freeze me, so to speak. For example, worrying that something might happen to my daughters in southern Germany almost stopped me from going 1000 km north to an island. Because then I’d be far away in an emergency and wouldn’t be able to get to them fast enough. That’s a clear advantage that worry brings me: not having to move, staying in the familiar, not risking anything. My German security box goes crazy when I do things like move to an island in the North Sea.
Some worries just distract me from other things. I mean, if I assume that there is a reason why I am here on earth, that I have a task, that there is something that only I can give to others and something that the world is urgently waiting for, then my worries can be a very excellent reason not to do exactly that. That is, not to do what I came for. Because I worry so much about what could go wrong. Suppose I am here because I am a wake-up callerous. A very unique being who has been given all the prerequisites to wake people up from sleep, to bring clarity to fog, to point the finger at what is wrong, to draw clear pictures with words that are so clear that others understand them, that others are encouraged to finally get up, open their mouths, say what is true and go. Go off, open doors, walk through and slam them behind you with a big loud bang.
Then one little fucking worry could very easily stop me from doing that. Because what can happen in the process, what can go wrong in the process. And the worry is then my alibi. I don’t even have to say I don’t dare. I can say I’m not doing it because I’m worried and this and that and I’m off the hook.
How about looking not at my worries for a change, but at what I’m not having, doing, experiencing, loving, feeling, creating, ending as a result?
I am currently experimenting with the image of the window when I have worries. It works especially well at night in bed. When a worry comes up, I just have to see if it’s real in my now right now. Whether I really see it in my window. If not, something in me calms down very quickly and easily. Then I can say: this worry is not real. It is either in the future or from the past. In either case, it is then irrelevant. And I can check it off. That works very well. There is really very little in my window that I want to worry about. If I look very closely, actually not much at all. Solely maybe even just the Big Dipper.
