LIFE

Back again.
I am sitting in Bandung/Indonesia, my fourth time here. Hearing the prayers from the mosks , enjoying the temperature after rain. I have this day alone, son is in Jakarta. I was browsing through Facebook and found this link.
http://www.lifebuzz.com/start-doing/#!RrpnJ
I started reading, and suddenly I saw my life.
 I am 69 years now, and my life had all the ups and downs that most lives have. I remember many times, when I was ready to give up, it felt like I didn't have the strength to fight another day. Somehow I did, and about 17 years ago I realized that I had to do something, I was becoming a bitter woman with regular depressions and attacks of self pity.
In my work I came across the concept of MINDFULNESS , and suddenly I knew: now or never, give it a try ! At that point I just had moved to Stockholm /Sweden, beginning a new job and a new part of my life. All my children were grown up and had their own families or relationships, I was divorced twice and had a pile of dept. Dept not because of shopping too much, but because of my inability of making money. we will come back to this later.
I was so tired of feeling miserable, so I gave it a try.

Start facing your problems head on. – It isn’t your problems that define you, but how you react to them and recover from them. Problems will not disappear unless you take action. Do what you can, when you can, and acknowledge what you’ve done. It’s all about taking baby steps in the right direction, inch by inch. These inches count, they add up to yards and miles in the long run.

I had to learn that this wasn't so easy as it looked at first. I realized that my problems and me were the same. Something was wrong with me, otherwise I wouldn't have these problems. 
But ok, , I promised myself to give it a try, so I made a list of my problems, and I tell you that was a long list. I suddenly realized that it went back to school and childhood. And when I looked through that list time after time I realized that all these problems were connected, I began to find connections.
And that day I started my work of change.

Start noticing and living in the present. – Right now is a miracle. Right now is the only moment guaranteed to you. Right now is life. So stop thinking about how great things will be in the future. Stop dwelling on what did or didn’t happen in the past. Learn to be in the ‘here and now’ and experience life as it’s happening. Appreciate the world for the beauty that it holds, right now.

This was so hard in the beginning, I realized that I hold on to all hurting and bad things that happened and piled even new "bad" things up here. Letting go of this attitude was hard and took some years, but it was the best I ever did. I remember , I was on the edge of giving up many times, these baby steps were to slow, I wanted things to happen faster, now that I began to understand. But only baby steps give us the possibility to understand, accept and live the new experience. it's the only way.

And today I am sitting here in Indonesia, loving my life, enjoying every day, because I still live, can experience happiness and appreciate this moment. I would like to share this with those who want and maybe want to try themselves. I know now there are no shortcuts, but the baby step march is worth every step.
See you.

Back to normal

Finally - all papers sorted and filed! I really dislike doing this, but now it's done and I feel good.

After being away from home most of last year it took me  some time to get all back to normal again. And now everything is in place again  and cleaning is finished ( for now).

Now I can get back to writing my stories, maybe parts will  be part of this blog.

And I have to sort all pictures, I love doing that, enjoying all the lovely memories.
Malaysia was a great experience, KualaLumpur with chinatown, Sabah on Borneo was so beautiful, but I had to learn that tropical climate with itäs high humidity was not for me, it felt like being in a sauna all the time, after two weeks I had to give up and go back to Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur

Kota Kinabalu

a lovely place to sit and just feel good

nature

friends


I am grateful for the time in Kota Kinabalu/Sabah, met great friends from Facebook, now in real life. I tell you , that's an amazing experience , no more typing in chats, talking instead, laughing together and sharing real time.  Without Facebook I never would have made this journey and never met these people and learn about their way of living. I watched the movie Hobbit there, in english! Here in Germany all films are in german, so I really loved going to the cinema there.
Enough for today, Now I have time to sort my pictures and write my stories .

Back again

2013 was a year of travelling - Malaysia, Indonesia, Sweden, Denmark, Indonesia and in between back to my hometown Kiel. I will tell about all in time. 

Right now I am home, I need to take care of things here for a while.

Today was one of these days you want to forget and definitely not relive. This morning I had a water damage in my bathroom, the pipe to the watertank of my toilet broke and it took 30 minutes before the repairmen got here, so there was water everywhere.

I took some time to dry all up, now the old pipe is replaced and we had to check if water was gone into the floor. So next came the man with the instrument to measure damp.

And yes, you can see for yourself. So probably they will come in a few days, drill holes in my floor and pu in an industrial dryer, after 5 waterdamages the last years because of old pipes in this house I know whats ahead of me.

Seen from the bright side, my bedroom , bathroom and hall are shining clean right now, though I had no plans of doing this today. All repairmen today were very nice , in the middle of all chaos my neighbour Corinna came with some cake and we took a coffee break.

And when all were gone in the afternoon, I looked out  and got this.

A wonderful sunset made me realize that life i great and I forgot all about water damage and just felt happy.

I will be back!