socrates meets valley girl

Last weekend we drove to Schleswig to visit my host dad's vacation home and beloved sailboat. I could write a novel about how beautiful the city was with its historic buildings and fascinating fisherman community, but that's on a completely different train of thought than the one I'm riding now (I probably took the wrong U-Bahn).

On Saturday my host parents and I sailed around a fjord of the Baltic Sea in my host dad's boat, named C'est La Vie. Such is Life. This boat is about 36 years old and very precious to him. Carlo is your typical eccentric European intellect, except not that typical. A retired schoolteacher, he's had incredible journeys throughout his life and maintains friendships throughout all of Europe. He's gone on countless journeys with his friends and has inside jokes that include the Italian phrase for going to the bar and eagles in bathrooms. I love talking to him because he's got such a good perspective on life; he follows C'est La Vie very well.

Something that really blew my mind was that he lived on C'est La Vie for 12 years in the south of Sicily. 12 years. That's about 3/4 of my life. 12 years is probably incredibly different to an adult than it is to a teenager, but nonetheless, his stories make everything I've done feel so insignificant.

I really like Carlo and Brigitte because they enjoy life. Not money or luxuries, but life itself. Today we visited their good friends (Carlo's sailing pal and his Finnish wife) and we had coffee and cake together. Afterward we took a short walk through a nature reserve. One of the things I enjoy the most about Germans is that they love to walk. I once read a book called Socrates Meets Jesus and in one part Socrates questions the excessive use of cars in modern (especially American) society. He describes cars as cages and claims that walking is one of the greatest pleasures in life. I never really understood that until today, when I found myself actually enjoying something that didn't involve spending money or killing virtual people.

Now I'm not gonna pull a McCandless anytime soon but I realized how trapped I felt in America's fast-moving atmosphere. Even as a teenager I felt so much pressure to get things done and to do it quickly. I constantly worried about my future and how what I was doing at the exact moment would affect it. Over the past 3 weeks I haven't even thought about the future because I was too busy enjoying the present. C'est La Vie, my host father says where most people would start freaking out and trying to get everything back in control. We worry so much about directing out life to the perfect path that we forget to look out the window once in a while and enjoy the view.

Can you imagine spending 12 years on a boat in Italy? Going out and walking to the bakery every morning to get fresh bread instead of rushing through the drive-thru for a McMuffin? One of my new goals for this year is to get back in touch with the present. I'm going to quit worrying about the future and I'm going to stop regretting the past. I'm going to stop hating people that are in my way and instead take the longer route around them. I'm going to take longer breaths and enjoy the free pleasures of life.