nada. Ayer algo. Manana también.

Me verses me in the future.
How I am to how I want to be.
The present self verses the future self.
Reality versus wish.
Building the future.
From the past.
In the present.

Is like entering a new reality, being created in the very instant: dimension for dimension. Or to put it in Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s words, “entering the flow”. There is no thinking about right or wrong anymore – the fingers flow across the scales, choosing their own path through the jungle of rhythm, melody and the color of sound.  Seemingly effortless everything merges, to become something bigger. And without further noticing they build a tinderlike structure of unlimited strength. Timeless space.               Until the beat stops. The fire goes out. And there comes back the other, the non-flow-reality.

Those words just came to my mind today. A mix of what a professor of mine, who worked on how to destroy asteroid with nuclear weapons because the cold war was over, once said and a quote I read somewhere a while ago.

Always be sure to know what you know.
What you once knew.
And what you don’t know.
Because, if you know what you don’t know,
then you know.
But if you don’t know what you don’t know,
then you don’t know.

After roughly 50,000 kilomters, travelled through 13 countries by plane, bus, train, car, by foot and by helicopter, 10 months of vacation are about to come to an end. Tomorrow morning. I will get up (most likly set an alarm bell and hope to not confuse it with Buenos Aires street noise) and will do something I get paid for. Longest vacation without a fixed routine, since I entered Kindergarden. The distance would take 980 days to walk (12h per day). That´s two years and eight months. I couldn’t do that. My knee would hurt.

It is okay to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene – and not just okay, but something to be thankful for. Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province.  said Tan Le during a TED talk I listened the other day. I like the idea and to a certain extent I live my life after it. New places force us to redefine, to reinvent and to restructure our lives. Leaving old, worn out routines behind. Thus we have a tool to review our habits and establish new routines, mainly because none exist, but also because different places offer different things and ask for different behavioural pattern. The only care has to be taken of the time scale. Rushing is not an option. Fine tuning is beautiful too. However, to say it in Steve Jobs words, the key ingredient to life everywhere is to “stay hungry and stay foolish”.

Basically every western political system works according to the concepts of “Demokratur”, a creative German word mixing the words democracy (DEMOKRAtie) and dictatorship (DiktaTUR). The two stage system consists of a dictatorship on top of a democratic pretension. This is our system. During the 2001 uprising in Argentina the Spanish word for it was coined: “Mafiocracia”. I actually believe we have the free choice and a fair system of choosing the “monkey” that “governs” us. Though what’s overseen is who is in charge of telling the monkey what to do – who’s the Dompteur. Certainly it´s not the people; But the financial sector, the big banks and the economic powerhouses, namely multinational cooperations. They impose their will from the top and make the democratically elected monkey function in their favor. The plain power of money, the artificial construct that sadly enough makes the world go round in a rather wobbly way, makes this mess possible. They were never elected to office; they don´t have to leave or be publicly evaluated after four years, and thus have enough time on their hands to establish nontransparent mechanisms to maximize their influence on whoever is legally elected to power. “The markets are always faster than the democracy” complains a European politician in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” the other day. That’s really not surprising, since a democratic process requires discussion and consensus whereas a dictatorship doesn’t. The most ridiculous thing, however, is, that if they tend to fall because of severe mismanagement, they even make the system they were betraying to rescue them by stepping out of the dark, to show their muscles and shout: “Haha, gotcha – too big to fail”.  There´s still a long way to democracy.