Wolfgang Maehr, Wolfgang Mähr, njyo

Travelling by plane always makes me ponder. It must be the bird’s perspective of things deep down there, one sees villages, roads, mountains, rivers and all the other things from a completely different perspective. It is beautiful, amazingly beautiful not only because it’s an unusual perspective. Our Earth IS MAGNIFICENT. And yes, from a distance all looks great and spotless, or at least many things.

The other thing that makes me think is the change of context. Yesterday I was sitting in a bus that was in a bad traffic jam in Delhi’s outskirts with the driver almost participating in a fist fight because of a minor metal kiss of the bus and a lorry. Tomorrow I’ll be Gothenburg preparing with my team for Europe’s biggest tournament in an unimportant (well, from a global perspective compared to famine, disease, etc. – still, I would argue more valuable than soccer, hehe) hippie sport called Ultimate Frisbee. Now I sit a few thousand metres up in the air with some layers of steel below me, many feet of air and the snowy Caspian Sea in visible distance. Before it was the mountains of Afghanistan and the hills of Pakistan, the lush fields of Northern India…

Thinking again of that remote city I changed the car ordered by the transportation company to a bus for the airport. On the way we would take small roads through Punjab passing by huge trucks, Sardars on motorbikes (yeah, that’s how it should be) and people biking home at late night. Many of those have never been in an airplane, many have only seen them from a distance of several thousand metres, some have relatives in another continent. Some not knowing what to eat tomorrow. How can such differences co-exist directly next to each other, separated only by a few centimetres of air. Like the electrician who came to change the broken fuse late in the evening and me… how different and still so close. And then the peacefulness, openness, genuine friendliness and the shining eyes. In contrast, the business guy in the seat next to me, sleek and business-oriented, and carrying an aura of seriousness, importance and fatigue. Those eyes that I miss in Europe or at least hardly ever see. It makes me sad when I sit here and think about it.

Maybe it’s the result of reading Milan Kundera’s “Immortality”, a gift of a friend, that I really really enjoyed. It’s been long time that I had not read a novel. And this proved me that between Dan Browne and the like, there is quality literature also in the 20th (and hopefully 21st) century. Still, next on my list is the Dhammaprada and Krishnamurti’s diary…

But back to the initial tought. Many things have been racing through my head in these few hours sitting here. One is that I want to re-work this blog. Yes, a mundane and continuous plan, but still, some nice ideas. I want to be able to put up songs here, share inspiration.

Sharing inspiration is the main topic here. Seeing the Earth far down as a rather small thing makes me remember that globalisation should not mean that we produce in China, assemble in Korea, ship via Singapore and consume in France. Globalisation should mean (in times of the World Economic Forum in Davos), that we must understand that we sit in one world. A stratified world, but one world with only a certain amount of resources, breathing the same air and drinking the same water. Yes, if some farmers in India’s countryside commit suicide because their life is unsustainable, it does not affect people in Austria, maybe not even people in Chandigarh. But on a personal level it does, and in a long term it does as well. While I can admit a general fascination for global communism and self-sufficent communities, I must say that working on closing the gaps worldwide must be our generation’s top priority. The gaps between rich and poor, between literate and illiterate, between people with healthcare and without, the gap between nationalists and globalists.

My father asked me how I can be out in the world while things at home are not too well. He did not mean the economic dip that everybody in the west talks about and still I think that our consciousness cannot end at our garden walls. Therefore I realised that what really interests me (as for now) is to connect people. And no, making web browsers for people to access Facebook is not enough. I am thinking of connecting and interchanging people. I had the privilege to visit many places in the last months and see many different cultures making it clear that humans are humans everywhere. Not only that, people on the countryside worldwide seem closer to each other (yes, they may use different tools) than people within a country. How can we make people understand that with a grass-root approach? Our politicians are busy putting up barriers for each other, it’s for us individuals to start working on removing barriers in a meaningful way. Any ideas and proposals?