Category: Thoughts

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12 minutes of pleasure

There is a paticular feeling of nothingness that I enjoy surrendering my mind into. It’s a space where neither time nor distractions exist; it’s just me being alone with myself, my body and my senses. The surroundings blur out and what stays are the details and the contrasts, colours, lights, textures.. and music. The impressions that my senses absorb are all I have for company and they put me in a state of overwhelming yet very calm and peaceful euphoria.

My daily trainrides are pure pleasure when I let my ipod guide me into myself and close out the outer world. I don’t mind the trains being delayed, or the rain, or anything at all. The fact of not really being able to do anything than just being is utterly relaxing and reminds me of the long distance buses in South America and the neverending trainrides in China. There’s nothing like having to let time pass and surrender to oneself, to just being. And enjoy it. At least for those 12 minutes that the trainride lasts, plus the short walk to the car.

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Never-ending Sundays

Metro

Last night you were present in a dream. Hurting me with your arrogance, intellectual strenght and sincere indifference towards me you forced me to face the destructiveness of my mere remembrance of you. You decided to take a bus and I was left alone in the night with anonymous people on a big street in a country that wasn’t mine. I cared a lot, but I don’t remember crying the way you did once.

Morning came and with it did happiness. Laughter, pleasure and dreams about never-ending sundays in Barcelona.

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Who survives, and why.

Guess what I just found..

“Ripley, an award-winning writer on homeland security for Time , offers a compelling look at instinct and disaster response as she explores the psychology of fear and how it can save or destroy us. Surprisingly, she reports, mass panic is rare, and an understanding of the dynamics of crowds can help prevent a stampede, while a well-trained crew can get passengers quickly but calmly off a crashed plane. Using interviews with survivors of hotel fires, hostage situations, plane crashes and, 9/11, Ripley takes readers through the three stages of reaction to calamity: disbelief, deliberation and action. The average person slows down, spending valuable minutes to gather belongings and check in with others. The human tendency to stay in groups can make evacuation take much longer than experts estimate. Official policy based on inaccurate assumptions can also put people in danger; even after 9/11, Ripley says, the requirement for evacuation drills on office buildings is inadequate. Ripley’s in-depth look at the psychology of disaster response, alongside survivors’ accounts, makes for gripping reading, sure to raise debate as well as our awareness of a life-and-death issue.”

Did I ever tell you how much I love the internet? And psychology. And books.

..click the picture for more info.

Caroline Bach1 Comment

Worst case scenario

You’re in the middle of a 12 hour bus-ride through the desert, it’s the middle of the night, you’re on very high altitude and it’s really, really cold. The bus breaks down and people start panicking and suffering from altitude sickness. It’s dark. There’s children. And the bus driver doesn’t have any mechanical skills but still refuses to call for help. You’re alone, your language capabilities are very limited and you’re the only foreigner in the bus..

My travelbuddies and friends have often gotten to join me on my “what would you do if” -wonderings. It often turns into great conversations and theories about laws of nature and ways to handle different situations and people. Naturally, travelling to strange places sparks the greatest scenarios and possibilities. And of course, gives you the most interesting people to discuss with.

What would you do if you were stopped by three ten year old boys with knives?

What would you do if you were kidnapped and taken hostage?

What would you do if corrupt police had planted drugs on you and stopped you?

What would you do if you were in a falling elevator?

I’ve discussed all of the above scenarios for hours and days, there’s so much to take into consideration and so much to think about that it leaves you wondering and thinking and spinning off to all kinds of different themes. I wonder what determines who survives a planecrash and who doesn’t, what is the difference between people who freeze in a situation and those who start acting? Why do some panic and other get their act together and make sure to fix things as fast as possible? When does high fear turn into a strong adrenaline-rush of rational reaction, and at what point is fear overwhelming to the point that it makes a person break down? How much does technical knowledge actually matter in a situation of chaos? How much does physical strength matter in relation to mental strength?

I haven’t found myself in a really horrible situation yet. I was in the above situation in a bus in Peru, where people were screaming and suffering from altitude sickness. I was giving away cookies to old ladies and I was holding babies while their mothers were crying in panic. But what mattered most was that I went out and forced the busdriver to call for a mechanic, which he was refusing because the company wasn’t insured and he wouldn’t get paid if he couldn’t fix it himself. I went angry-gringa on him with my really bad Spanish and made him make that phonecall. Being on the verge of hitch-hiking with some random truck to the closest village, the mechanic arrived and we got rolling again after three hours in the cold. Victory! haha..

My reaction probably didn’t change a lot because if it wasn’t for me, some angry Peruvian guy would soon probably threaten the stupid busdriver and make him call anyway, however, my main trait in these kind of situations is that I need to try to affect them somehow. I just can’t wait for things to happen and solve themselves.. So, if I was kidnapped and taken hostage? I don’t know.. but I think I would probably try to escape or do something really stupid.. after trying to psyche the bad guys out of course. haha

My point is, experiences are always a great thing. No matter if they’re good or bad. I always enjoy chaos and think that if it doesn’t hurt me too much physically or mentally, it’s been a valuable lesson and a great adventure.

Disclaimer: Please do not confuse my statements above with brainlessly putting oneself in unneccesarily risky situations. Stupidity is unforgivable. haha

Caroline Bach1 Comment

Lucid dreaming

I’ve always had a vivid imagination, when I was a kid, I used to start daydreaming and make up scenarios and stories and experiment with how I would handle different situations. I love putting myself in chaos. Train crashes, robberies, riots, kidnappings.. being in the middle of horror and asking myself how I would handle it. After creating scenarios and working with my fantasy for some years I learnt how to distinguish imagination from reality. At one point I found myself in the middle of a really bad dream, realized it, and started enjoying. I could control what was happening and use the dream as a playground for my fantasies with unlimited time and possibilities. Kind of like playing a videogame, but so much better, more real and more fun.

Lucid dreaming provides you with a possibility to explore and live and try the things you always wanted to try. The only limit there is is your own imagination and it’s capacity of creating an artificial sensation of something that you have never felt, kind of resulting in the sensation that you think you should expect. My favourite thing to do is stretching my capacities and doing things that I know my brain can’t handle, there is no pain in lucid dreaming, but there is still fear, knowledge of physical laws and natural instinct that holds you back from doing things. The fun thing is to try to work against it. Jump off that cliff, go touch that puma, try climbing that wall. Once I tried to break a glass inside my hand, what happened was that it broke into small glittering particles and kind of dissolved into the air. No pain, no glass, no blood. I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like or feel like, and my brain clearly couldn’t handle it. haha

Another thing that’s great is going to places you have enjoyed and try to recreate the feeling you had when visiting them. After travelling for a while I have collected a few gems that I love visiting when I feel that I need to, what’s really funny is that though I visited the places for long periods of time and spent my days wandering around the streets, it’s often night and the streets are empty when I get there in my dreams to have a look around. Kind of like in the picture above from when we walked around La Paz in Bolivia in 2008.

Lucid dreaming is fun and I recommend it to any bored kid out there with a connection to their inner self. I usually enter by going “nah, this can’t be.. it’s a dream.” What also works is trying to read, looking at numbers or looking at your hands.. look around a lot and look for details in your dreams, they’re usually not all perfect, your brain isn’t good enough to recreate everything in a setting, and when you realise that things are strange, you’re in.

Now, don’t wake up and don’t be afraid, go flying instead – it’s a lot of fun.

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Passion

I couldn’t say I agree with the political vision of George Bernard Shaw, but his writings on life are pretty striking.

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

George Bernard Shaw
Getting Married, 1908

Caroline Bach2 Comments

Circumstances

“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

George Bernard Shaw, 1983
Mrs. Warren’s Profession

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No me odies, linda.

Photo taken at Lomma beach

Yesterday I spent the day thinking about energy and other fluffy things such as yin & yang in relation to relationships between people. I believe in the existence of positive versus negative energy that is present everywhere and that determines the mood of people and the ways in which they affect occurring situations. (That’s probably the fluffiest you’ll ever get from me.)

Sometimes you meet a person that fills you with positive energy and makes you very energetic and happy, other people make you sad and tired. Sometimes a simple phonecall from a friend can spark the feeling of either being sucked out of energy, or filled with it. This is commonly understood and nothing to discuss really, different people affect each other differently..

What I was thinking about yesterday was the balance. Yin & Yang, black and white, man and woman, rain and sun. We often hear that balance is the preferred option, we need to balance each other out. If you’re very calm, you need a person who will hype you up, and if you’re very dominant, you need somebody who will let you have that role without protesting. That’s the utopia. Finding balance. Harmony.

However.. after contemplating this for a while I went, “but what if two very driven, energetic and happy people get together, what happens then?” And what I think is that when you posess some specific traits, it’s not really about leveling them out, because why should we supress the essence of ourselves to compromise? It’s rather about enforcing what’s best about you. I believe that if two people that are loaded with very positive energy get together, what happens are not only amazing fireworks, but an instant and constant process of development and growth. Hype and happiness.

It’s just a thought, but I think I believe in it.

Caroline Bach1 Comment

Karma

Yesterday was a nice evening. Beach, pizza, sunset & Avinka.

Today I bumped into a worried girl from Costa Rica in the airport, we found out she had missed her flight so she was sad and confused and didn’t know what to do. After quitting work I helped her to get her act together. We got information about what had happened, called her friends and got her luggage back, she already had a place to stay so I just left her my card, gave her a hug and told her to call me in case she would need me. An hour ago she called. I booked her a new ticket for tomorrow and she will call me from the airport to let me know if she’s okay or if she needs me to come there.

I’ve met truly amazing people on my travels who have let me crash at their places without knowing me, helped me out in various ways and just been utterly nice without asking for anything in return. I have collected a big karma-account that I want to balance out with the world and I really enjoy passing it on to strangers. People need help a lot more than we usually care about noticing, and most of them are afraid to ask. Sometimes it’s showing them the way somewhere or let them use your phone, sometimes they just need a smile from a stranger or one of those cookies you’re eating.

No matter what it was all about, these nice little encounters usually end with a “how can I thank you?”-moment and that’s when I usually go all hollywood-cheesy saying “if you see somebody who needs help, help them!”. haha

I don’t know if it actually works for spreading kindness and smiles, but if it does, it rocks.