Author: Brand Smit

Friday, 27 March 1998

Allow me to tell you a story of two travellers. One guy arrives at a crossroads. He looks in every direction, walks to the carts placed at the entrance to each path, picks up a copy of all the brochures and reads through all of them. After an hour or so he sits down on a rock by the side of the road and wonders out loud: “Which one should I take?” As he sits there, silently pondering, time goes by.

The seasons come and go, and still this guy sits on his rock at the crossroads. And he ponders. Every now and then he takes a notebook from his back pocket and scribbles a few notes. Then he thinks some more. From time to time he rises to walk in circles for hours on end, occasionally stopping to jot down a few ideas, after which he sits down again.

From this position, he sees many other people arrive and depart. Sometimes he sees someone turn into a road; a few months later he sees that same person, stumbling out with a few bruises, a wound or two, and maybe a shirt or a jacket with a tear or a sleeve missing. This person may hang around for a while, catch his breath, and then he’ll start walking in another direction. The guy on the rock would shake his head, and he’ll know he’s doing the right thing – to think long and hard before taking action. After all, he doesn’t want to end up like that guy, he always tells himself. Then, after a while he will start circling the rock again, looking in this direction then that, writing down a few thoughts, and again sitting down on his rock, his face buried in his hands.

One bright autumn day another man appears on the horizon. The moment he reaches the crossroads, he goes down on his haunches. He sniffs the air for a moment, casts his eyes in a westerly direction, then north, then east. Then he gets up, slings his bag over his shoulder and starts walking.

The man on the rock observes this spectacle. He mutters to himself, and shakes his head. “How can this man just make a decision like that? I’ve been sitting here for years pondering what path I should take! After how many preliminary conclusions, after so many stories people have told me about the different paths, I still can’t decide which one is the best!”

Annoyed, the guy jumps down from his rock and yells after the man. The man, already some distance along, stops and looks behind him. The rock sitter picks up the pace.

“Wait a second … I was watching you from that rock,” he puffs when he catches up with the man. “I saw you arrive, and I saw how you sniffed the air, and then you just started walking. I’ve been sitting here for years. I know everything there is to know about all the paths. I’ve seen many people come and go, and still I can’t say for sure which is the one I should take. Most people pause for at least a day or two before they choose a path. But you? You sniff the air and just start walking! How can you be so sure?”

The guy looks at the rock sitter, sighs, and says: “You’ve been sitting on that rock for years. You’ve considered all the options over and over again, and you’ve probably filled dozens and dozens of notebooks. But what do you have from all the years of sitting and thinking? A rock, and it’s not even your own!

“I, like you, know there are obstacles in the path I’ve chosen. Good days await me … and there will probably also be less pleasant days, circumstances that would cause me to question whether I did, in fact, choose the right path. Every path has these elements of uncertainty.

“The idea,” the guy continues, “is not to choose the path with the least number of obstacles. The idea is to commit to a path regardless of the obstacles, whatever the risks, regardless of good weather or foul. To commit yourself to a path until you have reached its end.

“If you commit yourself to a path, your fellow travellers will accept you. That will increase a sense that you belong on that particular road, at that particular time.

“Every time I reach a crossroads, I see people like you, people who’ve been sitting on rocks for years on end arguing with themselves over which path to take. There is no absolute right path! What there is, is commitment. And that can make any path the right one for you.”

The rock sitter lowers his head and stares at the dirt and gravel around his feet. By the time he looks up again, the other man is already over the first hill.

* * *

A few days later a tired and weary traveller arrives at the crossroads. He notices a rock a few metres from a large oak tree. In the light of the late afternoon sun, his eye catches an inscription: The right path for you – is the path to which you are committed. And if you are committed to a path, it is the right path for you.

______________________

Wednesday, 25 March 1998

In the first three years following my graduation, I struggled with the idea of commitment. I had no clue to what I should commit myself. I was also reluctant to devote myself to something or commit to it if there were a vague possibility of failure.

If you don’t have a focus point in your life, something you’re committed to, you are intensely aware of the effect this state of affairs has on your sense of well-being. Shortly after graduating from university (which left me with a small mountain of debt), I went to Europe for a few weeks (more debt). Whatever I tried to achieve with the trip, it did not succeed. Then I spent more than a year wandering between places in the hope that “something will happen” that could give me direction – in the hope that I might find something to which I can commit myself.

Eventually, I found myself in another foreign country, still looking for something to fill the void left by my lack of commitment. Or maybe I thought the mere fact that I was living abroad, away from the hassle of student loan creditors, away from even family and friends, would be enough – for the time being.

Alas, escaping does not work if you cannot escape from yourself. In my case, I could not escape the feeling that I don’t belong. If you’re not committed to something or someone, you’re not going to feel as if you belong. And if you don’t feel as if you belong, you will experience what some academics call existential angst.

You can keep yourself busy for a while with a variety of things to make up for the lack of commitment in your life, but once the effect of these measures begins to fade, or if you get bored with it, you’re back at square one.

To what do people commit themselves? They commit to a religious entity, an idea, a dream, an ideal, or to someone else, a group or even a subculture. That to which I want to devote myself ought to be meaningful enough to keep my attention and to take hold of my imagination. It will also help if this focus point is of such a nature that, by keeping myself busy with it, I can provide for my daily needs.

I’m a dreamer, but I am also realistic. I have seen enough, and I’ve experienced enough to know what kind of life awaits you if you are not free; if you are not in a position to make choices and act on them. I know what it feels like to wonder when you’re going to get evicted from your rental home, or to wonder when you’ll again sit down to a proper home-cooked meal, or to wonder if the next knock on the door will be the repo man. I know what it feels like to have dreams, but to not know whether a fraction of it will ever come true.

I can thus with a fair amount of certainty say that I am committed to the idea of freedom – freedom from debt bondage, and freedom from poverty. I can go further and say that I am dedicated to reaching a point where I will have options, and access to the necessary resources to act on choices made; also to having the ability to give more than I ask. It only makes sense to then also commit myself to a path that would lead to financial wealth – not as an end destination, but as a path to freedom.

Where is a better place to commit myself to the above-mentioned ideals than the piece of earth where I was born and where my deepest roots still lie?

_____________________

Tuesday, 24 March 1998

Everything I’ve always said about freedom, financial debt, my own ideals, my aspirations, my dreams, achieving my potential, living as I’d like to live, crystallise around a single, essential prerequisite. I have seen enough, experienced enough, and read and heard enough to understand how important power is: The power to make choices and act on those choices. “Kto kgo?” asked Lenin. “Who (masters) whom?”

If you don’t want to play the role of the servant, the debtor, the person in self-imposed economic exile, for the rest of your life, stop running and start working, purposefully, effectively, with a single goal in mind: to acquire what will make you free – from creditors, bailiffs, poverty, and an insignificant existence, and free of economic masters who want to rule your life.

If I want to survive, in the first place, and then be able to get more out of life than mere survival, and to have the ability to exercise my choices, I’d have to work on obtaining the one resource that will make these things possible for me: financial prosperity. That’s all that remains.

Easier said than done? Not if it has taken your entire life so far, years of poverty, shame, embarrassment, and frustration to get to the point where you realise that this is the primary means to so much you hope to achieve.

______________________

Wednesday, 18 March 1998

I recently became acutely aware, once again, of certain patterns in my life: my parents’ financial situation, my own financial history, my increasing paranoia about the harassment and possibly prosecution I am facing because of unpaid debt.*

A different idea nevertheless struck me like a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue sky: The last seven or eight years I have had some exceptional opportunities to understand things. This includes theology, history, politics, psychology and most recently, economics.

If I wanted to make a case about my unenviable personal experiences of financial difficulty, the legal troubles one faces because of debt, and the effects these things have on your self-esteem and confidence, I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time arguing the case. But I can certainly also make an alternative case about the opportunities that I’ve had so far, and still have, to understand things.

———–

* By this date, I had learned from the bank that held my student loan that I had to start paying back my loan fairly rapidly if I wanted to avoid some very unpleasant consequences.

______________________

Sunday, 15 March 1998

I sometimes see myself as a former monk who’s lost his faith – or one whose religion has lost him, and who is now searching for a meaningful existence in secular life.

I am, however, not yet fully immersed in this “new” life. I’m unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, with some of the ways of this world, especially compared to people who have lived their entire adult lives in secular society.

* * *

Compared to most people I know here, I’m not a big success as a so-called backpack traveller. As they travel from one country to another, discovering interesting places first-hand, I prefer to set up camp in one place for a while and work my way through a pack of newspapers on a Sunday afternoon.

A little pathetic, maybe? Why? There’ll always be people who have done more than you, who have seen more than you, who have met more and crazier people than you, and who have done more and stranger things in more countries, and in more exotic countries than you.

I shouldn’t try to follow in other people’s footsteps just because I think my way of living is less impressive than theirs.

Stop competing with other people, I say. Do what you find suitable for yourself and what you like. If not for a better reason, do it because then you won’t have to measure yourself up to other people and in the process finding yourself too light, while that criterion is only one out of a million.

______________________