A tribute to fabulous Toscany

 

A couple of years back, I spend 2 weeks in the late summer in Toscany at a rural farm house in the country side of Toscany, Italy.

I completely unplugged and enjoyed the silence (not the song :-)) , the beautiful nature, the warm weather, the friendly people, the great food and the lovely Brunello red wines.

I can only recommend others to do a trip like this and get life into perspective and to cherish what worth it and trash what’s not.

I tried to capture the nature while I was there. You can watch it in the video above.

 

 

To return Home

As you embark on every journey – you will – eventually return back Home.

Whether you have been:

• Doing lots of business travel for more than 25 years
• Making vacations to distant places in the world
• Completing your daily commute
• Exercising on you bike or doing motorbike rides
• Visiting underwater life all morning in a dry suit
• …or returning from a windy walk on the beach

It could also just be mentally through your mind…

All travel will eventually complete and the distance from Home will cease to increase (the 180 turn).

I am always connected to my Home and enjoy traveling out but always happier returning back Home – I love coming Home – to recharge the energy.

Please enjoy the relaxing mood of the video above as I will try to capture more Danish coast lines during 2018.

Welcome to Holland!

I have to share this essay…it is just so true and meaningful. Please read ahead and enjoy the life you have been given.

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by

Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this……

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.

Smoking! Why not?

I have long been thinking about smoking (no, I don’t wanna start).

However, we all live in a society where smokers are being stigmatized and frowned upon. This makes me wonder why our culture has ‘agreed’ on chasing smokers who can’t barely find a spot to enjoy their addiction. And it is only getting harder. Just think about travling – train, bus, plane…the worksplace…public areas…etc. etc. 

Yes, I do understand that other people can be annoyed and possibly affected by smokers standing close by and yes, I do understand that smoking can cause cancer and other serious health issues which later will require treatment and tax dollars…

All that being said though, why don’t we let smokers enjoy their cigarettes and respect their choice to reduce their age. Shouldn’t it be the individuals right to make the decision themselves? Why do the rest of us think that we have the right to chose for them and know what is better for another human being. Imagine if smokers just have accepted that they wish to live strong and die young? Is a longer life more valuable than a short?

I have nothing against smokers as long as we all (smoker and non-smokers) respect the individual choices of each other. One type of life style can be just as good as another.

Stop…think…act

Yesterday I had an life changing wake-up call. A long time and dear old friend had gotten ill – really ill. So serious that only a specialized hospital could help. A simple pain, turned worse and worse without any doctor took the small effort of examining more closely and performing a MRI scan. Once the MRI scan finally was ordered it was almost too late. I don’t wanna write more details but another 24 hours would have been fatal without proper surgery. What the future will look like for my friend is very uncertain – it all may return after many months or may never improve with a resulting degradation of life quality forever.

When you experience these thing you have to stop and think – and take a holistic and realistic perspective on life. Are we spending time on the right things? Are we prioritizing our life carefully enough or just wasting precious time. Are we with the right people, is the job the right one, do we travel enough, do we care enough about our children and what about our parents who get older every day?

I mean – life can change 180 degrees in a split second – sometimes you just need to revise and adjust or perhaps just continue as before – but anyway stop and think…and decide then. Your life and “ecosystem” deserves it.

I will cross my fingers for good strong health, fast recovery and a happy future for my friend.