My teenager came home the other day and told me she had been to a café in the city and had asked for a straw for her drink. The girl behind the counter tried to persuade her not to use a straw. When my kid persisted, the girl got angry at her and said: but…
Wrong place, wrong time
When I was a teenager I was assaulted on the street in broad daylight. It was a weekday around three o’clock and I was cycling home from my flute practice in the inner city of my hometown in the Netherlands. I remember seeing a small group of teenage girls walking on the pavement ahead of…
The Queen of Poor Me
Sometimes I hear a sentence and it immediately gets stuck in my head. Usually it’s because the words are so beautifully put together and/or the sentence has a meaning that deeply resonates with me. Today (in a podcast about my favorite TV-series of all things) I heard a sentence that resonated inside me: Do not…
Balance
When I think about nature, a word that quickly comes to me is balance. The sun rises, the sun sets. There is ebb and flow in the sea. Flowers bloom and die. Animals in the wild live in balance with their environment. And so on. It seems to me that many of us human beings…
About romantic love - part 2
For the past eight days I have sent about three text messages per day to a dear friend, all with the same message: please remember to drink and eat. Why did I do that? First of all, of course I asked this person beforehand if these reminders were appreciated (which they were). So then what…