Spirit of the River

As I was walking to town, I noticed a black cormorant sitting on a pole that was used to fasten one of the local paddle steamer’s mooring lines. I had not planned to write anything on that particular day – apart from the things I get paid for. However, looking at the bird that usually never sits on that pole made me think about different aspects of life and I decided to sit down at the river side, simply watching the birds. I am often watching birds and we can learn so much from them. All we need to do is spend a little time with them – with an open mind, open eyes and open ears. So what can we learn from birds? These are just some of the observations I made in half an hour at the riverside. Mindfulness and living in the moment: The cormorant had no other worry than to have a little rest – but he was resting in a very mindful way and took everything in that was happening around him. There is most likely nothing that escaped his attention. Yet, he did not worry about what would happe...

When we meet a person for the first time, we immediately have an idea about them even before they utter the first word. We look at them and our brain takes in all the different aspects of their looks: age, gender, height, weight, hair, eyes, clothing etc. We get a lot of information from what someone looks like and some of the information is usually quite correct: e.g.  (approximate) age and gender. We often make assumptions based on our observations . Many of our assumptions can be wrong because looks can be very deceiving. A few examples:   Just because someone looks like an angel, does not mean the person really has an angelic character. Often people hide their real agenda behind a smile.   Just because someone does not wear the most fashionable clothing, does not mean that they do not have a sense of style. You might just have caught the person on a day on which they had most of their clothing on the line and it had started raining, so all the good clothing was not...