Day 5: A sharing of experiences
The jetlag I left in Belgium finally caught up with me. I was glued to bed like a teenager that doesn’t want to wake up for school. Then again, I was a teen and going for another round of painful meditation is not that pleasant either. But it when coming here, it was not the jetlag that I was afraid for, I’ve learned from my trip to Paris that there is something far more terrifying. It is basically a kind of homesickness.
Some people would think that it comes when you’re not used to the strange new environment. I believe it’s the opposite. When everything is new, and there is still a lot to take care of, then one’s alertness is so high that there is no room for any sickness. Your subconscious would still be thinking that you’re traveling and that you’ll get back home after this. But guess what, it doesn’t last forever. When I’ve started to let my guard down, got some free time at hand and the ‘Have a nice trip’-messages died out, that’s when the mental test begins. It was here that sensible and lone travelers would break down. And I would prefer losing a week to jetlag than that.
Anyways, I’m neither sensible neither really alone, it’s just that the feeling is unstoppable. And when something like that comes up there is nothing wrong into doing something about it. Well, staying the whole morning in bed isn’t going to help. So I’ve decided to try out two possible remedies: talking to new people and talking to old people. I’m not talking about age here, with ‘old’ I mean those friends I have left back home and with ‘new’ I mean everybody else. After all, the majority of mankind is nice - we just haven’t met each other.
Well, that and the fact that we all don’t speak the same language. Whenever I went to a McDonalds (because they have conquered Taiwan too), it’s the manager I need to speak because the staff is not trained for a foreigner. I’m not complaining, I just went to that place to endure another one of their fish burgers so I could go on the internet. Turns out that I needed to register and pay for the service. I was not really planning to come here so often so with some luck I got showed the direction to an internet café.
The place I found was strangely located next to a large arcade hall. Even though I didn’t see any signs that told me there was internet here, my instinct to me I had to enter this one. The interior first made me think of an office. Most of the room was taken by a good number of wooden cubicles which hided their occupant, giving the impression nobody was here. The walls on the sides of the room were entirely covered with Chinese mangas and magazines. When I could look inside, I saw in the cubicle a sofa for two and a large screen attached. I was really impressed by this strange combination of an internet café and arcade hall. It takes you some place far from the outside world for only €1,5 an hour.
It was also there that the idea of making a blog began to grow.
There is something called a Fa-study. It is nearly unavoidable to join one from time to time as a real practitioner of Falun Dafa. And as I have said in the introduction, this whole undertaking is also a way for me to advance spiritually. So what is it exactly? It is mostly just a bunch of practitioners meeting up in somebody’s living room and studying Dafa for a few hours. Dafa itself means Buddha Law and that refers to the books and scriptures in our practice. To make it easy, you can compare it to a Bible study.
It was the dullest thing ever happening to me back when I was a kid. But now I grew into a student, and just like I gained appreciation for fine arts or a well-prepared dish, the Fa-studies started to attract me more. But secretly, there is always an experience sharing attached to the study. It’s no coincidence, you got a group of alike-thinking people in the same room and it turns into a social happening. I’ve never found such peaceful environments anywhere else. The experience sharing among practitioners is a free place to talk about one’s deepest attachments and unusual experiences without shame or fear. Thinking about it, non-practitioners would need their most intimate friend or some Anonymous-meeting to reach the same goal.
So It’s after such an event that I know there are friends everywhere I go.
