some of my thoughts and notes
I am in a smoky backroom of some sort of shop in Mysore, India, and the guy who just welcomed me and first tried to sell me Cannabis shows me a greasy plastic bottle that is about a third full with a slightly yellowish oil. He opens it and lets me smell it. It does smell remotely like Sandalwood, but mostly pungent and unpleasant.
On the 20th of July 2024, the day of the summer solstice, I got my access card for the hangar at Torp, just a day after flying in the DC-3. We were also looking for apartments in Sandefjord to move to.
Five years ago, in September 2019 I had just been to Madrid and gone through some of the worst insecurity and sadness of my adult life.
My biggest fear at the moment I wrote this was that if I ignore my desires, wants and needs, I will lose contact with myself, become dissatisfied, and... probably just fail at whatever I need to do.
Now my experience has been quite the opposite. I am quite satisfied, my needs are fulfilled and there is not much that I want.
Yesterday I came across the idea that success is when you can look in the mirror and say that the 18-year-old version of you would not be disappointed by you.
To check this and to imagine myself as my 18-year-old me, I read into my journal that I started exactly 11 years ago, in August 2013.
I wake up knowing that my family is doing well because they are close to me. I am surrounded by trees and plants and sunlight. I feel relaxed and motivated for the day.
Over the past weeks, after following Chat-GPTs recommendation of reading the book Perfume by Jean-Claude Ellena, I have been training my sense of smell, or perhaps more precisely, my olfactive memory.
The base below every perfume is the skin of the wearer. The base of a perfume is what stays the longest and is designed to enhance the scent of the skin.
Just two days ago, on Wednesday, I had an amazing online-conversation with an 81-year-old British guy, that flipped my mindset into a much better state.
I first discovered his website more than five years ago, and a few days ago, after seeing a post from him on LinkedIn, I reached out to him and booked a time in his calendar.
Last year in February I spent a few weeks in Portugal, some of them in a forest estate in a northern valley. I loved climbing the lemon trees every few days and picking some ripe lemons to make fresh ice tea. The grated the peels to extract as much as possible of their beautiful fragrance, and I loved standing in the trees where the fragrances of the wood, the leaves and the lemons mixed. I also loved the fragrance of the wet earth and moss in the forest.