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- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
A book with forty stories, observations, poems, and illustrations about loving life, written for readers who are looking for a particularly inspiring and emotional soul mirror. The book does not point fingers, but rather stimulates with insight, wowing experiences, and inspiration for independent further thinking, written for all readers who are at a turning point in their lives. While reading, I had the great feeling of holding something very intense and personal in my hands. Anneliese Bunk, best-selling author These wonderful tales illuminate with sharp and open eyes our world full of blur. Silke Nowak, best-selling author
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About the book
Volcanoes spew clouds of smoke into the starry sky. Filipa thinks about being childfree while Theo hands out fruit skewers at the reception of the Swiss Embassy in Paris. The question of justice is mirrored in the streets of Mumbai, and a young American finds himself at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.
What is the best way to deal with the daily madness of life? How do we become happy with our lives? How do we deal with the feelings of constantly having to keep busy, of always having to think, and of running endlessly on our hamster wheels? What kinds of stories do we only tell ourselves? And should we even give a damn about the meaning of life anyway?
This book will ask you many questions.
www.corinna-rosa.com
A special thanks goes to my mother.
For the globetrotters, cinderellas, and little rascals,
who love life with all its colorful follies
and don't want to miss a single day.
And the day came
when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anaïs Nin -
Table of Contents
For you, in advance
A phone call to God
For the life inside of us because that's all it is
About eye glances
Switching off helps
To hell with the purpose of life
Volcanic sparks
Tiger-print leggings, a black bow tie, and nothing else
Surprise in a moment of disgust
Rice in Indonesia
Chase away the dream thieves
A little piece of wood
Botox
The vigor of youth
One year
Potatoes in Lehel
On beauty
Wilder Kaiser
Benchmarking
The heavy issue with babies!
What do I do today?
Take it easy
Love wins
Nude bathing
Hot shower
Going nowhere is also going somewhere
Strawberries in Paris
Making peace with the uncertainty of life
Quality of life
Switching off
Breath
My mother
Past and future
Childfree by Choice
India and the question of justice
Don't stop thinking for yourself
Suffering from an overdose of people
Success and my point of view on it
Happiness
About the art of walking away
The breeze in my hair
A final message for you
For you, in advance
As a curious adventuress, I have traveled through the deep African bush as a student, backpacked through the Philippines in my twenties, and I have passed through Burma at a time when people in Rangoon didn't yet wear jeans. I've worked for the United Nations in New York, founded an NGO, and today I have an international job in a large company.
Now in my forties, I continue to travel a lot, love to try new things, and enter the unknown. By doing so, I often lose myself in the process as well as in my thoughts and my imagination. I run into walls and suffer through the injuries.
Luckily, I love and am loved, but I also was abandoned and left bleeding. I still laugh and cry. I've had painful surgeries and nasty accidents.
Life has shown me its dark and bright sides—its whole range of color.
I experiment, try, win, and fail brilliantly, as I'm always looking for experiences that bring me closer to my personal truth.
For years I have been filling the pages of my journals and notebooks. Sometimes they are just partial thoughts, and other times they can be whole stories or even drawings.
While writing this book, I wanted to go through them all again.
I got chills in my stomach.
So, I got myself charged up with excitement and chose a sunny autumn weekend for this task. Putting the papers and a pen on my lap, I started reading through the old pages. Little by little, I remembered where I was standing in my life when I was writing the notes, remarks, and stories. Intense flashbacks lunged me into a time already past.
Reading through this collection, I noticed that life was indeed crazy, but that I am also a little crazy about life.
I realized that the few things I was sure about in life seemed to be timeless. What I have found important over the years is still important to me today, despite that I hope to never stop learning and improving during the decades to come.
This book contains experiences that made me laugh and cry and understandings I didn't want to acknowledge or take seriously at first, but which I came back to at later moments in time. It also reveals a lot of things I want to do more of in my life.
However, I don't always manage to make sense of my personal findings to the extent that I'm able to fully incorporate them in my daily routines. Writing about them is definitely easier!
But as soon as you start to ask yourself what you know about life and to search for answers, something unique happens: you discover yourself bit by bit.
Finding yourself perfect and complete is probably never going to happen, but a little bit of improvement is possible because the journey to find yourself is the most beautiful gift you can give yourself.
It's your personal truth, and one of the great things about it is that you can share your insights with the people in your life that you love and are surrounded by.
I hope from the bottom of my heart that this book will inspire you to embark on this journey into yourself.
Yours,
Corinna-Rosa
A phone call to God
Another night on the cold, barren desert floor, inside my tent at Burning Man in the Nevada desert on the US West Coast, is behind me.
I had put on all the clothes I had packed, and still I couldn't sleep because of the cold.
I hear a distant, loud noise, so I get up and am on my bike a short time later. I cycle past quiet campers, quiet tents, and pass a few other early risers.
One is a serene naked man with a slight belly and a small, wobbly penis on a furry pink bike.
The atmosphere is relaxed, untouched, and free.
I absorb the energy.
*
The Playa—the very heart of the Burning Man festival—is so very different during the day than at night. There are no glaring lights nor loud music and only a few people at this time of day. The mountains stand out on the horizon, creating a fascinating view that seems to engulf the countless sculptures.
On my left, I discover a converted golf cart that looks like a long golden goldfish with scales that shine brightly in the morning sun.
In front of me is the first of many colorful stilt walkers romping around, moving towards the Biofeedback Flowers installation. Further to my right, I spot a stack of cars suspended midair by a sturdy metal construction.
Behind the stilt walker, there is an actual silver airplane, seemingly buried nose down into the desert ground.
As I take in this scenery, the thought occurs to me: If only real life was closer to this. If only life outside the Playa had more wit, art, and fun like here!
This is some kind of adult wonderland with fewer conventions. It is more of what we want to be but so rarely dare to be.
It is a land of plenty.
*
Still busy with my thoughts, I head toward an old-fashioned British telephone booth with no door. Inside, I discover a lemon-yellow telephone connected to the wall by a cord.
Before I get into the booth, I look up and notice a large wooden sign.
In beautiful black type, the sign says: "Speak to God."
Because I haven't done this for a long time, I pick up the receiver and start talking.
How long I stay, I don't know.
I talk and talk until I run out of words … and then find answers in the silence of the receiver.
Interludino
when I'm at a loss
in my life and in general,
I sometimes wonder,
what are my other options?
and then it often appears quite clear
to me,
how I have to decide,
and what I have to do.
For the life inside of us because that's all it is
One of my life principles is to dive deep into life and to experience it to the maximum with all its intensity and color.
Principles can't always be lived out strictly; that's why they are called principles: There are exceptions to the rule.
The attempt to align oneself with them is what matters. It is irrelevant where and how we do this. The main thing is that we do it.
Recently, for the first time, I slept alone in a tent in a lonely natural meadow, learned Tantra, and danced tango until the early morning. None of these activities really felt good for me in the beginning. I also didn't know what would happen next. Would a wild boar come? Am I embarrassed to be undressed in front of strangers? Do I feel uncomfortable wearing high-heeled shoes while dancing tango?
But that is the big world out there. It is full of the unknown, surprises, vitality, energy, flow, action, and excitement.
It is exhilarating that I always feel like a real part of life when I connect with my environment, resonate with it, get involved with it, and when I experiment with the world.
*
Maybe life doesn't always happen at a corporate job, on the sofa, or in front of the laptop. It's not even behind books, newspapers, and magazines, and it's certainly not happening while watching a TV series or hiding from a strained relationship.
These are comfort zones. They are cozy, relaxed, and safe.
On the other hand, the area outside the comfort zones can be damn cold, hard, unfair, scary, and so much more.
We don't know what's outside our comfort zones. And it's the unknown that typically scares us.
We think that the area outside our habits could be like a dark hole into which we will fall infinitely deep without ever seeing light again. When we are in this state, the tunnel vision, our limited world view, comes, and we are stuck with our status quo, clinging to it and trying to hold on to it.
But at the end of the day, this is a mistake in our way of thinking, because in reality, we don't even know if the unknown is as dark as we think.
Perhaps it consists solely of sunlight.
Maybe it's light, liberating, and joyful.
What then?
*
Why should we leave our comfort zones, from time to time, in order to dive deep into life?
Because that is exactly where life begins, and that is the only place where we feel that we are actually alive. Because it's only there that energy flows into our bodies again and wakes us up from the half-dead sleep of our everyday, routine lives.
It is like a kick start that recharges our batteries.
To dive into life is easy: Initiate new experiences and participate in and support them, not watching from a distance like a visitor to a rock concert, but getting into it, becoming a musician and playing the instruments of life.
We can allow our hands to get dirty.
Could it be that it hurts sometimes because we reach our limits? Then that's just the way it is.
Can a little pain not be therapeutic every now and then?
We should be involved in trying new things, such as participating in a community gardening project, saying kind things to strangers, walking to the office and leaving the car at home, volunteering, or organizing a dinner with friends and acquaintances.
Life is unique, wonderful, and diverse! We are allowed to explore and experience as much as we want to.
It is also good to pursue interests besides earning a living, with which we can neither earn money nor become famous, things that we simply enjoy doing. And with a little luck, they may even help others.
All these things are balm for the soul.
Whatever it is, it's important to participate in life and to go with the flow, to get involved, to dive deep.
But not always, because an always is only good in the fewest cases, and anything extreme isn't without consequences.
But we should laugh, cry, and dance as often as we can. We should reach for glittering stars, smile about our mistakes, and let ourselves be enchanted by the summer thunderstorm.
We should seek out the life inside us because more just might not be there waiting for us.
