A year ago, I wrote an ultimately unpublished post on Life on Wheels with the following proposition:
Can a minibus change your life?
And I immediately added.
Obviously not, but it could be close enough.
Soon afterwards, I set off on a 4,000-kilometre journey in a minibus that changed everything forever. In a couple of weeks, I was really beaten up by life.
I asked God why? Why is this happening to me? But not in a self-pitying way – because everyone has their own cross to bear, but I never forgot for a moment that millions of people have an immeasurably harder fate – but I really wanted to understand. Of course, it hurt terribly and everything…
From my experiences and my experiences came understandings, and somehow I hoped that now all I had to do was incorporate it into my life and then it would all work.
But it didn’t.
At first it was chaos after chaos, but then slowly the picture began to clear that there was no way out of this party. (At the time I had no idea that this was the good thing!)
In the lake of my soul stones fall,
Sándor Reményik
Heavy stones of pain,
The roaring dull splash
Many tiny ripple rings follow.
More and more layers are being torn away from the imprints of the past I was born with, and the life I have lived in the dead space of myself. Of my travelling and once-living world.
As I wrote above, at the deepest point, I was not oblivious to the dramatic fates that life has, but I also knew that I had to live mine. I have to let it hurt. I must not be ashamed of why what is almost nothing to others is the drama of my life.
As I sat there in the depths of my hellish existence, I became more and more aware of things. Right at the beginning, I discovered that I had two posts before I left, which I had, as if to myself, written earlier:
Perhaps the reason why travel columns are so popular is that for many of us, life is mostly just meandering through wild places, and there’s nothing exotic about that. Let’s say that the great passes and descents of our existence are worth the effort if we can see them as a great journey. At least in hindsight. Even if we didn’t necessarily do them for adventure.
We are all explorers of life. When we get stuck on our life journey, we are confronted with our traumas, our hurts, our fears. The question is whether we can face them and overcome them. Do we even recognise them? Some people gain true self-knowledge by exploring remote places, by wandering. Some people cannot or do not want to go to distant lands. We are diverse. One thing is for sure: true freedom can only come through self-knowledge.
I’m also only just realising that I flew out for a day before my trip to see the place I wanted to arrive by bus and…
I remember it was bright sunshine as I was walking along the oceanfront promenade to the rocks, and I suddenly collapsed. I burst out crying and had to sit on the side of the road. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me.
It was only now that I realised that I had started my Divine Inf erno at the Boca do Inferno, or ‘Hell’s Mouth’. Life has a sense of humour, doesn’t it?
And on the way I went to the end of the world. At least, my life up to that point had ended anyway.
“Where the Earth ends and the sea begins”
Cabo da Roca (Cape Rock) is the westernmost point on the European mainland. It is located in Portugal, 40 kilometres west of Lisbon and 18 kilometres west of Sintra. The national poet of Portugal, Luís de Camőes, wrote of the place in his canto Os Lusíadas VIII: 'Where the earth ends and the sea begins' (Onde a Terra se acaba e o mar começa).
In the middle of my hellish journey, I was forced to bring up my past. Both legally and self-consciously.
I’m still browsing the sources I found, and it occurred to me that I’ve been writing about the same things for ten years, …and ever since I started publishing. But only now am I beginning to understand the true meaning of my thoughts then for my life.
“At the beginning of everything, there is the whole process and the end.”
Brigitta Szántó – On the path to fulfilment
So not only did I find evidence to defend my rights in the legal case, but it also proved that I had been living in a catatonic state my whole life.
It was as if my higher self kept me constantly in the picture about myself, only there was no voice to project it.
Or rather, it’s as if I watched the film without understanding the language it was in, and that just confused me even more.
I could see things and understand things, I was sitting in my own cinema with strange experiences in my mind and thoughts in my head, but I had no idea what was going on. I just hadn’t been aware of it until now…
Or even worse, I was convinced that I was right about the world and myself.
I also experienced the repetitions, but I didn’t figure out why I was sitting on a merry-go-round and not moving forward. It was a mad dash. By the way, the analogy is really apt, as I felt until my hellish journey that there was a relative balance of peaks and troughs. The only thing that bothered me was that my life was average. On average, it’s miserable. It’s only now that the swings have been released with me and started free-falling…
And I always tried to do introspection, to care about self-improvement, but I was doing it based on the wrong patterns and programmes.
I lulled myself into a false belief.
And life has tolerated all this until my minibus journey. But now it has finally tipped the scales. It won’t let me drag out any longer, just like the doctor didn’t let me drag out when I was born. After all, the method is no more gentle.
Why am I writing that finally? Because even with all the pain and doubt, I am grateful. I am grateful that I am grateful at all!….
Because even though it was very bad to be faced with the fact that I probably had much less ahead of me than I had behind me, it was also very bad to be faced with the fact that I hadn’t lived… that I hadn’t lived the life…
but at least now I have the opportunity to make a real change.
It could have gone on for eternity.
How do the Indians say it?
My soul has finally caught up with me.
I got the sound right in my film. I finally began to understand what had been going on in my life up to that point.
“God stood behind me, and I went around the world for him.”
Attila József
I also had a partial truth – but I was finally able to actually recognise it – about why my marriage had exploded back then. Why my relationships and many of my human relationships had become my greatest teachers.
“Life can only be understood by looking back, but life must be lived by looking forward.”
Søren Abye Kierkegaard
I am very grateful that my mother can still tell the stories of my family and my life. That what I have come to understand about myself in my life and what this journey has made me understand can add up to my mother’s stories. So it’s a pretty clear and meaningful picture.
But as I wrote at the beginning, it is not enough to understand, it is a task to build in and in the process, new layers are being torn open.
Why am I giving myself up?
Because I hope that my story can give you something too. For I have confessed since I walked through hell
healing is the best way to heal, and teaching is the best way to learn.
The time has come for us all to get off our own little merry-go-rounds.
“Roads take a long time to understand. You just walk along the roads and think of other things. Sometimes one road is wide, asphalted, sometimes bumpy, rutted, steep. For a long time we see the roads as an opportunity, a chance to go to the office, or to our beloved, or to the sulphur-rich spring forest. One day we learn that roads have a purpose: they lead somewhere. It’s not just us on the roads; the roads are moving with us. Roads have a purpose. All roads eventually converge into one common destination. And then we stop and wonder, stare with open mouths, admire the mysterious order in the maze of many roads, admire the multitude of avenues, highways and paths through which we have finally arrived at the same destination. Yes, roads have a purpose. But we only understand this at the last moment, just before the destination.”
Sándor Márai – Heaven and Earth
