Friday, November 30, 2007

The passport is lost... part 1.

There are days in life that are more remarkable than others.
Of course, every day that life is allowed to be lived is a phenomenal event not to be taken for granted.
But in that collection of days and nights making the extraordinary experience of being alive, a day can happen that will be remembered for the time to come or that is so exceptional that it becomes the subject of a posting on this blog.

Yesterday was a day standing out.
Arranging luggage in the Fuso Szulc after the trip from Mexico to the USA it was noticed that the passport and the Mexican residence permit were missing.
This created an Antarctic around the heart.
A disaster of unprecedented dimensions was envisioned.

Life used to be in a rather big house in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
A two-floor 19th century building with seven rooms and two bathrooms.
One of the aspects of a big house is that it makes the people who live in it accumulate things.
There is so much storage available that easily things are acquired and kept.
Hardly ever the things in the house are qualifying to be considered for keeping or not keeping.
Eventually, in the house is so much stuff that the persons living there have no more idea what exactly they have.
This is not necessarily a problem except when one suddenly thinks of a specific object, believing it might be in the house.
The tremendous problem is then where it is.
How to find its location?

In the house in Amsterdam in the Netherlands a lot of time has been spent simply looking for things.
It might differ from person to person but in this case the looking for things was always experienced as very frustrating and ridiculous.

When moving from the Netherlands to live in Spain a lot of the things in the Amsterdam house were not coming along in the large pantechnicon.
The start in the house in Spain was therefore good.
But the problem was that the house in Spain was huge as well with its 8 rooms.
Within a few years a lot of things had again accumulated.
And the same problem was often occurring of not being able to find things.
Loosing time and suffering of aggravation.

The eventual conclusion was that we have a tendency to surround ourselves with a lot of unnecessary stuff.
Spending our money for nothing and confusing ourselves.

Based on this conclusion the nomad-life was started without many things.
Literally, Spain was left with a half empty suitcase.
The serious intention was to live with a minimum of things.

This has actually been achieved.
The amount of things in the Fuso Szulc is very limited.
And the smart thing has been done of putting the few things in transparent boxes having a label describing what exactly is in it.

Therefore, most of the time things that are looked for are found.

Another trick used is to put things always in the same place.
For example, very often in the past the glasses couldn’t be found anymore.
There would be activities and the glasses were taken off and when the activity was finished it was not remembered anymore where the glasses were put.
Sometimes a long time was spent to find the glasses again.

Nowadays, always, the glasses, when taken off, are put in one particular spot and no more time is lost and no more aggravation is felt.
In spite of all those precautions and strategies, nevertheless the dramatic situation arose of having lost essential travel documents.

Tomorrow’s posting will tell the story of the lost passport.





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