I read a story today about three visitors to baby Jesus who arrived just as the three kings were disappearing at the horizon, and left him three gifts. Apparently, these this visit was not recorded anywhere. The first visitor was called ‘Lebensfreude’, or ‘joie de vivre’, who left his patchwork clown-like coat with the child hoping that it might bring him happiness. The second was called Time and told him that what people feel they have so little of is not rare or scarce – they just have to remember to spend it where it is most needed. The third was full of scars as if she had been beaten up regularly. She was called Love. Giving unconditionally, not asking for any returns, being full of trust, she had suffered like no one else. But as soon as she approached the baby, all her scars disappeared and there was a beauty and a warmth that filled the manger and embraced all those present. – We all know that these three presents and the knowledge shared by the visitors changed world history.

The story was  much better told than I can do it here. It reminded me of what is important in life: Lebensfreude, Time (well spent), and (unconditional) Love.

We experienced all three today.

We went back to Südstrand, South Beach (like the one in Miami, and as ‘cool’), where one of us went riding on one of towering Olaf’s magnificent horses across the endless beaches while the rest went “Kaffeetrinken” with Pádraig enjoying half a cheesecake and half a mandarin cake. We had the full afternoon with beautiful sunshine and an incredibly strong wind. And, above all, we were together, being happy, enjoying the time together, remembering old times, creating new memories, being there for each other.

If I was 20 years younger, I would go for it. Rainer is looking for someone who would guarantee the future of Lütt Mattes, the really incredibly amazing unbelievable music venue and put in Garding, we heard tonight when we went there for the first time in years.

We’re getting up late, we go for long walks, we waste time just sitting around, we don’t really get anything done. We drink beer and Apfelschorle, eat crisps and Bratwurst. We wonder through the streets, along the beach, on top of the Deich. Pádraig is enjoying new adventures in eating and drinking, revisiting places and meeting people he hadn’t seen for a long time.

We have stepped out of our daily routine. There’s nobody coming to the house, there’s nobody we have to go to and meet. There are no meetings. There are (almost) no phone calls. It’s Saturday and we’ll be going to Garding’s one and only live music pub, the first time since we stopped coming here when Pádraig left the Schön-Klinik in January 2015.

There are hints of happiness, a scent of good times.

Looks like we’re having holidays

The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun”
― Christopher McCandless

One of those evenings, when I can’t really find the concentration and stamina to write. My eyes are closing and there’s zero concentration left.

This evening, we had dinner in one of the restaurants we used to go to. Close to the lighthouse in Westerhever. One of the ladies working there has a daughter who went to primary school with Pádraig’s younger sister.

Pádraig smiled this afternoon. Not because something was funny but because he was happy. The weather was good, the company was good and we went for a walk in Heide’s downtown. It’s one really nice street with a few shops. And with a small stand in front of the butcher’s selling Bratwurst. We shared one. Pádraig eating Bratwurst. On the way back home, he had a few Bugles, crisps. Those flavours must have exploded in his mouth. And the texture!

Life was good this afternoon. In Heide!

I was still travelling. Four years ago. Trying to get to Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. Trying to learn Forever Young by heart. What was it that had happened?

Truth is: I still don’t know. Truth is: I probably won’t ever know, won’t ever comprehend. Truth is: I don’t need to.

Four years today. We celebrated it.

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Some time ago, someone I’d never met sent me the name of an occupational therapist specialised in neurological rehabilitation in Garding (!), just a few kilometres from here. Pádraig had an appointment there today and it was fabulous. We agreed two long sessions per week for the next few weeks.

There was me, writing about Pádraig’s journey. About our visits to Rainer and his pub in Garding with the live music sessions on weekends all year ’round. Someone, with family in Tating, and having worked in Garding, reads this and makes the connections.

You can say what you will, this would not have happened without the internet, the web, and people ‘talking’ to each other – even if they never meet in person.

We are planning to celebrate tomorrow. We’re not quite sure yet how, but we’re getting ready for it. Who’d ever have thought we’d get this far?

“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

There was an article in the Sunday Independent newspaper apparently today (talked about on the radio) describing how residents in nursing homes who were continent became incontinent because there were no carers who would bring them to the toilet when they needed to be brought. That fits in with our experience of the use of medication to regulate bowl movements of persons in care so that they fit into the time table of homes and the turns of the carers.

It beggars believe, but this is how institutions work: the military, convents, prisons, nursing homes and hospitals. Even home care. People in these institutions and dependent on that care have to adapt to the rules and procedures and routines of the institutions and the carers.

It beggars believe.

We had a brilliant Sunday today. Slept in. Late breakfast. Kaffeetrinken beside the sea. Early dinner. A short movie. Early night. The way we wanted it. It’s hard to believe that something as ‘normal’ as this is not a given for all, and wasn’t for Pádraig, for a long time in his life…

Everybody needs a project. No doubt about it. The question is: what kind of project it should be. One that really excites you? One that really challenges you? One that will change the world a little? One that supports your family? One that realises a dream you’ve always had? One that realises someone else’s dream?

Whatever it is, it has to be one that keeps you going and interested, it has to make sense to you.

This year, Pádraig and us arrived in Santiago, finishing the Camino we started many years ago.

Next year, we’ll go on a roadtrip himself and a friend had planned, or at least part of that journey, through the USA and Canada up to Alaska. One of his friends gave him a guidebook to Alaska when we were still in Hamburg.

After the summer, this journey will become our new project. It’ll keep us going.

Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

It must have been today, four years ago, that I went to China. I was going to change planes in Amsterdam. At check-in at Dublin Airport, the person behind the desk took some time checking my passport and my ticket, enough time for me to think “there must be something wrong, what is it?” And then he said, “Sir, the names on your passport and the ticket don’t match.”

Not good news when you have less than an hour to departure. I had booked the flights and I was pretty sure that I had booked them in my name. What was the check-in person on about?

He gave the passport and the tickets back to me to check.

I had taken Pádraig’s passport instead of my own. I had grabbed the first German passport from my desk at home without checking that it was actually mine.

The funny thing was that what had called the attention of the check-in person was not that the person on the passport did (1) not look like myself and (2) was more than 30 years younger.

Using some magic, that day Pat managed to get home, find my passport and bring it up to the airport, all in time for me to get on to that plane to Amsterdam and then to Beijing.

I was terribly excited. I was going to get a front row ticket to the Beijing Opera, a great day in a great city, and another flight to Sanya on Hainan Island in the South China Sea where I was going to give a presentation using Skyfall and Adele’s title song the same name of this brilliant James Bond movie as a theme for a keynote on the future of the localisation industry. Let the sky fall. When it crumbles. We will stand tall. Face it all together.