past & future days

Today, I came to this chilled place in a backyard, surrounded by trees, chatting people, and rushing honking cars in the distance. I ordered a Vietnamese coffee, which wasn’t one, and sat down with my laptop to finally write a blog entry I desperately wanted to write since a couple of days, maybe weeks.

Now that I am here in that coffee place and my choice of leaving home to feel more free to write somewhere else, I feel actually the pressure of writing something great. Funny how we do something to reach a certain state of mind and actually its creating exactly the opposite.

I guess one reason I didn’t write much the past two months is because there is nothing which needs to be written down. On my world trip or in Germany i had sometimes interesting new experiences, struggles and challenges, where in Shanghai everything works out so smoothly and somehow awesome-ish. Maybe its hard here too and I just don’t feel it, because all I can do is compare to my life I had before in Germany. Nothing there worked really out, not many photographers in Germany would allow me to be an assistant for them and learn from them, because I didn’t have any experience or was already too far in my vision of photography to assist. If there was a photographer who agreed on hiring me occasionally, it was really hard to help me out as well, because of the finance crisis and their lack of assignments. Although this frustrating time took more than 8 months I strongly believed and believe that everything is meant to be in the way it happens. Imagine I would have been lucky in Germany and would have got a photography assistant job, I probably wouldn’t be together with my girlfriend and would have the issue of missing traveling a lot. But who knows, everything what happens makes sense because there is only this one way we all have to go. I accept every part of life, because I know it teaches me something.

To live in the present tense and to enjoy the present tense is something that sounds pretty obvious and normal for everybody. But if we have a closer look, we have a hard time excepting the present time, always being busy thinking about which steps to take in future or doubting the steps we have token already in the past. (Thanks to Paul Watzlawick’s “The Invented Reality” I just read and felt confirmed)

And again, maybe that’s the reason I am not writing as much as before because life became just what it is, a mystery of chance, of redundancy and a mystery of the power of control we seem to have. Everything happens exactly the way it needs to happen and I truly believe that the life by itself is guiding me. Thanks life, so far you did a good job.

This blog entry is therefore all about telling what is happening right now and I am sure you can read the future and the past out if it, if you’d like to: Its Sunday and I have my second day off from the weekend. At home there are Zoe’s grandparents from southern China, who are about to make dinner right now. They live with us in the apartment to be closer together with Zoe for a longer time. Its a little hard to understand them, because of their accent, but definitely also because of my lack of Chinese. I am sure it has improved a lot by the time they leave again after 3 weeks. Its almost like a home stay in another country and the only difference is that we provide the home and invite people to stay, rather than staying somewhere else. A very Chinese experience. Of course I was a little worried about being with the parents of my girlfriends ex-husband who desperately wanted their son and Shawnee to be together again. But now, since they are here and are very sweet I gracefully looking in the future. Likely I think its cool to live with a Chinese couple for a while. Its my first home stay, after travelling the world for 18 months and staying in China for a pregnancy’s period of time so far.

And what a great introduction with these last words: The pregnancy is going well. We have decided to go to Seattle for the birth and be together with Shawnees family. She is in her 29th week and feels the way pregnant women feel when they are 29 weeks pregnant. I can’t really speak for her, since I understand her vision of reality only through a filtered system called spoken and body language – hunger and pain. I do though assume that she feels excited as I do but additionally has a hard time to sleep. One thing needs to be mentioned for sure: She is beautiful like the mother of mother nature itself. The baby is kicking hard and I talk to him a lot in German. Ha, I just said it, yes, it will be a boy. Liam shall his name be. So far, so good.

Speaking of which, mother nature is in progress regarding the pictures I just took in An Ji, a gorgeous place close to Hangzhou. I still need to work on the pictures and will show some of them soon. My so called photography career is going OK. I am happy with what I do and where I do it. From an assignment for a German magazine, portraits, product, landscape and travel to my first so called photo shoot on the roof top of hour apartment building. (The picture you see above). To be honest the pictures didn’t come out as expected and led rise at first a little disappointment, but than made myself smile again, thinking back of my world trip’s first pictures and last pictures I took. To be honest it felt almost really great all of the sudden coming home with those shots who didn’t look the way I wanted to look, because it very much showed me the beginning of a new photography way I am about to go. The idea of looking at these pictures again in one and a half years and compare them to the pictures I take than in future, I know It’ll feel good to see the progress I made. Not important if I am competitive in the professional world of photography, I actually give a xxxx nowadays. Fun counts more.

Mainly I need to focus on my daily job, which pays the bills. I work with international people in an chinese-english speaking environment and do all sorts of work. From advertising campaign concepts, advertising campaign executions, illustration, art direct photo shoots, brochures, backdrops, websites, name plates, pens and all these things people feel like it needs some design. I think I said this a 1000 times already.

Its amazing how we sometimes just need to look back and see where we are coming from and how we made that development in whatever we worked on the past time. Of course its recommended not to be too depressed in general, so you don’t start to think about suicide, reminded by all these targets you set yourself and haven’t reached any of those yet.

I hope everybody else is fine and is happy with what they have and what they need to be happy. What I am working on now is my photography work and how to be transcendent, as I already knew that this is the key to be satisfied in eternity. Now, I think I know what way to walk.