The Silence

Embrace the tiger and go back to the mountain

Spending the winter months — holidays and all — in cold, wet Holland is, on the one hand, a heart-warming reunion with the people I love. On the other hand, it leaves a lot of empty time.
I usually fill that time with making music or writing. Last winter, out of sheer boredom, I wrote twenty-eight songs. This winter, I published a book.

A book is a birth. Writing it is a joy; finishing it for publication is a form of torture. Intense, all-consuming — and then, suddenly, silence.

Luckily, the first reservations for the new boating season are already coming in. I consider myself fortunate that this work keeps me in touch with interesting, beautiful people from different countries and cultures. Life starts knocking on the door again.

I feel young. The relentless clock, however, insists on a different age.
Sometimes I am genuinely surprised — even slightly shocked — when I realise that my body is running on a different schedule than my mind. In that gap lie problems. But also direction.

I hold on to an old saying: embrace the tiger and go back to the mountain.
Everyone may interpret it in their own way. For me, it means embracing problems — however irritating or exhausting — not resisting them, and then simply continuing upward. The path undeniably grows steeper the higher you climb.

I notice this winter feeling around me as well. Old friends reappear. Yesterday it led to a beautiful but intense conversation with a female friend that lasted until eight in the morning. Combined with the whisky I had forgotten to put back in the cupboard — and therefore consumed without much awareness — I woke up in the afternoon with a fierce desire to skip the day altogether.

After some clumsy struggling, dead tired but still pleasantly so, I had dinner with my daughter and her family. Last night I slept deeply. Today I climbed the mountain again, whistling. Enjoying the most trivial things.

A doctor once told me that when men are greeted in the morning by a sign of virile health, it usually means the blood vessels and hormones are still doing reasonably well. That is comforting news. In conversations with people my age, this subject often surfaces as a source of concern — sometimes even fear.

My eighty-year-old neighbour and his eighty-five-year-old girlfriend recently whispered to me that, to their own surprise, they experience a kind of adolescent energy — one they celebrate almost daily.

So there is life before death.

Embrace the tiger.
And go back to the mountain