TEXT
MAAIKE HELMER
ILLUSTRATIONS
TAKU BANNAI
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
My daughter’s amazement is not an isolated case;
young children have an unlimited talent for being
amazed at the—in our view—most futile things. The
sun or a rock, for example. They drag a branch home
with them like it’s the greatest treasure. And why
shouldn’t it be? I decided to start behaving more like
the hedgehog and my daughter. This meant allowing
the interval, the nothing-something, to come between
the things that I believe are ‘something’: my daily life
and my thoughts. This required me to ‘let go’ of my
head (and my phone!) and to let relaxation, curiosity
and amazement in.
It wasn’t easy; my head wasn’t designed for this.
Practice does make perfect, however. By continuing
to give these moments a name (I started calling it
‘highlighting’), slowly but surely I got better at it, until
it almost became automatic at a certain point. It really
was a unique experience.DRUM SESSION
After applying my new way of looking at things for a
couple of months, it suddenly took on an incredible
side effect. Because the little moments increasingly
turned out to be big moments (my daughter’s laugh is
still the biggest conceivable moment), I started looking
at my life differently—distinguishing between senseand nonsense, for example. What do I want to invest
my energy in and what do I not want to invest it in
(anymore)? It’s as if the clouds are dissipating, and I am
seeing things more clearly. Days after my conversation
with Muis for this feature, she told me about her own
experience with the concept of nothing-something.
“After our conversation,” she says, “I started paying
attention and that’s when I noticed it. I was standing in
the kitchen and heard rain falling on our roof. It just
sounded like rain at first, but after a while, it felt like
nature’s drum session. Strangely enough, I suddenly felt
connected, simply because I was open to experiencing
it differently. After we spoke, I honestly started seeing
things I hadn’t noticed before. I almost want to say it
was magical, even though it was all so normal.”
And this is it in a nutshell: The magic is in the
mundane, in the space between you and me, in the
composition of the flowers on the table. It’s also in the
wind that blows through your loved-one’s hair. Nothing
is self-evident, and something is self-evident. But then
again, that’s hardly self-evident.