When you are young you feel like the whole world is still ahead of you and you have oceans of time. I thought the same when I was young. Not that I wasted much time because I wanted to get ahead in life and that meant hard work and learning.
Essence of life
From an early age I had the idea that I had not just landed on earth for no reason. Life had to be more than ‘survival’ but what then was the meaning of my existence, I did not know. So I went looking. There was much I didn’t know about. I discovered literature and in doing so made my world bigger. Then art followed. My first art book was “Painting in the Twentieth Century” by Werner Haftmann. I looked at the book hundreds of times. I was hungry and wanted to discover.
Spirituality
Although literature and art touch on many essential things in life I had not, to my mind, caught the essence of life yet. In retrospect, you can’t when you are young but I was very impatient at the time. I wanted to understand the here and now and that led to my spiritual path. This is not surprising because in the 1970s the New Age movement arose in which people strived for unity of man, nature and cosmos. There was hope that a new age would emerge, one of light and love. The idea was that you could achieve this by working on your own spiritual growth/personal development, that it would lead to ‘becoming whole’ and would have an effect on your environment. That seemed to make sense to me to work on. In short, I threw myself into it and devoured many books about it.
Photography
Later, my son Raoul studied documentary photography at art school. What he did, learned and discovered there made me curious. A whole new world opened up to me, especially the world of documentary photography. This form of photography is fascinating because it opens up unknown worlds/situations. I read reviews about photographers and visited many exhibitions.
Seeking spirit
Tina Turner has been my inspiration to explore Buddhism more closely, especially Nichiren Buddhism. Lucia Rijker (kickboxer), Herbie Hancock (jazz pianist) and Wayne Shorter (jazz saxophonist) were also examples in this – see website SGI USA. Nichiren Buddhism talks about having a ‘seeking spirit’. That it is important to keep an open eye/mind. That appealed to me. I spent many years studying this philosophy of life.
Now
I still have the same hunger for getting to the bottom of life, trying to understand other views, beliefs and cultures. I have come a little closer to answering my life question (the meaning of life) but still, even though I am now retired, I am running out of time. There is still so much to discover and deepen. Life is never boring! It remains wonderfully challenging! Johanna
