Blog Archive

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

3. A place to stay

So this is the number 3 on my previous list of "what is happiness"

A place to stay


my room in berlin



A place to stay can mean many different things. It could be simply a shelter under which you sleep every night. It could be a tent that you carry on your back and that is your home wherever you need to sleep. It can also be a house, a flat or a room. In my case it is a shared flat in Berlin, Germany. But for a German citizen I have the privilege to travel and stay almost everywhere on earth (I know a lot of people don't have that privilege and I find that so unfair and stupid). With that privilege comes the question "Where should your home be?". Should I stay in my hometown Berlin? Or could I also imagine living somewhere else?

I lived in San Francisco for about a year when I was 11 years old. I now stay in Morocco for a few months every year. I lived in South Tirol for half a year in 2009. But I feel very rooted in Berlin. Not only because of the city itself, but because of the people here. I have a community of open minded and playful people around me. My generation of Berliners is really about staying a child in some ways. And I don't mean in a stupid way, but in a very wise kind of way. The people here have realized that it's not about the money or about being serious and having a big car, the people here have come to the wisdom, that being happy is the thing we should strive after. And being truly happy means, the people here stay playful, they enjoy, they care about the things around them, they want to live a good life with less stress, more laughter and with everyone around them being happy.


Like most Berliners my age I live in a shared flat. We are 4 flatmates in one of these big old flats of the Berlin houses that were build before 1920. We call these houses "Altbau" which means something like "oldbuild" and has it's special charm. Our ceilings are more than 4 meters high, the walls are made of bricks and the floor is made of wooden planks like the ones used on a boat. I love this flat and we get many compliments from visitors. And it's really affordable for a philosophy student like me.

For me the key to being happy in my home is minimalism. I really love having enough space for my thoughts and giving only few well chosen objects the space to be recognized. Minimalism is really a lifestyle and a thing you can get into as a hobby as well. For me it means being free of clutter and free of things that make my life heavy and chaotic. I'm definitely planning to make another post about minimalism, because it is such a good thing.

giving this cactus all the attention it needs


Another thing I really love for making my place the place where I want to stay are plants. That's why I searched for a room with a balcony and a lot of light. Plants are so beautiful, they also produce oxygen and clean the air for you. And green is the color that gives you relieve and makes all the stress of the day go away. It's also fun to grow your own plants out of avocado pits and other things.

my own banana tree


For making my place a healthy place to stay, I used only natural materials like wood for the furniture and chalk to paint the naked walls white. Chalk is really cheap, totally natural and it also keeps the air clean. No fungus can grow on chalk walls and the white is very bright and reflecting the light almost like snow.

What does "a place to stay" mean for you?






2. Good food

Hello again!

I am talking today about the second point on my previous list "What is happiness".

2. Good food

lunch during summer



So what exactly is good food?

I've read somewhere that instead of depriving ourselves from foods that we think we shouldn't eat, we need to learn how to nourish ourselves. Especially as women, we need to take care of a good and happy relationship with food and eating habits. A lot of women in the western societies suffer from a weird and guilty relationship with the food they eat. I had my own experiences with binge eating. It started in puberty (of course) and lasted on until my early twenties. As a child I was rather skinny and the type of child that you would have to call a hundred of times to come to eat dinner. I was more interested in playing and feeling totally unaware of hunger, so my mom would have to remind me to eat and motivate me with little tricks. She bought plates with pictures at the bottom so I would eat up to see the nice pictures.
Puberty came and with it came the shame. As my body started developing curves and breasts quite early around the age of 11, I wasn't prepared for all the sexism and comments that would wash over me every day. And I was also dancing in a ballet school with some ambitions. Of course the body image of the traditional ballet environment wasn't healthy and so I started to feel guilty of eating. I felt like I shouldn't eat, I didn't deserve to eat because I wasn't thin enough.
At this point people would conclude that I developed anorexia. But I didn't. Instead I developed a binge eating disorder. But back then in 1999 there wasn't a name for this invisible kind of eating disorder. My habits were unsteady. Sometimes I skipped meals or didn't eat much of it, only to later get a hungry craving for something (my cravings were typically vanilla yogurt and cheese that I was secretly sneaking out of the fridge and eating it guiltily and quickly and unrecognized by anyone). I got addicted to sugar and ate big amount of sweets and ice cream, regretting everything later, hating my uncontrolled self, wishing I would have more discipline. Whenever I lost weight in controlled times, I got compliments from my family and attention from the boys in school. Whenever I bounced back into cravings and put on weight, guys were commenting it, making fun of it, my family making passive aggressive comments about me eating everything from our fridge and getting fat. My ballet teacher was not amused and in a big fight with her I ran out of my dance school and quit ballet forever.
With the lack of exercise in the following year, I got even chubbier. And hated the food more and more. And I felt like the food hated me too.
Only when I moved out of my moms house and lived together with healthy young women with good eating habits, I learned to have some positive feelings for food again. I educated myself about binge eating and what you can do about it, I read why "french women don't get fat" and reflected about eating culture, I relearned the habit to cook proper meals every day, sit down and give myself some quality time with my food. And I learned what it means for me to nourish myself with good food.

I guess everyone has to make their own journey with these things and learn what good food means to oneself. For me this is a list of things that for me define good food:

1. It is appreciated and tastes good:
So no artificial low fat slimming shakes and other tasteless trash. But something with a lot of taste and butter and herbs and spices and prepared with love.

2. It looks and smells good: I make sure to look at it and smell it and put things in a nice way.

3. It is the right amount: I make sure to eat when I'm hungry to fill my empty stomach, but it is neither too much nor too little. And I would never starve myself or keep eating endlessly after not feeling hungry anymore.

4. It is fair and doesn't harm anyone: I make sure to buy only organic food. And especially for food from non-western countries I make sure it's also fairtrade (for example coffee, chocolate, bananas, mangoes, coconut and tea). And for all the dairy and meat I buy only a little bit knowing exactly that the cows, chicken and pigs had spent most of their life time outside with healthy food and enough space to be happy. I also prefer to get regional and seasonal fruits and vegetables.

chocolateria kreuzberg


What is "good food" for you?

1. An interesting occupation that keeps my mind busy


In my post "what is happiness" i made a list of things that I consider important for being a happy woman. Here I want to take a closer look at the first point on the list.

fixing a surfboard before redesigning it

1. An interesting occupation that keeps my mind busy

 

What kind of thing could that be? Well my experience in life shows me, that the crucial thing about that is: It's not only one thing. I'm a person who is easily bored by routine and repetition, I want to have a healthy mix of different activities that are still all rooted in the same idea or belong to the same striving.

Let's check out all these activities. Lately I was quite dedicated to feminism. There are different forms of feminism, but I mean something deeply anthropological that is in your body and in your mind. For me that was manifested in playing football for an NGO that works for female rights in Arabic countries.
Also I started picking up all these sports that I find kind of cool: Started with snowboarding and football, then surfing and skateboarding. I discovered a lot of things on the way. In almost every sport scene there is a little feminist department growing just now. I discovered the
Cooler Magazine (boardsports for women), I discovered the Lipstick Productions (a team of pro snowboarder women making movies), I discovered Suck my Trucks (a skateboarding workshop for women) and many other things on the way.


my selfmade Longboard at Tempelhof Berlin

Another type of work that keeps me happy was a seminar in the Technical University of Berlin: The so called Energie-Seminar. The features of that occupation were the following:

Groups of 30 people worked on one project, the 30 people were divided in smaler expert groups and worked on individual tasks. The expert groups regularly presented their work to each other and evaluated and inspired each other. In each small group the work was also distributed in a way that each person of the group was an expert for her own topic of interest. All the projects of the seminar where about sustainability and green progress. It was so inspiring and interdisciplinary! Another good thing about that seminar was the fact that we ourselves were the ones to define our own tasks. We planned our own projects and set our own goals. That was so empowering and motivating!

I will keep looking for that kind of inspiring and productive environments to blossom with all my interests and talents.

 

What were your best experiences with things that kept you happily occupied in a productive way? Please share your experiences with us!