Apprecciation ...

What about Sri Lanka ...

… years after my travel to Sri Lanka, my thoughts, heart and soul are still coming back to some certain moments, imprints and memories. Maybe some values I've learned and took on along my way? Maybe some special cultural habits, that touched my heart more than others? That make me love the people I've met and showed me this particular custom even more? That make me think of them and send them love, happiness and a light heart full of daily joy of life. I hope they are all good and fine and without worries.

On my blog there are so many empty slots I've missed to shared with you, while the daily motion of travel excitements carried me through countries, time and cultures … Sri Lanka is far away and still so present … in my heart, my though processes and in my life. I like to dive into certain moments, what they gave me, what those people shared with me.

I am lucky. I have the time. I am allowed to think and love and remember. Too noisy are our lives, that let us forget to value the lived moments. Too speeded up our daily marathon of responsibilities, to do's and actions. Too little time we take to feel gratitude for what our lives present us with. Now it seems there is the time, to deeply remember and share, what Sri Lanka thought me …

… about APPRECIATION …
 

In Sri Lanka, there are doing it … It was my time at the English Bank … and for the weekends, some of the students visited there parents and when they came back to the English Bank they got from their mothers a huge packed banana leave, filled with rice and vegetables and other stuff … and they placed the banana leave dish in the middle of the table and a whole bunch of boys gathered around the table to eat with their fingers from this shared dish.

Why is this precious moment and those happening so present for me? How is it related to appreciation? Well, they eat their food with hands and fingers … every time by the way … and this is for me something, that they appreciated the food they eat more with, than if they would use cutlery like we do in the west. With eating food with cutlery we de-attache our self from it. We are not as close to the food like when we would take it with our hands and bring it to our mouth. We put something else in between us and the food, using cutlery. For me, the gesture of eating food with their hands, carries something magical and special with it. They are more connected to the food intake. They give them more attention and therefore more value, than we do it in the west, eating quickly in between stops on our way from one to the next daily destination, we have to attempt to. Life in the west is so much more structured towards multi tasking and forgetting of taking time to appreciate what we are doing. We don't eat, we walk and eat, stand and eat, think and eat. We don't eat eat … and those Sri Lankans who eat their daily food with hands value this food so much.

… and they share food every time with all people who are around. It doesn't matter. If you are around and food is around, it gets shared equally between all who are present. That is magical and beautiful as well … a special in those moments, when they feed each other food from one hand into another mouth. Something very awkward for us from the west in the very first moment. Let it sink in and think about the closeness and friendship the express with such an intimate gesture? … But you also have the same custom, as sign of respect, when the housemother is feeding the birthday student the cake from her hands into his mouth … and then the intimate gesture turns into something worn off by time and tradition, looses its glance and becomes something typical in their lives, they don't even think about. At the end they were just a bunch of young friends sharing a meal together and having a good time.

But they share, from the bottom of the heart. They live community more than the west. They believe, feel and live, that the community is much stronger and more important than the single one and that each single one is strengthened the community to make the community as well as one self survive. Without the community the one can't live. The community is as strong as its members. Each member is as strong as the community. They live equality.