A Walk in the Woods and the Next Ten Years

I’ve rigged a small music studio setup by the window in one of the living rooms here in Norway. Double speaker sets, a couple of Macs and the necessary extras. Sis came over to have lunch with dad today and I joined them in the kitchen. Afterwards I was gonna sit down to do some admin at one of the computers but the view was just too beautiful. I forgot to tell you, there’s a window with almost panoramic view over the city and surrounding hills in front of me when I’m on the computers.

I was dreaming of mountain trekking, but haven’t had the big push to go do it lately. Just been dreaming of the sceneries but I’ve been spending time in the woods instead. It takes less commitment and can be more spontaneous, as it is just a quick drive away and requires no equipment.

I didn’t know whether I was gonna end up in town or in the woods so I left the house in rather normal clothes. No backcountry stuff. I really should be working and writing e-mails, but there was no way I would be able to focus with a crisp frosty view of the hills bathed in sunlight in front of me.

First stop was the hills I can see from the window. The road up the last leg of the hills was icy. I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to get all the way up but I was in the end. The car started sliding a couple of times, but I managed to correct it quite quickly.

I got a surprise when I reached the car-park, right under the timberline. I couldn’t believe how many mountains on the Eastern horizon was already covered in snow! I mean, it’s just a drizzle for now and you can’t ski on it, but from a difference it doesn’t make a difference. –Just that this looks distinctly like Autumn and not ski-season! Deep green valleys with towering white mountains above, flushed in midday sunlight. I took a couple of pictures, but having just a phone it was impossible to capture the impression of grand mountains as far away as the Swedish border. It was worth a try though…

When I started to walk I realized city shoes and cotton socks were probably not a hit after a frost-night, but the road was nice and it soon became warmer. I stopped a couple of places alongside a lake. –Just sat on some rocks for a while looking at the day. The sun was shining and in the hillside the temperature was getting more comfy. At the second place I stopped I saw some cranberries by the side of the track. There ain’t many left now, but you can still find a few good ones. Oooh, and then I saw some more up the hill. –and then some more… and so it went. And then I realized I was almost up on a small ridge and guessed that there would be really nice view up there. Besides, I shouldn’t be too far away from one of those little roads that criss-cross up the face of the small mountain to give access to the army’s installations, and for Summer maintenance of the ski lift. I was sure it would be nice up there!

A few minutes later I was sliding down three steps for every step I took forward and was revealing hitherto unknown layers of wet dirt under a beautiful top-layer of Erica and grass. I saw my light brown suede shoes change colour, to a colour I didn’t like. It was actually quite ironic! I always used to walk around in funky light trekking shoes before I left Norway. They were fashionable in Norwegian cities and I was always prepared when the day presented me with a challenge. How many other people’s shoes have I messed up by the words: “oooh, come check this out!” It was the mountain’s ironic revenge on me and my life! “Wahaha! –have you become a city boy while abroad? Payback time for all the crazy things you’ve made other people do!” Ok, I got it! You win! And it was actually quite fun. Besides, the ridge was just a few more steps away now!

The ridge that looked so nice and dry turned out to be some old brown grass with a marsh behind. On the other side there was no smooth descent into the woods, but a small cliff with a very steep hill under. And as for the little road I had dreamt of, I was far away and there was another marsh and another leg of woods between it and me. I was not too happy about the marsh-idea on behalf of my shoes.

Counting the way I had come up I could now:
A. Chose the lesser of three evils.
B. Chose the most fun of three evils.

Fun is good! There had to be a way through the cliffs!

There was!

After a while I came to a flat plane in the hill under the cliffs. It looked like someone had chipped it out of the rock at some point and I thought “what a lovely spot to put a cabin.” I reckoned that was probably what it had been used for once. I made my way through the thick branches of some threes, and voilà! –there I stood facing right into the wall of a small cabin!

I could vaguely remember the place from many years back. I don’t know who owns it, but it looks like it could have been quite nice at some point. Now woods were enveloping it and someone had ungraciously removed the front door. The cabin’s days were numbered. It looked so sad! Looking like a little 1950’s holiday pearl, it had been left to die. I do think about that quite a bit these days. How things die and give space for something else. Chiefly things like innovation and initiatives. It says about King David that when he had served his generation he went to be with his fathers. His generation! Anything with the word “generation” in it is often surrounded in hype, popular culture or political disagreements on care of the elderly. But more fundamentally, generation means something “finite.” –A timeline cut in both ends. A birth and a death. That’s the first historic consideration you can make out of it: “What’s the container?” –and only then can you ask: “What is it filled with?” Time-container: 1642–1651, filled with what: E.g. The English Civil Wars. We’re all gonna die, and how sad it may be, this once lovely little cabin had served it’s last guests. But the track had not! Countless footsteps that had once trafficked the hill still left their mark. Once nature has accepted a trodden trail it does not give it up very fast. I later found more of these old trails that I knew. People don’t know them today, and they went out of use before my time, but I once used to know them before they closed up too much. Now they manifest in wet grooves in the terrain filled with pebbles or as open rock in a wet hillside. Nature is slowly swallowing them, and you won’t know what they are unless you know what you’re looking for. Anyway, my shoes and I were grateful to all the people that had once walked up and down the hill. We had had enough mud for a while.

I was back on the road again. I didn’t want to follow it all the way to the end, so I decided to aim for a small hill before the vast marshlands that lead you down towards the fjord on the other side. I sat up there for a while enjoying the view and taking some half successful camera-phone pictures before walking back.

I used to visit places like this, sometimes several times a week. And I would live for the snow and mountains on the horizon. I’m looking back at an era and I’m not really sure what I’m doing in Norway yet. I like being home more and more, but last time really lived here I was this active little trekking-guide/ skier kid. I don’t think I had realized fully how much older I had become, until I looked into some familiar old mirrors I knew here in Norway this Summer. I’ve often felt older than I am, so I might just be younger than I think… as usual. But still…

After a while I came back to the car and tried to shoot some more pictures of the snowy mountains on the boarder to Sweden. Big green woodlands and a grey/white horizon under a blue sky. Really nice, but the mountains were too far away to catch them properly in the frame of a phone-camera.

Next, I set sail for the sea and decided to drive around the hills down by the fjord. Picturesque was the word, but I was just driving right through it all, catching every impressionist’s impression in the same big bag. –Like a little kid with an insect net in the wind. It’s like “good view = happy, period.”

I thought of the mountain treks I had lead and all the people I had introduced to the outback, the youth works and organisations I had taken part in, and the free spirited crazy things I had loved so much and wondered if I had left anything lasting? Karen Blixen’s words played in my head in Meryl Streep’s voice a couple of times: “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?”

I was 17 and wanted to climb everything with a slope, ski everything that was white and paddle in every little stream the rain left. I used to think of all the fun I was gonna have the ten next years; now, the last decade. Looking back, I got almost everything I dreamed of and a whole lot more. But with time I have stopped asking things like: “will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?” or whatever would be the Norwegian equivalent of Baroness Blixen’s African adventures.

The King’s writer was right that David only passed on when he had completed the task of serving his generation. But no matter how learned the writer was, he didn’t have the benefit of our three thousand years of hindsight. People that go above and beyond in serving their generations usually leave a much more far-reaching legacy. Do you carry dreams of how society, your family, your city, your school or your business should look like? If you give it heart and soul, the next generation may still not sing a song of you, but they’ll be lifted up on the shoulders of your work. My grandparents left my sister and me some of their savings. Not little and not a fortune, but they invested what they could in us. They had been gone for roughly ten and fifteen years when I was a mid-twenties student in Singapore with urgent need for a very expensive Mac to mix music on. For the rest of my life I’ll know that some of my most important skills were obtained, and some of my most important essays were written on the back of the work invested by my grandparents. Proverbs 13:22 says that, “a good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children,” and thus we see that he is allowed to serve more than just his own generation.

I hope the next ten years are less defined by who I am and what I do, but more defined by what I leave.

Loud Cry in the Silent Night

So if I left, would it disappear?
The slight banner of disastrous steps to the tier?

Now left behind like barren land,
how could East of Eden ever provide for a man?

So if I not, but burnt it hot,
the fiery promises escapades won't stop...

But promises, hey! -what shall I say?
Has wind and rain now yield to me?

But if you say the dice is thrown,
and if you say all chances are sown...

I stand but for a moment still,
and in thine eyes I sense no victorious thrill!

For sure as man one day shall die,
if he himself is full measure he swiftly should say goodbye!

I'd think I would be better off,
in the hope that my name's letters were gained in the tough!

To the wind and the rain, for it all was design,
if not the rock holds it's own mindless mind!

Or what would the waves tell you if you asked them your worth?
For so many a man was killed by the surfs.

The chance and the surf has this one thing to share,
they won't cut off the time for those no longer here.

For time and chance provided, it all was decided,
the meaning of random forever be fired.

So if he then lost, against a worthy cause,
where then could the strider again find a provider?

For much as it feels like when surf hits the sand,
if aims are missed it is sad like lost land.

And if it is lost for this moment in time,
it means that the intent was for it to be mine!

In spite of the gone, the head be held high,
as a soldier till he comes home or dies.

The only thing pondered quite simply is this:
that if we have feelings, then who did us kiss?
and if we have aims, then who sets the games?
and if then we miss, is it like tumbling sand in a little kid's pile and no bigger bliss?

For if the evolvement was right,
the rational would have developed the irrational and the day could be night!

And sure as the sane is sure not insane,
I lay on man's destiny forever a claim!

For if all this was given to me and to you,
then there is more than the random in the clouds and the blue!

And that's what then hurts when the arrow's too low,
that there is no such thing as "random" for the angle of the bow!

By days to come I'd much like to see,
the lines and bearings, the paths of the free.

For many strolls in the dark of the woods,
raise your glasses!
For them all to be past in our wishes like ashes!

For more days graciously delivered,
and sunlight on hills over hills we can bear.

Men of the free, attach your loyalty,
raise your sceptres,
all we all long for cometh here after!

I'm sorry if tears felt like bruises to the faint,
but no one are dead while there's still blood running in his wains!

Please give me more of the wine in that toast,
for the days we shall live and no past to boast!

2+2=0

Orange is the new red on recording-ppm metres, some say that 30 is the new 20 for age, and 50 is the new 40 and so on.

I was thinking... If 5 was the new 4, then 4 squared would be 2,236067977, and 4+4 would be 10. You could say you'd get a whole lot more value for money, so maybe it could prove to be a good monetary reform in a time of credit crisis. However if 2000 was the new 1700 I'd be 300 years older! I'm not sure whether that would give me extra credit and experience on my CV or simply less pension. Or maybe no pension at all since Otto von Bismarck had not had time to invent the system yet! So maybe we shouldn't go there, but it would be good fun to see Mozart perform live in Prague!

But lets not leave the numbers quite yet. For if we give the above mentioned 2,236067977 (and a few more digits) to the power of 4 we'd get 25. And since 25 is a product of 5 times 5, then for everyone who just became 300 years older, our 4*4 is 25 in a modern context. If anyone then should make the mistake as to take an old 4 and subtract 5 from it and label it "the new 2," we can easily see that 2+2 is 0.

There was a lot of noise when I walked through town tonight. Many people going out to party. One rule of leadership says that "leaders celebrate." It is true indeed that past milestones should be celebrated, but I don't believe all the party people are celebrating milestones.

After I ended high-school I told a friend that I was worried. I had ran away to the mountains every weekend thus far, to escape the clutches of boredom and many pointless classes by teachers who's knowledge was becoming pasé. I did vocational electronics and had many great teachers, but especially with a couple of them we spent a lot of time on irrelevant material from yester-years. ...if not yester-decades! I was worried. I didn't know if I had anything to "run away from anymore." My friend is wise and said that maybe it was on time for me to find something to "run to" instead of "from." I'm not sure if I have found it still. But more so, if milestones are celebrated... If the celebrations in town tonight are running away from the milestones, we reject the hights we have ascended; and if they are running towards them, people should be even higher on excitement by the end of the night and reasonably sober! And rightly we think that there are no milestones involved and people are running from the mundane at the most articulate, and where there is no articulation the celebration is becoming a mundane pattern itself. If cities were to bless us with the combined strengths of human society and support, division of labour, and entertainment; then the city has surprisingly many critics in our days. On the streets tonight it seemed like the "Big Issue" sellers and those who sell various party apparel were the only ones with an agenda. It seems like a lot of people need something to "run to!"

If kaleidoscopes were the new blue, I'd be dizzy when I looked at the sky.
If beer was the new water, a lot of English people would be happy.
If sparkling water was the new petrol, I'd be drinking petrol all night long baby!
If peace was the old war, then Charles 1st would not be decapitated.

I'm hungry...