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The end of the race

By Food for thought

The 70s were funky – despite the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, Baader-Meinhof and Chomeini as a finale. The 80s began with a marching rhythm as a prelude, namely the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the stationing of cruise missiles in Europe, escalated to the cacophony of the American Iran-Contra Affair and ended with Punk, No Future and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The 1990s brought Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, the end of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the supposed end of history and the realisation that history continues even without the Iron Curtain – inevitably. For example the second Gulf War and the war in Yugoslavia. The daughters and sons of the 90s understood that compared to their parents, there was little to earn for them. All the more they were intoxicated by the hope of eternal fun and defiantly celebrated against the threatening end of their means.

2000 started with Eminem’s machine gun rap, a bad aftertaste called Bushido, Robbie Williams lonely run and the sobering realisation that every party has to end once. The only question now was how? The answer came by plane. And on September 11, 2001, it hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbol of Western prosperity and growth.

In 2007/2008 came the next blow: the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers with bankers carrying file folders out of the office. Beyoncé raised with “Irreplaceable” the question: Where do I put things now?
With the beginning of the economic crisis, the ground is shaking worldwide – not only on the financial floor of the stock exchanges.

At the turn of the year 2008/2009 Kanye West appears “Paranoid” and broadcasts “Nightmares” through Autotune. But the wave of shock ebbed away. New bonuses are being granted. The hunger of those who want to hoard before the shortage comes. No trace of new consciousness and course correction! And once again the economy took off for another boom! Hooray for the numbers like in old times!

Now in free fall. It sounds like a bang before the requiem.

Imagine all of humanity is sitting together in one car. Since the 1950s, the car has been picking up speed. Accelerating in the 60s and 70s, driving in laps of honour in the 80s and 90s, braking briefly at the turn of the millennium, stopping in 2001 for a minute of mourning, braking again in 2007, but rushing from 2008 into 2009, accelerating again 2010 and running with full speed from 2011 to 2018. Directly towards a wall.

A girl steps in the way in protest. She holds up a stop sign and speaks plain words. They are meant to encourage pausing, but humanity just keeps racing, past her and straight towards the wall. Everyone knows what this wall is made of. Unleashed capitalism, advancing climate change, increasing poverty are perhaps the most important elements. Ignorance is the mortar that holds them together. There is an urgent need for humanity to slow down. But the car just keeps on racing.
What do we hear now? Squealing tires and the glassy sounds of Billie Eilish and Aurora.
The passengers in the car hold on to each other. As if to confirm that they are the kings of the road and thus the masters of the world.

Anyone who is now thinking, well I stepped out of the car because Greta is right, should honestly ask her- or himself: Did I really get out of the car or am I just pretending or imagining it?

In fact, the car is still driving. Not quite as fast as before, because it was decelerated majestically by Corona, the microscopic queen and new ruler of the world. And now the occupants of the car are thinking about how they can leave this crown on the left hand and drive around it on the right to be able to race away from this ugly coeval as fast as possible. Namely further and directly towards the wall.

The order of the day would be to stop, get out and continue on foot. Or even take a bicycle.

What might happen if we refuse?

Perhaps Simon & Garfunkel’s “The sound of silence” will be heard in a modern version: “Hello darkness, my old friend …”

Civilisation, as we had it, if it would be accelerated to high speed again, will drive us on crash course against the wall – if we don’t listen and get out of the car.
What we have learned through viral deceleration: getting out of the car seems possible.

This is the opportunity of the day. Yes, I am optimistic: this is a turning point.

All the more so as we are aware of it.

Stay healthy! All my love!

Yours – Otmar Jenner

P.S. Dear readers, English is not my mother tongue. If you find striking mistakes in the wording, please let me know (oj@otmarjenner.de).

#otmarjenner #corona #covid 19 #SARS-CoV-2 #energyhealing #healing #happiness #heal #healingvibes #energy #spirituality #meditation #spiritual #chakras #goodvibes #selflove #psychic #yoga #energybites #instagood #metaphysical #awakening #spiritualhealing #positiveenergy #energyhealer #consciousliving #consciousness #healingprocess #justhealing #compassion #forgiveness #guidance

Distant proximity

By Food for thought

We smile at each other from a distance. Looking at one another while our bodies have to avoid each other at a distance.When did I last shake hands with someone? I try to remember, but I can’t.
On these days of new and still unfamiliar distance, most people also avoid eye contact. They move in strange serpentines so as not to offend other passers-by. To the lowered glances, ears are often closed as well. The spacial separation is amplified by an acoustic one. Headphones emphasize the hermetic inner space for many. A casual conversation could be infectious. Our life in the new zones of deliberately protected sterility. Our life in the séparée of an increasingly rigorously partitioned and publicly defended individual sphere. A life as if behind a protective screen. It is easy to imagine the protective clothing of medical emergency workers.

A blossom that folds and closes in a paradoxical impulse back to the bud. Maybe it got too much sun.

If humanity were a child, one might think, it would push back into the womb these days.
Whole societies are in shut down and locked in. If the sky is closing, one feels the abyss of comatose standstill and could easily confuse the momentary calm with an eternal one.

“Bunker mood”, observes media theorist Peter Weibel in the present day socium. A contagious phenomenon. Every one for himself among the many. These days, the term hermit has taken on a new meaning. Welcome to the new distance society …

Maybe we have been sitting too close to each other for far too long, and this is what we have now: a virus that forces us to retreat.

Assuming that humanity has actually crawled back into the womb these days. Sure, we know, a state like that won’t last. The child must be born, even if it is called humanity. A lot of things went wrong in his previous life. Or maybe things just got terribly complicated. The economy with its swaps and flops, its derivatives and bailouts that nobody understands anymore. From consumerism and capitalism to the climate crisis, from health care to redistribution – many people have ideas, nobody knows what works anymore. The system has decoupled itself from the people. This frustrates politicians who are supposed to make sustainable and systemically relevant decisions. And it depresses the technocrats who want to optimise systematically. Many people think that little of it succeeds. Capitalism continues to bloat. The world is getting hot flashes. Fire is rolling like a fever in some areas. In others, water eats the coasts. We mourned it, yet we kept taking off and flying. But now finally the planes stay on the ground. For this a virus has landed. It took this arrival in horror to make us pause.

The era of air travel and mass mobility will perhaps be remembered as the era of frenzied standstill. Now begins the era of the standstill of frenzy (Weibel). Airfields where no planes take off, orphaned highways and railway lines, roads so empty that you can picnic on them. A slowdown of life. The quiet cities seem like invitations to wander in them again. The air is better than ever these days.

Suppose not only individuals, but whole civilisations could be reborn. They rise, they fall, they perish, a new one comes into life. One thing is certain, no civilisation is born twice.
What’s obviously dying out: physical proximity. Students in overcrowded lecture halls, employees treading on each other’s toes in offices, shopping-hungry consumers pushing past each other in shopping malls, fans crowding together in stadiums and at festivals, parades with thousands of participants – all that is yesterday’s news. Prohibited in the present, feared in the future because potentially dangerous. Welcome to the new distance society …

Because proximity has become dangerous, we will set up in the distance.

“Only temporarily,” contradict the backward looking among the prophets.
I think they are wrong. After this coronavirus will be before the next and new one. Corona demonstrates that the mass accumulations of modernity offer too much proximity for viruses. They jump from one to the next, microscopic free-riders of mobility, travel by plane as fast as an arrow, hop across national borders and spread congenially continental.
The holiday society in particular has waged war against nature, claims Weibel. “The virus forces us to end this war.”
Hopefully the world will recover now. Hopefully it will also be beneficial for the people. And we’ll find ways to be close to each other even far away. That’s probably what rebirth is all about.

Enjoy the silence! Stay healthy!

Yours – Otmar Jenner

P.S. Just received an audio file via mail – allegedly a message from the Association of German Psychiatrists: “Since we are flooded with calls, we would like to inform you, dear fellow citizens, that it is absolutely normal in the time of quarantine that you start talking to the walls, plants and other things. Please call us only if they answer to you. Thank you.”

P.S (2). Dear readers, English is not my mother tongue. If you find striking mistakes in the wording, please let me know (oj@otmarjenner.de).

#otmarjenner #corona #covid 19 #SARS-CoV-2 #energyhealing #healing #happiness #heal #healingvibes #energy #spirituality #meditation #spiritual #chakras #goodvibes #selflove #psychic #yoga #energybites #instagood #metaphysical #awakening #spiritualhealing #positiveenergy #energyhealer #consciousliving #consciousness #healingprocess #justhealing #compassion #forgiveness #guidance

What is called life?

By Food for thought

“Dear friend and fellow prisoner,” a friend’s message to me today began, “let’s celebrate…”

What? His birthday. Online, in a chat room, as he explains.

What has changed in my life in recent weeks, I have recently been asked.
Everything. To put it bluntly. I’m now getting emails calling me a fellow prisoner.

I thought I was free.

My friend, to make this clear right away, has not committed any crime, has not been convicted of any crime and is therefore not serving any sentence in a state prison.
Nevertheless, a few sentences later in his mail the term “imprisonment” appears. Again as if I was part of it.

The Aztec goddess “Coatlicue” (“The One with the Snake Skirt”): She embodies, it is said, the ambivalence between intimacy and autonomy. This can also be seen in the context of society as a whole.

It cannot be overlooked now: certain freedoms that were once taken for granted, are suddenly curtailed. Suppose there was a need for me to buy new jeans – difficult these days. The relevant shops are closed. Sure, I would still get some pants if I needed them. Probably none that I like, though. At my favourite café the doors are barricaded. Not even coffee to go. Kreuzberg in an artificial coma. An unfamiliar picture.

Since gatherings of more than two people are prohibited in Berlin, I only meet friends individually. At least that intensifies the conversation. I had to cancel seminars. For a visit to my practice you now need a good reason. Many things must now be solved by telephone.
Hardly anything still works as before. The present seems so new, you’d think it had just been invented.

I then called my friend to speak as a fellow prisoner about his and my imprisonment.
“Been out for a long time today”, he explains and reports on an extended walk. Between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. he had walked from Kreuzberg to the eastern outskirts of Berlin. “Walked fast, got far. Wonderful in the sun. I saw my city with new eyes.”
I hear joy in his voice and I notice, “On the loose, if I understand you correctly.”

I know people who take social distancing very seriously. For example, a young couple from Spain lives in the house next door. They haven’t left their shared apartment for about three weeks. Letters and parcels as well as food deliveries have to remain outside the apartment door for 24 hours as a quarantine measure. They communicate with neighbours by calling through the closed door. Only when the hallway is empty do they move the deliveries in.
The real prison these days is fear. Am I imprisoned by fear? I would deny it. I think it’s likely that I will be infected with the new virus in the near future. I am not afraid of that. I am more concerned about the loss of individual freedom of movement and the dismantling of democratic rights. We will soon know how justified this concern is.

As uncomfortable as social distancing may seem. I have no serious problem with it. In fact, suddenly people I know only by sight greet me from afar. And as they greet, they smile. In the past, they almost ran over me, stomped past me without a greeting, without looking at me, and they didn’t smile either.
The (almost) standstill in the mechanics of the city creates a whole new, unusual freedom. Sounds probably strange, maybe also not very empathetic, because people suffer from the current viral consequences.
But while things are currently getting tight in some areas, for example in your own home, when the ceiling slowly falls on your head, new rooms are opening up at the same time. Even if they are thought spaces.
What do I want? What do I need? What do I enjoy? What do I love? What frightens me? What gives me courage? What gives me joy? How can I find fulfilment?
The slowing down of the world almost automatically generates a concentration on essential questions. The fog of distraction lifts. Answers become visible.
I too wandered through the city today. Explorations in the new space of silence. In some faces I believed to read findings.
What does life mean to me?, I thought.

Is happiness standing at the foot of a mountain asking, “Shall I come up to you?
The mountain answers: Stay where you are! I’m coming down to you!

Even if nobody can say exactly what life actually is – I feel we have every reason to kneel before it.

Yours – Otmar Jenner

P.S. Dear readers, English is not my mother tongue. If you find serious mistakes in the wording of an article, please let me know (oj@otmarjenner.de).

#otmarjenner #corona #covid 19 #SARS-CoV-2 #energyhealing #healing #happiness #heal #healingvibes #energy #spirituality #meditation #spiritual #chakras  #goodvibes #selflove #psychic #yoga #energybites #instagood #metaphysical #awakening #spiritualhealing #positiveenergy #energyhealer #consciousliving #consciousness #healingprocess #justhealing #compassion #forgiveness #guidance

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