11 Jun A hard life

Pim makes a joke and places his hand on Paul Rosenmöller’s shoulder. Hands off,’ he responds sharply, ‘hands off, hands off.’ And then, with a twinkle in his eye: ‘I definitely have to say that to you.’ The audience laughs. When the laughter dies down, Pim jokes: ‘You’d like that, Paul.’ You don’t see it, but you sense that Rosenmöller’s fierce ‘Don’t touch me’ has hurt him. A little later in the debate, Rosenmöller lashes out: ‘What I notice about you is that when you’re hit where you’re vulnerable, you make a show and don’t respond substantively, and that’s your weakness.’ The audience applauds long and approvingly. Pim’s hand goes to his breast pocket. He removes his hands-free microphone and places it on the table. Paul extends a hand. Pim waves the outstretched hand away and stands up. A loud booing erupts. Pim leaves the room.

A hard life
It’s a scene from the documentary ‘Fortuyn: Un-Dutch,” currently showing on the Dutch televison channel NPO. The documentary runs for eight hour-long episodes. The visual narrative goes much further and deeper than just Fortuyn. There’s no commentary whatsoever, just snippets of film, testimonies, footage of deprived neighborhoods, footage of immigrants who speak broken Dutch and struggle to integrate, and footage of ever-increasing numbers of clicking and filming cameras following every inch of Fortuyn. ‘I look like a movie star,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s a hard life,’ he replies to a journalist who exclaims that he chose it himself.

The history we’re watching is our own. Many of us experienced it firsthand 25 years ago. In the fifth episode, both planes pierce the Twin Towers. The shockwave lingers for an entire episode. Fortuyn’s assassination is depicted by a lonely pool of blood in the empty parking lot.

A slow river
The documentary doesn’t try to impose an opinion on you for a moment. It shows the environment in which this event took place. And that environment flows, like a long, slow river. Events build on each other and then disappear again. Politicians stand on the stage and descend from it. Afterwards, I was left with an empty feeling, the feeling that the river carries everything away, good and bad, pain and joy, pros and cons. What remains are the moments that touched me. They linger in my mind like small testimonies. Like that moment when Rosenmöller truly touched Fortuyn by shouting ‘Don’t touch me’ three times. And Fortuyn wasn’t acting by getting up and leaving.

Time flow
The time management method I’ve called Time Surfing, like this documentary, gives a place to both the large river that forms the overview and the smaller streams that represent the important themes in your life. Only when you have the big picture clearly in mind can you give the right direction and weight to the components. By practicing Time Surfing, you always take the right action at the right time. Moreover, you experience each activity fully, and then let it merge back into the bigger picture. People sometimes think Time Surfing is vague, but the opposite is true. These are seven concrete steps that form the key to acting calmly and with conviction, no matter what comes your way.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch