11 Jun Inhabitants of the Galaxy

‘Poff’, we hear, followed by a scream. And immediately ‘Poff’ again. I turn my head and look over the busy square. I see a huge bouncy castle with an axle in the middle on which is a horizontal floating tree trunk that swings around like a giant pointer and mows everything in its path. Fortunately, the pointer is made of plastic and filled with air, but the speed of the pointer makes it sweep the participants in the game down with force. They form a circle at the end of the tree. When the tree is spinning, you have to jump at exactly the right moment. That requires timing and flexibility. A dull horn sounds. The turn is over. A new group of children flows onto the pillow, the others leave the place with excited faces and red heads.

To warm up, a boy with a brown cap carelessly does a somersault backwards. ‘Wow’ shouts our circle of friends who have now started to follow the spectacle together. The new jumpers all appear to be young and practiced. The tree trunk turns its dangerous circles without knocking anyone down. Only when he suddenly changes direction and turns the other way, he does make victims here too.

A really good man
We decide to wander on between the orange crowd on our way to café ‘Het Noorderlicht’. Sander runs into an acquaintance. Why not? When the ferry spit out its crammed orange cargo on the quay after the calm crossing in North, we looked at a dancing crowd. There was a disco tent with heavy bass tones that made the island vibrate. ‘Come on,’ I say to my wife, ‘let’s go and have a look’. While we are strolling in the direction of the beats, someone breaks away from the dancers: ‘Ha, you guys here too?’ We are now on the road with those friends.

We see a green field fenced with a sheep fence where, between all the orange, there is still an empty place where we settle down. Next to us, a family speaks Italian. ´Wouldn’t you rather be in Rome?´ I ask, because on King’s Day you can talk to everyone. The son, a boy of about 14 years old, looks at me inquisitively as if he wants to assess whether I am worth his answer. `We are from Rome,´ he proudly agrees,´last week we were at the commemoration.´ And then: ‘Two weeks ago we were still with him’ he says as if he knew the Pope personally and he was one of his best friends. Now he kneels in front of us to make himself better understood. ‘He was a really good man’ he says seriously with the emphasis on ‘really’ and falls silent. Then he makes a head movement as if he is looking at the Pope somewhere in the clouds. He stands up, gives me a mild look and follows his parents.

Galaxy inhabitants
In their place comes mother and daughter in shining orange glimmer overalls who neatly roll out a towel over the grass. ‘Are you from the Galaxy?’ I try, because we have become generous with jokes by now. They speak Spanish. Suddenly I get the feeling that I am a Galaxy resident myself. Shyly, the Spanish stars answer. Maybe with my comment I make them doubt their outfit. ‘You look beautiful’ I say with a broad grin.

Nice to notice that King’s Day is also international. As a people, we are lucky that our king has a color as a surname and that we can all express our solidarity with this color. I think it’s special every year, this party in which we all smile at each other.

Feeling connected
Feeling connected can not be so obvious at other times. Somewhere in your youth you have translated the message of the circle of educators around you to: I don’t belong. Such an old belief has an annoying tendency: if youth is long gone and the educators of that time are now elderly, this person continues to think of himself or herself as an outsider. It is as if a deep groove has been carved in the brain that keeps repeating this message. It doesn’t even have to come from childhood, by the way. We often feel like spectators in this world instead of connected to everything around us.
In the workshop ‘De Innerlijke Metamorfose in zelfbeeld en emoties‘ you will be given simple but extremely effective tools to let old beliefs such as ‘I don’t belong’ lose their meaning and to let new characteristics such as ‘I feel connected’ grow in you.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch