In the morning, I cycled to Strathfield to meet Katherine, who also had been a couchsurfer in Vienna. We had been meeting in 2015 on my first trip to Sydney with stops for visiting friends, too, and she had been saying something interesting and important in that short time of meeting. She suggested that I am having the best time of my life (not only in the 49 days of that trip but in general) and after a short time of thinking I happily agreed.
There are two conflicting concepts (regarding at least my life). One says, everything is gone, I have had my chance and I am just waiting to get old enough for dying (short version) and the other says I am still able to do things, to change something, maybe even enjoy life and it is the easier part of my life, because there are no big struggles, I am in a position of stability and safety regarding many aspects and have a global network of friendship. In a way both concepts are true, because I needed to give up hope and expectations for this desirelessness that made things possible blossoming on these for a while nearly empty grounds. And now these words of Katherine helped me to make a shift from:
“It is all over but still some nice things can happen” to “I am grateful how many nice things are happening!”
We met in a Korean café and talked for a while,
Katherine now is a doctor working in a hospital as last part of this education and probably because of this working environment she frequently catches illnesses and didn’t feel too well.
On the way back, I wondered about all those car drivers who prefer building up a traffic jam to having some motion or exercise and moving on faster on a bike or using public transport. Of course, there might be situations where it is not only more convenient but also more efficient to use a car, but I fear that many people don’t even thing on alternatives being alternatives.
At 14:00 the “working bee” in the community garden started and more and more people came, doing a little work each and summing up to clean the place and maintaining and nursing the plantings.
At 16:00 it changed to the party part of this gathering, many of the neighbours had brought something to eat and now were standing in small groups for talking and eating.
I had the impression that the idea behind such a community garden was put into effect. But there are difficulties to master in the long run of every project that is based on commitment, because some do more, some do less, some want to usurp everything and others just want to contribute to keep the idea alive but they get more and more to do until they are exhausted. And you must meet frustrations like theft and vandalism in this case.
So, I hope this project can stay alive and can grow more than plants for many years ?
In the evening, I looked at the photos we had been taking with my new camera and saw that half of them are little videos were you can take out a photo. I had seen that the camera was slow until we pressed the 4K-button to change back to normal but now I saw the effect:
It is a much longer process to open these vids in the proper program to extract photos and then you have 50-100 different pics you can choose. If you have one photo, you can decide to keep it or not, but with so many options it is harder to come to a decision.
I will not press the 4K-button on purpose too often…