And so the stories are strung together in which I was humbly allowed to learn from the simple and so clear people, without them knowing that they were my teachers. And so often I was inwardly ashamed of my imperfection and secretly and unspokenly hoped that their secrets could be shared with me. Thomas just came to mind. He is a private person who sold his business together with the building at some point and has been living from the proceeds in a small 45 square meter house in the neighborhood for „quite a few years“ (as he says). Modest and frugal, always aware that one day his savings will be exhausted and then „the worst thing in the world“ will be waiting for him again: „Work! A man, centered in many ways without being aware of it, with an annual electricity demand in his house that we have for our refrigerator and freezer alone. If one asks him concerned, how he would get that then, then he says a little embarrassed, because he does not know it even so exactly: „Ooooch, I have there not so the Internet and the computer on. And energy-saving light bulbs. I’m also on the road a lot by bike. I don’t know. Don’t need so much…!“
And when he then tells about his neighbor, whose gardening tools have to be loud and smelly, and who constantly burns his waste paper in the garden, and the whole stench then wafts into Thomas’s bedroom when he is not there and has foolishly left the window open; and who stands with his wife so curiously at the garden fence that Thomas had to build a screen on the terrace in order to be able to sit there in peace with his visitor; and who gives Thomas the envelope with the statements only days later, opened and smelling of cigar smoke, when the private mailman has posted his account statements incorrectly… then I always become quite silent…
And when he then tells me this with equanimity or even rather as a rather amusing incident and says: „Well, these are just old people. You won’t change a thing. „Then I know that with such incidents I could not sleep for nights because of inner restlessness and in the morning I would already stare angrily at the neighbor’s property with the thought to move or worse. Then I suspect that my way could still be far and arduous and envy the one who does not know and yet is so secure in the river and possesses such an invulnerable I. Then I am always very silent and try to find out his secret….