You have to suffer on the way to make your love affair worth while

All I see are people with nice shells. Beautiful clothes, pretty hair and makeup, a new iPhone in their hands. But I can’t help myself from wondering if they’re truly happy living in this spinning world called society. And to what cost?

I find myself being put on the other side, the outside, where all the news, latest fashion trends and hits on the radio haven’t really reached me. With some kind of hawk eye view where you can see everything so clear, that the way we live also destroys us.

Only just managing to keep our heads over the surface in a system where buying a lot of clothes that we’ll never really use is accepted, shopping at the grocery store where huge amounts of food is going to get thrown away has become normal and just buying toothpaste gets tricky when there are at least 30 brands to pick from.

I guess that’s why I love spending time outside, up high climbing or skiing in the mountains or close to the ocean. It brings a calm, a natural state of mind to carry with you in all kinds of situations. Into the most crowded cities where that kind of calm is much harder to find at times.

I guess that all the time spent skiing in Chamonix around some of the world’s most beautifully scarce mountains and enormous moving glaciers has led me on the road to becoming more aware of the spinning world around me.

And I can’t even count all those times I’ve had that feeling of total joy, feeling of an absolute perfection in a moment, total happiness, wearing that silly childish smile on my face after only having made some turns in that fluffy white snow together with people I love. And maybe most importantly it has brought me these deeper thoughts and feelings that we just have to protect what we love.

What else should we do?

Well, we should go outside play more, but in order to get there we often use the car, take a plane to go skiing or the boat to cross the seas. Wearing a jacket with materials that are dangerous for both ourselves and the ecosystems. And that’s where my judgment towards myself begins.