There are many kinds of people out there. You can look at the more common or even cliché stereotypes like: nerds, douche bags, the lazy guy, the wigger, sluts, the romantic guy, the artistic guy and so on.
This view on the world and people around you is called “hokjesdenken” in the Dutch language. A synonym for this word is categorization. It is the opposite of “out of the box thinking”, which actually is a worldwide appreciated quality to have.
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It’s been almost 17 years that I’ve lived in the Netherlands now. I’ve seen this land turn into a chaotich, corrupted and abused land. My familyhas been officially acknowledged as refugees based on social patterns. It was hard to fit in at the beginning. We have had a social assistant who showed us typical Dutch phenomenons. I remember when she drove me and my brother in a citroën (that she called citroen – citron) along long distances of farm fields and opened the windows. She said: “Smell it; this is fresh air!” The only thing I smelled was cow dung and compost.
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Ever since I was a kid, I looked at the smallest things in life – literally. I enjoyed looking at the textures of various things: paper, plants, textile and my very own skin. You’d probably count me as an idiot when you see me studying my arm for hours. But the truth is contradictory: I would count you as an idiot if you ignore the beauty and complexity of life in its tiniest forms.
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I can almost certainly say that we all have been spoiled in our lives. Since you were a kid, you enjoyed the little luxuries of candy, the best clothing, the coolest toys, the best bed and so on. After growing up a little – becoming a teenager, an adolescent; you enjoy the other luxuries like that new game console, that new laptop, that television, the freedom and the opportunity to have a lack of responsibility. Everything we did, did not lead to any real consequences. Continue reading
Ever since I’ve been a little kid, I’ve been thinking about our perceptions we get from our senses. Thinking about if other people saw the world as I did. As a kid you often feel misunderstood, because as a child you seem to see things that other people don’t see. And children aren’t taken very seriously anyway, so no one believed me or took note of my perceptions.
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