Bon Iver - Skinny Love 

So here it is, the final “so what did I learn from my one year in Germany post”. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, now. In my head I see my old flatmate Johnny from Uni at one of his American summer camps. He used to talk about how on the last night, everyone would sit around the bonfire holding a “truth stick”. In turn they would share one memory and then reveal how camp had changed them, forever……Shameless deforestation I hear you cry. Johnny told a story for which he was forever then gently teased it goes like this. At the end of camp he took a 6 week long tour trip somewhere, I can’t remember the specifics I know it featured Las Vegas and pissing into the Grand Canyon I guess that gives you an idea. At the end of the trip, I think at the airport he told of standing in front of the mirror looking at his hands and his face in the mirror and thinking to himself “I’ve become a man”.

Many boys have become men for the first time in a mens bathroom. I’m not sure if John was alone in the bathroom, what he was doing with his hands or face at the time, its not polite to ask. Nor is this the point of this post.

I guess I’m ready to have my own mini-reflective moment. Somewhere between the truth stick, and bathroom realizations of manhood here is the cringingly, lame, preachy and ultimately unsatisfying conclusion for everyone watching, you know these moments they occur at the end of American movies, accompanied by flashbacks of highlights narrated by the main characters voice overs and possibly ending in toilets and “I looked down at my hands, and then at my face in the mirror. I looked different somehow, aged by my experiences that summer, a summer I would never forget. I’d become……….a man.

Half the cinema vomits.

Sorry if I make you gag:

Unlike Johnny I was a man before I came to Leipzig, I have the receding hairline to prove it. In fact my experiences in Leipzig taught me the opposite. I was an old man of 23. My key learning of this year is the learning not to care. Opportunity is everywhere, everything I experience a million people have already experience, the more people opt in, the more possible it is to opt out, people everywhere are much the same, but the conditions which with they live are very different. 80/20 is everywhere and effects everything.

Now I live much more to impulse, I’m totally open to everybody, i’ll befriend anyone, I appreciate people 100x more and know how little I need to be happy, which liberates me to have almost unlimited options. Life in Germany has shown me the possibilities of life without the rat race, without concerns of status, the quality of life achievable when the stakes are lower and life moves slower.

Not all of this stuff is new, you see what you choose to see no matter where you’re looking. I guess I’d written my conclusions of Germany before I set foot on the plane, this was going to work because England for me despite all its good points somehow didn’t. Through hard work, coming here on my own with no support network, quite a few lucky breaks, it did work.

I think I’m going to leave it there before this turns into some dribbly, smug, cringe worthy and overly personal splurt. So instead I’ll just say thanks to everybody I’ve met here. I owe you invaluably.