Urban buddhist

Sometimes you have a weekend in which you experience so many interesting things, that it's impossible to devote just one post to it. So let's go back in time to Brussels again. When checking out of the Pantone hotel, I went to the Iris festival with my girlfriend, where there was a lot of theatre, events and DJ's.

After that, I went into the train, which had a defect so it took almost 4 hours to get to Amsterdam. Normally that would piss me off, but that trainride I met an asian man, who is a business lawler and owns a cocktail bar in Antwerp. I had a very interesting, 4 hour talk with him about all kinds of things. And during that long conversation, I noticed more and more that our business ethics and philosophy on life were very alike.

He told me that he tries to live a life as a buddhist, but to live completely according to these rules is just not realistic in our stressful, materialistic western society. Now I always thought the same. I think the buddhist philosophy not only provides a lot of useful wisdom, but is very down to earth at the same time (well, maybe if you leave out the reincarnation part). But in order to cope with problems in this society, you need to be flexible. You cannot always trust everybody or be serene in every situation. In business, you need a bit of stress in order to push yourself. And materialism and having possessions is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you realize that more material is not necessarily making you happy. And losing things isn't necessarily the end of the world.

It's a flexible, more modern way of dealing with a philosophy that is ages old. During that train-ride I even thought of a name for it: urban buddhism. To end this post with some Tao-wisdom: sometimes the trip is more important than the destination.