September 21

Life is unpredictable. When you asked my sister 10 years ago where she sees herself when she turns 30, the answer would have been probably something like “living with my husband close to our family, in our own home, having children and a job I love”. She turns 30 in about a week and which of these things did she “accomplish”? She is living with her husband and her younger brother (me), they almost finished building their house, but she is not going to live in it until mid of 2022. Her job is a 55-hour mess, but hey! they say it’s the regular life of a PhD student…
Her first anniversary she probably expected to be this super romantic weekend with her husband. Instead, it was a weekend out with her husband and her younger brother at castle Neuschwanstein… sounds like the definition of being a third wheel, doesn’t it? They actually take good care of me not feeling this way 😉
Why am I sharing this with you? Why don’t I take myself as an example since also my life is a more or less disastrous mess and also not following the paths I had anticipated? Well… you might laugh at this point, but for a youngin like me turning 30 is huge, especially my (tiny) sister (yes! I know she is older, but she is physically very compact! Also, the reason why her nickname is Hobbit) But back to the story, growing up has always been something very frightening to me. I would identify myself rather with Peter Pan or the little prince than with any other famous figure. A way how I cope with all this growing up and unpredictability in life is staying connected to my inner child. Not being childish but appreciating this 5-year-old version of myself in my heart. Whenever I feel like being an adult is suffocating my inner child, I would go and compensate. Whenever life is getting too serious and is changing me, I take timeouts to enjoy my time with myself and my inner child.
Now that sounds pretty cryptic, I know. Let’s work with examples. When I have a very long day filled with work, I compensate my inner child with playing basketball all by myself, for hours and hours. Just like kids do, in my head it is Kobe against LeBron, MJ against Iverson, Magic against Bird. 24 seconds left Kobe with a 2 points lead… LeBron got the ball crossover left crossover right step back 3 and BANG. After making the shot I even celebrate like it was real (all this happens at a public square with only one basket in the middle of Heidelberg in front of people just enjoying their free time).
Another example, most of the McDonalds around my area have playgrounds and often enough weirdly shaped slides. Almost always before even ordering, you can find me climbing my way into a way too small slide… and sometimes ending up stuck… but eeey I did worse things to keep myself happy. That’s the point where I would like to go back to the anniversary of my sister and my brother-in-law. We visited castle Neuschwanstein, but we stayed in Austria in a spa & sports resort. They offered a million different things, one of them was an indoor kiddy-paradise. When we discovered it, it didn’t take longer than 5 seconds until I was hip deep inside the obstacle course. Seemed fun, was fun, so much fun that even my brother-in-law started preparing to come inside. At the end of the obstacle course was slide. The closer I got to slide the weirder it smelled. I even mentioned it to my sister, and she was like what does it smell like? “Well, it could be plastic, but even for plastic it is a strange smell!” It didn’t matter to me, I kept going, seconds later I jumped feet first into the slide. Reaching the end my sister just commented “wow, you brought the smell with you, but it is not plastic, this smells more like poop” I turned around and the next thing I heard, was her screaming “iiiiiiiiiih! you have poop on your pants and your shirt!!!!” I immediately took of my shirt and pulled down the pants. My sister and husband basically ran away from me. I was left in socks and boxers only hearing my brother-in-law’s diabolic laughter and my sister crying with laughter… My walk of shame to my hotel room wasn’t as much fun as the obstacle course…
that’s definitely the downside of keep being a child… but ey it’s again a story worth telling isn’t it?