New Life Guru

I’m eating, as usual in my kitchenette, over the countertop and I tried to find my chopsticks among all the plates and cups and food and what not…

And when I found one of them – it struck me: I seriously feel like a lone chopstick. You know, just one. And I miss my counterpart. A lot. There’s only so much that one single chopstick can accomplish… a pair of chopsticks can do so much more… ah…

Full disclosure: I actually have no idea how a typical chopstick feels with or without their partner. I just liked the analogy, haha 😅

Have a wonderful weekend! ✌️

Woke up. No stress. Checked my socials: few likes and beautiful comments on Tiktok & Insta. Not that I care… but… I do. Lol. A good morning message from an ex colleague… (how nice is that?). Stepped out on the street and… mmmmmmh. Took a deep breath of this beautiful summer morning. Mixture of tree blossoms and city fumes. Life is beautiful ✨ for another 30 min, at least… until I reach my workplace, haha 😅 Leeezzgo Tuesday 🚀

It’s 11 PM, I’m lying in bed, thinking about tomorrow… and while this will probably sound like other extreme of world hunger situation… (and I’m not trying to ridicule it in any way….) I was actually hoping I WON’T eat tomorrow (ie. I’d fast tomorrow). I definitely need (and want) to loose those excess 20-ish kg of fat… I exercise regularly, but that ain’t it. As they say: 80% of the fitness game is nutrition…

In my desperate search for a partner who I would be writing and producing music with… I enrolled a songwriting course. And it’s an awesome course, great teacher, some really talented attendees… ok, some of the topics are perhaps too advanced for total beginners and I don’t feel like re-learning corcle of fifths, so it’s kinda far from a 100% fit. And obviously I was not only hoping to find my personal /McCartney but also learn some songwriting skills…

But guess what – I so effin don’t vibe with them. Or… no, let me put it this way: I feel my ‘dynamic personality’ (read: ADHD) is disturbing the flow in the classroom. I fall into other people’s words, people don’t understand me when I try to say something (this could also be due to my foreign accent, of course), I’m coming up with wrong examples at wrong moments etc.

And… just like my job – I quit already, just didn’t let them know yet 🤷🏻‍♂️ (my job I silently quit last Monday. F all that. Life is too short to do things we are not made for…)

Oh, yeah, and… regarding my being a stranger in a strange land… I’m so ready to move on. Leave Deutschland den Deutschen. As Nissim (Yosef Shiloach) says in The House on Chelouche Street:

“…because it’s a big world, Sami, and life is short…“

There is so much to see. So much I still haven’t seen. And the time is ticking away…

When we start a new life, in order to be able to move forward, we must weigh anchor(s). And after we have done that, we become the anchor. For ourselves. And perhaps for others, too…

I started drinking coffee again. Unfortunately. “Why unfortunately?” I hear some imaginary avatar asking. “Coffee is good and healthy.” Yes, perhaps for some people it is. For me, coffee is poison. I feel jittery, irritable, cannot sleep in the evening, cannot get up in the morning… it affects me in a really bad way.

“Ok, so why don’t you stop drinking coffee, then?” Uh… would that it were so simple ☺️ I have such an addictive physiology (brain-body etc.). When I start some habit – I usually go all in. I cannot eg. smoke one cigarette. Or drink one glass of wine. Nope. All or nothing.

I guess I’ll just have to go through another round of abstinence sindroms and quit coffee again 🤷🏻‍♂️

This is going to be one of those micro-posts I promised…

These days, the idea of holding a mirror to others occupies my mind. It’s so easy, isn’t it? Holding a mirror to someone else. Bringing up what they were hiding from themselves (and probably projecting a good part of our own thoughts & beliefs onto that someone in the process).

This magnificent idea came to my mind (I know, I know… “magnificent idea” sounds a bit like megalomania, haha 😅):

Each time we hold a mirror to others, we in fact turn the backside of the mirror towards us. And the back side is not reflective… it’s easy to poke around other people’s wounds. And so much more difficult and painful for us to do it to ourselves… takes significantly more courage 🙌

Ok, that’s it for now. C U on TikTok or Insta: @newlifeguru 🤗 I uploaded new cover songs (ya know, all that heartbreaking crooner love ballads 🎶❤️…). Have a good one! Bye!

Yesterday I had a longer saxophone practice session. It’s Easter-time, so everybody’s out of town, it seems. The woman who booked a slot on Fridays, right after my practice slot – didn’t show up. So I stayed longer and instead of the usual 2-hour session, I practiced for three hours straight.

Here’s the plan: I need a nice repertoire of songs which are 1. relatively easy to play (for me, at my current stage of soprano-sax musicianship) 2. sound relatively good without accompaniment and 3. are relatively famous and recognisable by a broad audience.

So far I got following songs on my list: “What a wonderful world”, “Somewhere over the rainbow”, “Strangers in the night”, “Love me tender”, “Michelle”, “Yesterday”, “Feelings” and “Killing me softly”. Ok, I wrote down “Lonely shepherd” as well, but… nah, I’ll skip it for now, until my articulation and air support and vibrato technique get better.

After 3 hours of practice in the practice room, I spontaneously decided to busk in the hallway of a nearby metro station (and test my current repertoire). So I found a nice spot, put the saxophone case on the floor, assembled the sax and started playing “Strangers in the night” 🎶 (the easiest of all, with the least chance of screwing up the melody, squeaking etc.). What a sound! That hallway-reverb is so awesome! This is probably what it would sound like if Frank Sinatra played saxophone 🎷

Yep, busking still feels a bit like begging. I even googled this and there are soooooo many discussions on this topic. Fact is – busking is not begging. But it can be seen as such. It depends, haha 😅

After only a minute or two, some dressed up dude, who looked like he was running late for some fancy date, dropped a fiver in the empty case. “Aw, man. Thank you so much!” I kept playing and subway trains kept rolling in and out… many, many people passed by… some old German lady dropped a coin in the case and asked: “Wo kommen Sie her? Ehm… Where are you from? Hungary? Romania?” And she continued, without giving me a chance to answer: “Können Sie hier arbeiten? Can you find a job here?” And I thought to myself: oh, lady, c’mon – let’s see if we can have all the clichés in less than ten seconds, shall we? And my playing couldn’t have been thaaaat awful, could it?!

After 20 minutes or so, a girl in her twenties stopped for a second, listened and commented: “So beautiful!” Oh, yes! Thank you, young lady! That’s all the confirmation I needed. Ok, and the two, three passer-bys who whistled along “Strangers in the night…” 🎶 haha. Awesome!

I’ll just jump straight into it, w/o any intro… straight out of my head, as if we were sharing the same brain and same thoughts… ☺️

Yesterday I essentially took credit for you and your folks potentially quitting smoking (in the future) by saying “that would be my biggest achievement”. Seems strange, right? For someone to make this kind of claim.

First of all – that would be your big achievement, not mine. Perhaps not the biggest, but certainly a big one. Statements such as the one above neither help the cause nor do they put me in a very favorable light 🥺 Probably quite the contrary. Uh, I gotta work on that approach some more…

You don’t know this, but I have this idea / goal on my list of life goals… to help as many people as possible “to live healthy lives and achieve in life more than they ever thought they could achieve” (among other goals, ofc). Yeah, sounds crazy, I might be having a bit of a Messiah complex thing going on, haha. Like Tony Robbins, only… completely different. 😅 I formulated this goal after I quit drinking alcohol and quit smoking, after I “woke up” and realized how crazy the very concept of consuming legal and illegal substances is (alcohol, cigarettes and all other stuff, incl. coffee).

There is literally the whole system of multi-national corporations behind this, making tons of money off of unfortunate ones who got stuck in some “life situations” at some point and didn’t know better than to look for an ‘easy way out’ or at least, a way to deal or cope with the situation they found themselves in. I guess some found comfort in heroin, others in nicotine, yet others got lost in the bottle… And once you’re hooked, you’re hooked…

Obviously, drinking alcohol (toxin / neurotoxin) or smoking cigarettes (don’t even get me started on toxicity of smoking cigarettes) is not a solution. Ever. And neither is heroin nor weed nor other substances of that sort.

For some reason, parts of modern “society” normalised consumption of particular substances such as alcohol and cigarettes (presumably heavily influenced by propaganda machinery of huge multi-national corporations). And in such social environment, those advocating against consumption of these horrible poisonous substances are percieved as weirdos or perhaps even enemies. John the Savage of the modern day, so to say (<- this even rhymes).

If you don’t care about your health – that’s… strange, but ok. I get it. We’re all different. We all have different priorities. That’s what makes this world such an interesting place to live in. Destroying your own health is one thing. We’re all gonna die some day, so I can undestand that argument. But completely ignoring financial side of substance addiction brings us to another level of masochism…

A pack of cigs costs, let’s say 7 EUR (retail price). It’s nothing. I know, right. Most people can earn this kind of money in an hour or two at their job. And some probably much, much faster… ok, but… let’s say this month has 31 days and you consume one pack a day… that makes 217 EUR. Ok, I know, I know… you’re not throwing the money out of the window. You’re actually getting someting in return, like (percieved) pleasure, (percieved) inner peace, (percieved) calm, something to hold on to, a ritual… (I’m not going into “you’re also potentially getting COPD, lung cancer, etc.” because that’s not the point right now). So, you’re getting something in exchange. Mostly ‘smoke’ but… that’s ok. And a bonus: stinky cigarette buds. But, that’s beside the point here. How many months are there in a year? 12, right. So… 12x 210 EUR (I reduced the consumption and monthly expenses a bit… ya know, fair is fair) = 2.520 EUR per year. Now, I can’t help but hear Borat reacting: “Woo wee woo wa!” Because… in two years time you donated more than 5.000 EUR to the tobacco industry and the state (through taxes). And I’m almost sure that part of these funds are being spent by the government for noble causes, such as COPD medical care or lung cancer treatment. So, it’s a honorable thing to do… transaction costs might be somehat high, but hey, who’s counting…

Yeah, I know, I know…. above calculation doesn’t even include alcohol and coffee consumption. Cool. Ok, let’s make it double, so it’s 10.000 EUR in two years…

But hey, if you suddenly stopped drinking and smoking, where would you get all the fun from? All the life’s joy? All the little pleasures? All the liberté, tojours? You’d never again go to where the flavor is…

That’s a tough call, I know. Aaaaaand… additional “benefit” of non-consumption: ca. 23% of the population starts looking at you as some kind of a nutcase for even bringing this up… and the other 77% don’t understand what you’re all about because they’re not even part of the substance consumption game. Statistically, ca. 23% of EU population have been smoking in 2020 (peep Statista reports). And… many of these 23% of fellow humans would for sure try their best to put you back on the right track again, if you ever try to leave the club… because… what are you? Better than us? Something else? Or did you simply lose the sense of pleasure? Friends will be friends… 🎶

We’re having “Hitzewelle” (heatwave) here in Berlin. Up to 40° centigrade. I’m opening roller blinds and windows only during the night, to keep my apartment as cool as possible.

For some reason I couldn’t sleep last night although I only slept 5 hours the night before. In the evening I did the good old ‘bedtime procrastination’ routine, despite me being fully aware of it… cognitive dissonance at it’s best. Scrolling through tiktok and Instagram feed instead of falling asleep… Interestingly enough, I still woke up at around 7 AM.

So I got up, ‘made my bed’, as Jordan Peterson suggests, brushed my teeth and rushed out on the street. Woooow, what a beautiful morning ☀️ This side of the street is still in the shade, so no direct sunlight yet. And it’s warm. So beautifully warm. Light morning breeze carries the scents of perfume and sun lotion in the air. “Heaven, I’m in heaven…”

In front of the U-Bahn (metro) station, a mother with two little kids and a huge ‘tandem’ stroller is standing there, looking at the stairs and the stroller, apparently explaining something to the little ones. So I immediately asked: “Can I help you?” and she immediately relied: “Yes, please.” She took the kids, I took the stroller and we went downstairs, to the train platforms… When we reached the platform, I put the stroller on the ground and made the ‘thank you’ gesture 🙏 She thanked me, too and we said good bye, wishing each other a wonderful day.

Each time we get the chance to do a good deed, we should thank the person and the universe, because being able to help others is such a marvelous blessing.

NewLifeGuru