The Handbook for Bad Days

by Eveline Helmink

  It’s no coincidence that flowers have been part of ceremonies and rituals for centuries. Flowers at a funeral are meant as a remembrance of the bloom period. Flowers at a wedding refer to blossoming love. All over the world, you’ll find spiritual places with flowers and flower offerings: They represent birth and death, life and the element earth. Flowers are related to feelings, to emotions, and as such, to human existence as a whole.

  In Japan, the art of flower arrangement is called ikebana. It’s a centuries-old tradition rooted in Buddhist flower offerings. Everything revolves around harmony, symbolism, and simplicity. The way flowers are arranged represents beauty and the connection of man with the environment. The tradition follows strict rules and isn’t necessarily something to do at home, but the essence is very beautiful: telling a story with flowers that fit your mood of the moment. Don’t make it more complicated than it is. Don’t see flowers as just another way to glamorize your home, though, but rather as a gift and a sweet lesson for your capricious lesser self. Flowers aren’t a luxury; they’re a form of sometimes dearly needed self-care.

  // Landmarks Along the Way

   How to measure your state of mind

  Before moving to Amsterdam, I took the A1 in the direction of the city on my morning commute every workday, including the section between the Bunschoten/Spakenburg exit and the junction with the A27. Countless times I’ve been stuck in traffic there. Countless times I saw the sun rise on my way to work and set on my way home. On one side, I saw the slopes of the Utrecht hill ridge on the horizon; on the other, I saw the church towers of Eemnes, and sometimes, on a particularly clear morning, the houses around Gooi Lake. I have seen this landscape in the rain and snow. I have seen its grass shoulders all shriveled up and browned, sighing under a suffocating blanket of heat, but also fresh green, the white mist of a crisp, fresh spring morning lingering over the meadows.

  And I often thought: I’ve seen this so many times, but never exactly like this. What I also noticed was that I was just as changeable as that view.

  I’ve sat in my car completely calm, but also furious. I’ve sung from the top of my lungs, but I’ve cried as well. I’ve seen those same meadows in a mood of great chagrin but also with great optimism. That stretch of road, out of all places, has become important to me. It became a landmark and a memory of how everything keeps passing by, also on bad days. By now, I’ve been living and working in Amsterdam for years, and I’ve formed comparable landmarks there, but to me that particular stretch of countryside will always remain connected to the self-examination I was conducting at the time. That practice had nothing to do with a yoga mat or deep meditation; it was just plain old mindfulness as I worked to be present with myself, in my plain old Ford, on the A1, between Bunschoten/Spakenburg and Eemnes. Poetic, not so much.

  I called that part of my commute my “car thermometer.” It became a natural habit to check the temperature of my soul each time I drove by that view: How am I feeling right now? A moment of mindfulness embedded in my daily routine. And although it’s a good idea anyway to regularly take stock of how things are going, this simple habit came with a wonderful side effect: I realized that the routine itself began to offer me consolation. I was stuck there on that miserable stretch of asphalt, but I was also carefree or excited. Everything I saw and felt was always in flux.

  I knew this for sure because I’d already experienced it. Now I have similarly meaningful places along the route of my bike commute to work: the crosswalk at the Molukkestraat, for instance, where there’s a heart-shaped hole carved out of the white asphalt. Can you do a checkup like this each morning during a meditation? You sure can. A landmark, however, is a visual reminder of good times and bad times, and of how those two keep occurring, one after the other, over and over again. In this sense, the streets are literally paved with consolation. Simply relating to the world around me helps me to reflect. When you connect images and places to moments of insights, they become etched in your brain more easily.

  Mindfulness Is a Place

  There are beautiful time-lapse videos of sunsets, filmed in one spot on the horizon by installing a camera on a roof and having it take a photo at exactly the same time for 365 days. And there is an artist who has made hundreds of paintings of the sky, always from the same location; Jurianne Matter takes a walk through the heather almost every morning and documents her routine on Instagram. You too can start a project like this, by taking a photo in the same place every day or writing down a note on your phone.

  // Go Watch the Waves

   About the healthy effects of salt water

  Unsure where to go on a bad day? If you ask me, “salt water” should be high on the list. My mom loves the sea; my dad likes lighthouses. For as long as I can remember, they’ve kept a collection of shells with strange, whimsical shapes at their home, and in his home office, my father has a shelf dedicated to snow globes with small lighthouses inside. Neither my mother nor my father grew up near the coast, but still, even now that my mother is no longer always aware of place and time, the sea instills in her a sense of calmness and happiness. “My mom used to be a mermaid,” I like to say sometimes.

  I myself didn’t grow up by the seaside either, but I was surrounded by heather and lakes. Yet there are only a few places in the world where I truly feel as good and calm—deep, deep to the bone—as on the ocean shore or, in the Netherlands, the seaside. Water that breathes. Water so wide you cannot see the other side. Water that is salty like tears and sweat. It is my quiet place.

  I really wanted to learn how to surf, and for Happinez, I once wrote a story titled “The Ocean as a Teacher.” The ocean is such an accessible place; it’s free, always open, and at the same time so intensely soul-soothing. There are no altars and statues, no rituals or scripted prayers, only the wind, the sand, and the horizon. I always feel great awe for the endless, vast body of water that embraces such a large part of the globe, that ripples, and folds, and flows, agitated by the moon, by storms and trade winds, able to propel waves for thousands of miles to coasts far beyond the horizon.

  The sound of rolling waves washing ashore, which you can hear on beaches everywhere, is like a lullaby. Sometimes it sounds as if the waves are laughing at me when they break at my feet thunderously; it makes me chuckle. “You are not a drop in the ocean,” wrote Rumi. “You are the entire ocean in a drop”—a favorite line of mine because sometimes I can literally feel the ocean inside me: the tides, the waves. We are like tiny oceans.

  Salt water reminds us of everything that is timeless and indifferent—and that puts things in perspective. The ocean doesn’t judge; it just is. The water lifts you up and embraces you, or it pushes you over, indiscriminately. Floating in salt water, we are all equal. On bad days: Go to the ocean.

  Or, if nothing else, look at it on YouTube. Or listen to it via one of those “ocean sounds” soundtracks. Zen master Alan Watts captured the magic of waves and tides best when he wrote: “Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the god Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.”

  A TAD ESOTERIC, BUT THEY DO HELP

  // Synchronicity: Hints from the Universe

   Pay attention to the small things

  Your intuition doesn’t scream, she whispers. She’s subtle, funny, m
ysterious, and demands attention in the most wonderful ways. The world around you is as it is, so it’s our perception that attributes meaning to it. How “awake” you are and the way you perceive is what sharpens your intuition. When you hear a snippet of a song, when your eye is caught by a word, when you instinctively pick something up or are suddenly alert: That’s your intuition whispering to you. To understand her language, you need to develop a refined sense of hearing. On hard days, she’s a fantastic and indispensable partner.

  Of course, you can walk a path of strict nonbelief. Many do so, and it is a life strategy you can grow very old with. The days will be tacked on to days like always; the sun will set and the moon will rise, time after time, nothing to worry about. But it will be a little like snoozing through life. Comfortable, and perhaps it’s exactly what you need—but it will never entice you to stray from the well-trodden path, nor will it expand your world. You won’t get any meaningful rest, and it won’t give you new energy. You’ll just keep the status quo. But if you choose to, you can lead an “awake” life, alert and attentive to what’s around you. At least that life will be an interesting one.

  I can’t answer the question “Does coincidence exist?” I’m not completely sure. But I’m allowing myself to accept question marks instead of exclamation points. No scientist, spiritual teacher, or psychologist—no one, including myself—can give a rational and comprehensible explanation for synchronous experience. The good news is that it isn’t necessary. Nobody knows exactly how synchronicity works, so we have to put rationality on the back burner. I know only this: Listening to the whisper always takes me to a place where I end up discovering something good: a new insight or inspiration. It has given me courage, consolation, a wake-up call, or a clear stop sign. What would have happened had I not noticed those whisperings? I have no idea. I probably would’ve continued my life as usual, with nothing to worry about.

  But I don’t want a slumbering existence. I want to discover, feel, and use my full potential. This is how depth psychologist Carder Stout describes them: “Synchronicities are incidents of spiritual significance that ask us to momentarily dampen our self-obsession and consider the possibility of the divine.”

  How do you notice synchronicity? For me, it’s a strange, weird, and exciting feeling: as if an invisible hand gives me a subtle, little push that throws me off balance, if only for a nanosecond. It’s as if time freezes for a moment. With synchronicity, it seems as if coincidence and meaning come together in exactly the same moment and fleetingly spark. As if a direct live connection is being established between one’s inner world and something in the outside world. As if the mysterious universe ever so briefly winks.

  I myself no longer doubt synchronicity or coincidence. It only takes me a nanosecond to sense whether I need to “do” something with an occurrence or whether it just happens to cross my path. Sometimes something catches my eye and I can’t feel anything itching or wrenching. Then I simply see “what is.” I intuitively feel if something is meaningful. Sometimes I don’t know yet what it is I need to “do” with it. In those cases, I store it in my heart by way of a subtle clue. I have a little junk drawer full of hints there, and occasionally something comes falling out: oh, I see now what I needed that for! Sometimes the energy is strong and clear; sometimes I shrug my shoulders and just wait to find out what the hint was. Sometimes I think that something is significant, and later feel nothing; then I let it go.

  Playing Around with Synchronicity

  Don’t think too tritely. Often hints will be subtle, cryptic, to be understood only by you. You might occasionally find a pack of chewing gum in your bag after eating falafel for lunch, but generally it works a tad more subtly than that.

  Be careful with rational explanations. Let an observation steep like tea and gradually unfold, but don’t force a meaning beyond the one that spontaneously pops up.

  Use your senses. The eye and the ear are the usual suspects, but also try to deploy your other three senses. Taste, smell, and touch can also be indicators. Let your senses cooperate as one big synchronicity Velcro tape.

  To find hints, you have to more or less know what you want to guide. Shoot a question into the cosmos now and then, and allow yourself to be surprised. Whether you’re a manifesting type or not, coincidence follows your attention, and your attention follows your intentions. Occasionally something feels like a coincidence, but it can also be that unconsciously you were already prepared for it.

  Trust your intuition when it comes to synchronicity. If something doesn’t feel like a coincidence, allow yourself to follow that feeling. If it does feel like a coincidence, do so as well. Trust your unconscious, your first hunches, and your own observation. How other people interpret your experiences is totally irrelevant, as long as you don’t cause harm to yourself or others. This is an inside game.

  Don’t underestimate the power of synchronicity. Although we like to think that all conscious decisions are informed by reason, all the things you experience and observe are equally significant.

  // On Dreaming

   Messages from your unconscious

  I’m a vivid dreamer. A former lover often called me “Josephine” whenever I woke up from a captivating dream—a reference to the biblical Joseph whose dreams predicted the future. This isn’t to say that I can predict the future, but boy oh boy, I can sure dream. It’s something that began during my childhood, when I already dreamed often and very vividly, and never went away. At times, for me, sleeping is like going to the movies: a dream unfolds, with a scenario, protagonists, and a denouement. In the morning, I sometimes still feel tired, as if I’m leading two lives simultaneously: one awake and one sleeping existence.

  People have given me dream encyclopedias, or a friend may scream, “We’re so going to google that!” I used to think that most dream interpretation was trite, rational, and slapdash, but I began to think differently about dreams after a conversation I had with dream expert and practical philosopher Hans Korteweg for Happinez in 2010. After spending decades studying the subject, he cowrote Het Droomjuweel (Dream Treasure) with his daughter. It’s a book about how you can use dreams to enrich your life. “Dreams give you insight into who you are at the core,” he told me. “The unity of our daily and nightly existence is precisely where the essence of who we are lies.”

  You can think of “day and night” as an hourglass that you keep turning over. The day flows into the night and vice versa. Likewise, you can start to see your dreams as conversations with yourself. Your dreams show you what’s going on, in a free-flowing, creative, and, at times, bizarre form. Call them messages from your unconscious, if you will. Consequently, the interpretation of dreams is more than a matter of “this, therefore that.” It is a form of meditation, of mindfulness. Dreams are wonderful self-portraits. When you observe them closely in daylight, you learn more about yourself.

  And if you’re one of those people who claims that they do not dream, that just isn’t true. Countless studies have shown that after ninety minutes of sleep, pretty much everybody reaches a state in which all sorts of things start happening in the unconscious. It’s possible you don’t remember your dreams; writing down what you know first thing in the morning can help. It might be no more than a shred of a feeling. That already could be the start of a dream log. Even if you remember dreams, however, they won’t always be clear.

  Often dreams are mysterious, incoherent, unrealistic, fluid, and elusive. Korteweg inspired me to look at a dream as a work of art. Just as Picasso didn’t represent the concrete physical form in much of his art, but rather an impression, dreams are an impression too. If a dream touches upon something that upsets you or makes you fearful or sad, it’s especially tempting to say, “It’s only a dream.”

  I had a dream once in which I lost someone dear to me, right before my eyes. It feels terrible to wake up with such shock and sadness, and then go through that strange moment when you are no longer asleep but it hasn’t quite dawned on you yet that,
in reality, the person is still in the land of the living. I’ve also been tremendously angry at someone in my dream, and that feeling was difficult to shake when we had our first real encounter. In such cases, it’s easier to say that dreams aren’t real. Yes and no. Dreams don’t show the daytime reality; most of the familiar faces in your dreams don’t represent the actual people in your life.

  I’ve learned to look at my dreams in a different, less literal, less clichéd way. I no longer boil down my dreams to platitudes about life, for instance; instead, I connect them to my associations and memories, to places and things in my life. In some dreams, we can see universal symbols for good and evil, love and hate, life and death, but often there’s a whole reservoir of things and places that only represent something to you because they’re connected to a personal experience or memory.

  Of course, the question then becomes how often to take something literally. If an old flame makes a sudden appearance, does that mean I still love him? If I dream that I’m drowning, should I start to be extra careful around water? It’s tricky to separate subjective and objective reality. Bad dreams on a bad day are even more confusing. Korteweg shared the following rule of thumb: If elements or people in your dream closely resemble reality and match with what’s on your conscious mind as well, then you should look toward the literal end of the interpretation spectrum. If your dreams feature people or places that have few similarities with your conscious life, then it’s more interesting to observe them in a figurative sense.