Who is the richest person you have ever met?

A while ago I was asked this question by someone. I didn't just have an answer. It became a deep thought. Actually, by the way, a very nice process.

The nicest thing about this question was it automatically started quickly to show me the movie of my life so far. All kinds of things suddenly came up and showed themselves again. Amazing to discover how much you still can remember if you take the time to watch that running movie.

My thoughts lingered for a while at the age of around fifteen. My father had his physiotherapy practice at home and he had several patients (clients) who lived far away from us and regularly came to visit him. Most of the time they had to wait for a while. And yes, his practice offered a waiting room as well but my mother always felt a bit pity on the people waiting and always offered coffee, tea and cookies in our living room for them. So, our private living room became more and more the waiting room. And her hospitality was not only there for the patients of my dad. Also, our milkman and baker, who at that time came to your house, nearly on a daily base were our visitors in mom’s ‘coffee shop’.

My father had a number of patients from a family. Father, mother and their son always came together every other week.

The son’s hobby was karting and always scored high in the national top ranking. He worked at their family business. They owned a garage and also ran an ambulance, coach and taxi services business. I was always amazed about the astonishing stories they told and especially about the wealth of jewelry that they wore around their fingers and wrists. Abundancy of money because business was running more than well and they had a lot of solid big customers including large hotel chains and Schiphol Amsterdam Airport. The wealth almost “sparkled" toward me.

And yet, when they were gone again, my mother often told me about the pity she had with them. I didn't understand that first that time. Often my mother, with her background as an actress, ‘replayed’ the stories to my sisters and me afterwards and we had to laugh a lot about it.

At some point I started to understand my mother's pity, despite the fun we sometimes had about the wonderful stories she made of it. Their life was not happy at all. Visit after visit to us was filled with a list of all sorts of problems and suffering because of their private and business life.

Now that I am writing this, I am sure they also saw (and used) the visit and therapy of my dad (and mom) as a kind of relief. Sharing their stories safely with someone who listened, did not immediately have an opinion or unsolicited advice, and who was outside their close "circuit".

Where I first saw them as super-rich, it turned out to be a great poverty with a lot of misery.

And in relation to that question from a few weeks ago, this memory shows me again that wealth is not at all in possessions and outward show. This insight began to come alive for me already at a young age through these stories from my father's customers and personal experiences.

Further on in the movie of my life, several "richest" people emerge. People I know from politics, government, the uniformed world, service clubs and so much more. The strange thing is that when I touched the situations in which I remembered them as ‘rich’ again, those thoughts immediately evaporate. This was and is no richness at all. Often simply laughable impressions and unreal life shows. I will not go into it any further.

The photo on this blog is from April this year when I was in India with my girlfriend. This poor boy, he begged in the streets, touched me deeply with his spontaneity. We only met and talked shortly. He was more than thankful after our chat and showed me his real inner richness and especially his pleasure in this photograph.

Where I am stuck for the answer to the question so far in my life, is with a person I met at the Padma Center in Middelburg-NL more than 12 years ago as my philosophy and meditation teacher. For years I attended evening classes every Thursday and also regularly weekend meetings. They were the fuel for the huge life(style) change that I was allowed to make in my life.

This man was far from rich in a financial sense and even struggled with a developmental disorder as he sometimes told. And perhaps precisely because of the latter, he was an expert in his specific interests and activities in relation to philosophy.

He possessed and possesses the wealth to encourage you to discover the richness in yourself through his stories, history, Bhagavad-Gita, personal experiences and inner wisdom.

Someone who shares his rich set of talents in a fantastic way to let others discover their personal treasures and added value.

Voila ... the answer. The richest person I have met in my life so far.


Gangey Gruma (Frans Captijn)
email: captijninsight@gmail.com 

Foto blog: http://franscaptijnhisworld.blogspot.com

Captijn Insight. Catalyst in developing tranquility & in-sight to get in a sustainable way real connection, purpose, pleasure and flow in life, love, family, business, career and work again.

Have you experienced that second most important day in your life yet?

A few weeks ago, I heard the statement by Mark Twain (American writer and humorist November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910) as shown at the picture added to my this week blog.

Oh well, in general I do not always like quotes and not at all this I call it ‘tile wisdom’. And yet this statement came back to me several times after I heard it. Of course, mainly about the discovery of that  second most important day that he mentions.

Nowadays we can hardly get lost with all our digital devices. Where would we still be without Google Maps or Google Earth? I think that about 95% of people with an I-Phone do use that app and the pizza courier for example cannot do without it. And although I live without an I-Phone, I have to admit that I have a GPS system in my car.

Not that long ago it was different and certainly at the time that Mark Twain (his name by the way is a pseudonym for Samuel Langhome Clemens) was alive and wrote his stories and books. It is a great progress and help.

Whether with all these tools we have also made that progress in the discovery journey in relation to find the reason we are born? In my opinion not.

Although the newest generations are certainly more focused on meaningful living and working, I think that perhaps 95% of us have not yet experienced the second most important day that Twain mentions. We run around aimlessly in the "we need more" system, which is shouted to us all day long by marketing. Maybe good for the economy.

And when you are young, it is almost naturally not a theme yet to discover why you were born. Around the so-called midlife crisis, you start to think and discover a big part of your lifetime is gone already and you start asking other and deeper personal questions. And a GPS or an app., does not help you find the answers to those questions. You have to visit yourself. Go deep inside. Looking for your core, your (latent) talents in order to ultimately be able to find that important answer. Discover your life mission.

When I look at myself, I have felt deep inside for a very long time that there was more and that I was only in the practice phase of my life. Incidentally, a fantastic period in which I could and was allowed to play fully with most of my talents. I also felt a long time ago that for that deeper development and search, and actually that experience of that second most important day, Asia for me was a must. When I was still working in jobs before I started my last job in The Netherlands as a CEO, I already was open about it and talked about it with a number of people. At the time I thought I had to wait until I was 65 years old. All of a sudden that changed, which allowed it to experience Asia already eleven years earlier.

That discovery of the answer, or to me rather the answers, why I was born, makes that second most important day a new birth. A restart of your life that encourages putting things into perspective. You will see what is really important to you and gives you energy to continue your life course in flow. A course that generates energy instead of consumes energy. Almost no disturbances from the outside world anymore because I connected for the most part only with that what for me really still was important. It makes your life, at least that is my experience, much richer. No more goals to achieve just your mission to live.

And the great thing is that if you surrender to that, the nicest things will suddenly come your way. And when you look back on it after a while you also notice that, in a material way, you actually needed almost nothing. Just because it is your destination.

That Twain may be a humorist and yet ... not a bad idea to spend time on the discovery of that second most beautiful day of your life.

Gangey Gruma (Frans Captijn)
email: captijninsight@gmail.com 

Foto blog: http://franscaptijnhisworld.blogspot.com

Captijn Insight. Catalyst in developing tranquility & in-sight to get in a sustainable way real connection, purpose, pleasure and flow in life, love, family, business, career and work again.

Don't drown in details. Look and read the signs and create a greater picture. It makes your live lighter.

It seems, lately, that I meet more and more people who have their day spoiled by something specific, a detail. And yes, details are important.

One time the reason is a message in the (social) media. The other time the disturbance is by something someone has said to them. Another time for something that went wrong. Plenty of examples.

The focus is on details and things are literally magnified. I often have the feeling that it is a big waste of energy. Everything you give attention grows and you not only influence yourself but also your environment with the irritation that you have called upon yourself. You can even disturb your night rest with it.

It seems to be no more than human that details have a disruptive influence on how "wide" we live our lives.

As a member of a group of photographers here in Chiang Mai (Thailand), one of the things that I deal with in that photo hobby is a different, deeper and wider way of looking. And indeed, that is paying attention to detail. However, that is only possible if you first consider the whole. No detail without a big picture.

And when you look at that large whole again, you find that that too is a detail from an even larger, infinite whole. Just like we ourselves are only that very small pin, or perhaps even less, of that infinitely large whole.

By continuing to focus on details, you miss the whole picture. A whole that always has much more to offer than just that detail.

Once during a lesson at the Buddhist university, the class got a question about a similar photo as I post in this blog. The question was to take some time to discover what you could discover in the drawing.

Some saw, by connecting the black dots, an animal or an object. Still others, like me, just got stuck in the remark of some black dots.

We learned that this is our natural response. Attention to the very limited surface of some black dots. We may have seen the large sheet of white paper, but the attention was not there at all.

And so, it is with all our news that we, in a constant stream, are absorbing. It is "only" the focus of something small within something much bigger. You may wonder whether you should constantly be distracted or disrupted by these details.

Seeing the bigger picture gives distance. Literally and figuratively, to keep an overview and to keep you more stable and in balance.

Look and read the signs and create a greater picture. It keeps you more balanced and makes your life lighter for yourself and the world around you.

Gangey Gruma (Frans Captijn)
email: captijninsight@gmail.com 

Foto blog: http://franscaptijnhisworld.blogspot.com

Captijn Insight. Catalyst in developing tranquility & in-sight to get in a sustainable way real connection, purpose, pleasure and flow in life, love, family, business, career and work again.

Back in time. Picked up my former profession again. Inspiring and super fun to do.

In my youth I have had many opportunities and many I picked up. One of them was my study as a constructional engineer. I passed for the degrees of constructor as well as architect. Until 1982 I worked for a company building a huge housing project in Noordwijkerhout (The Netherlands) and for Ballast Nedam in Saudi Arabia. After that I went to the Fire Service College and I worked for over 30 years in the (inter) national world of safety, crisis and disasters.

After more than 7 years in Thailand it started to ‘itch’ again. Fortunately, I have two right hands. I am grateful that I am still strong and healthy to this day.

I just wanted to build something again here in Thailand. A small private project that is certainly not common for Thailand. My two children reacted spontaneously and my girlfriend no less. So… I started.

It is actually very inspiring to see your mind suddenly starts to think in a different, former, direction again. And the experience that everything, really everything, is still stored in that mind and that it is not even a matter of blowing off the dust, surprised me the most. Structures, construction types, details, possibilities and impossibilities. They all come back in detail. The experiences from Saudi Arabia, especially in relation to the climate, are doing well here.

It actually all works a little bit addicting. Your mind keeps thinking and looking for, sometimes even very creative, solutions. By the way, absolutely not under any pressure. It is now a professional hobby and for my/our own use. Really super fun to do.

I still remember how during my studies my father sometimes in the middle of the night came to my room after he visited the bathroom. Light in my room was still on and he asked me if I still did not sleep. No, I was drawing.

Sometimes I suddenly got inspiration or an idea in relation to my graduation project and with the large drawing table in my room I worked that out that night. It gave me energy and after I finished, I could sleep. I now have those experiences and that feeling again.

And yes, that is the only thing I have encountered so far. Drawing with the Rotring pen on a so-called "Chalk” nowadays is almost impossible. And with more than 37 years out of this profession, I have to refresh my former drawing skills. Making drawings now on the computer with a so-called CAD program.

YouTube, where would we be without YouTube, offered and offers advice. And that too is a super fun experience. To learn by doing. And old-fashioned scratching a wrong line of your paper with a razor blade now is a piece of cake.

Sitting still? No, not for me. It is great to fresh up my old profession and to do something with it again in practice. This former study pays back double.

The prospect of start building myself and with my own hands in a while, and all the preparations for this right now, give a blissful energy and keep my mind creative and young.

Do you want to follow this process?

Feel free, now and then, to visit: https://pyramidhousethailand.blogspot.com

Gangey Gruma (Frans Captijn)
email: captijninsight@gmail.com 

Foto blog: http://franscaptijnhisworld.blogspot.com

Captijn Insight. Catalyst in developing tranquility & in-sight to get in a sustainable way real connection, purpose, pleasure and flow in life, love, family, business, career and work again.