Arriving in Beijing was a strange yet familiar feeling. It seriously felt like I’d been there before. I get that with a lot of places I travel to, but this time was very different. There wasn’t any fear. No worrying, and at no point did I think someone was going to be rude to me or harm me. You can get that in some places around the world let me tell you.
I’d been in Beijing airport for over 3 hours and I felt totally relaxed. It’s very clean and the people are so helpful. For the first half hour a young man in Starbucks had been helping me find the code you need to log on to the Internet. He was been talking to me about his dream to be a football star and that AC Milan is his favourite team. I told him my little brother was a football player and had soccer trials for the L.A Galaxy. He went crazy. It was nice to see someone’s eyes light up when they were talking about something.
I had a great experience on the plane. I was really cold about 2 hours before the flight landed and I had got up to go to the restroom and when I got back I went to pull my blanket over me and the elderly Chinese man turned to me and gestured that he would put the blanket on for me; with a fantastic smile, and so wise. I was a little shocked at first but when I saw the look in his eyes I just relaxed. He really wanted to do that for me. It was a really incredible experience.
My social life experience is so far removed from that behaviour but something interesting sparked in me. He did exactly what I think about doing for others. If I see someone having difficulty with something I want to help. If someone can’t figure something out I want to help him or her find the best way to do it. I really get something out of that and it really saddens me that people don’t really do that for each other anymore or find that they have the bravery to do it, me included.
The art of human conditioning is a very powerful thing. We’ve all learnt to be fearful of each other. To protect and guard what is ours. We all want to love but we have all experienced life too and life has taught us to be fearful. Schools and other educational places have taught us that too… even our own parents and friends. When we were young we had many experiences where our hearts were open to our parents, teachers and friends but at some point we all got scolded and we all believed we did nothing wrong… and we didn’t. They were only protecting us but we came from a place in our heart that was innocent and we felt like they betrayed us. Over the years we built a defensive behaviour to cope and went to the inner recesses of our emotional body to find strength. Then we built stories that were not truly “us”. We had to live up to something to fit in and now we aren’t honest with ourselves and it’s tough living a lie… isn’t it?
I can feel a little anger inside me about all of this but I know that is frustration and resentment at the throws of life and being bought up in the society I was and with the lessons I was taught. Well, I guess it’s been there for as long as anyone can remember. It’s just a shame. It’s such a loss to humanity that people feel they have to act like this and that they lost the innocence of childhood. The love they hold for strangers and people they meet. Remember the only reason you that you feel fear when I mention “strangers” is because that is what you’ve been taught and the only reason they can do harm to you is because the same lessons they learned were from damaged humans that they had as parents/teachers.
From what I saw out there in Beijing airport and with the people that I met in my hours of roaming before my flight, is that the a lot of the Chinese people met still had that innocent spark in their eye. A little hope for others and an attitude of service and thankfulness, compared to an attitude where they would step on each other to get where they wanted. Like the expression, “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire” Yeah, I get that. Totally.
I was so excited to get out of the airport and land in Singapore to find out what the people were like outside the confines of space and security; the in-between place they call an “airport”. Maybe they were different? Maybe they were even more hospitable?
It was 9.55 am, only 3 hours and 25 minutes left to my flight to Singapore so I drank my weight in coffee at the Starbucks and I felt like I was back home down the street from where I lived. It’s crazy, I was thousands of miles away but Starbucks made me feel at home. Thank God I don’t feel the same way about McDonalds. I’d be the size of a house.
More on Singapore real soon...
PEACE
KRIS X
