The car radio of the Jean-Paul van, owner of a B&B in Jezona, Spanish, plays ‘I Believe in Miracles’ by Mark Capanni. “Do you believe that you can get signs from above?” Yvonne asks Jean-Paul, who looks like Jack van Gelder, and to Renate, who speaks so nice and creamy and buttery Rotterdam. “Well, no,” says Jean-Paul enthusiastically, while the car is bent through the very dry Spanish landscape. Renate can hardly hide its broad grin in the back seat.
“My father died in October,” says Yvonne suddenly.
“Oh condolences, that’s less.”
The music turns into an emotional piano tune. “In three months it was over, say, and I took care of him. But since then I have always got small things on my path. And very coincidentally, in the patio, exactly before me, a feather was again.”
“How is it possible?”, Jean-Paul responds surprised.
“Now I get, every time I go, there is a feather in front of me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, but not somewhere left or right, but one right in front of my feet.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I looked up: that you can trust yourself and that you are doing well.”
“Okay, well then I learned something again.”
“Don’t you think that’s special?”
“Yes, I think it is particularly yes, I had never heard it,” says Jean-Paul, losing power over the wheel for a moment and almost heads on a truck. Renate’s shocked hand on his shoulder speaks volumes. That just went well.
In her book The human condition From 1958, Hannah Arendt distinguishes three categories of human activity: labor, work and action. We do work to survive: breathing, reproduction, consuming, making money, etc. Work is a step ‘higher’ on the activity ladder, and is about the production of things, from culture, of technology. By working man creates a world, we make something of it. Acting, the highest form, revolves around interaction with others, about language, about stories, about community. The action is about taking initiative to show the world that you are there.
To assure
According to critics, however, Arendt would put too little emphasis on the human activity of worries. Not at Omroep Max, there was the penetrating documentary Good people To be seen (NPO 2), about the elderly Sjaak and Clara Sies, founders of the Food Bank. The two are now 83 and 72, but they cannot stop taking care of others, for the ‘minima’ of Rotterdam-Zuid. Empathy seems to be the most natural thing in the world for these two. Yet they also see that that does not apply to everyone: “For someone who does not know poverty, it is very difficult to estimate how someone experiences it that is poor,” says Sjaak, experience expert. Unfortunately he has heart problems and a hernia, so he has to take it easy now. “Sometimes it is good to listen to your wife.”
The power of B&B full of love (RTL) is that the program focuses on all three categories of activity. Work must be done: cleaning, cooking, chores, groceries. We also have to work, after all, it is the owners to do to create their own small world, the B&B. But why so many people are looking at the program is because there is to act much more intensively than in real life. Constant all those people have to do something together, they have to relate to each other, compete and have fun together. That of course goes horribly wrong all the time. But that is, in close-up, what it means to be human. And that is above all a shared experience.
“What did your father have died of?” Asks Jean-Paul in the car in Spain.
“K.,” says Yvonne.
“Oh terrible. Mine too.”
It is quiet for a moment. Then Renate whispers from the back seat. “Mine too.”