Column | Up close everything is important, from a distance nothing matters

Our rather overweight girlfriend looked surprised to hear us whining about hips and pounds and calories as we downed cheese croissants after the weekly swim. “I thought girls like you looked happy every day in front of the mirror,” she said, a little disconcerted. We rushed to assure her that it wasn’t, oh no, we had our frustrations too, she shouldn’t think that being slim solves all your problems! I don’t know if we meant it comfortingly. Probably not.

Now, a lifetime later, I often think: she was right. Girls like us, people like us, should be satisfied every day, if not in the mirror, then at least look around us.

It’s a bit of a good feeling, but how could you not have it?

On television you can see the desperation of people in collapsed Turkish cities. A Syrian who hears his sister calling under the rubble, but there is no assistance, there are no machines to clear the rubble. You think you are both the sister – does she hear her brother’s voice? does it give her hope, strength? – if the brother who can do nothing but keep a spell on guard, don’t let go.

Even our government seems to be better than expected when you see Erdogan

“I live in the earthquake zone”, I sometimes say to people to clarify the location of the unknown village in Groningen. No house has ever collapsed here. Even our government, which does not excel in effective decisiveness, to put it mildly, seems better than expected when you see Erdogan use this disaster to praise the government: “We will build new houses, just like we did in 1999 have done!” Yes, new houses that again will not be designed for earthquakes.

The neighbours, who recently had to leave their farm acutely because it was no longer safe to live there, have been put in emergency housing and work is being done every day to strengthen the dangerously shaky parts of their house. They have never been homeless. Of course there are not millions of them, but still.

I watch Thomas Erdbrink’s impressive series about Afghanistan. The brave girls who are afraid and go to a secret school, hoping that the tide will turn at some point and they will have a life ahead of them instead of lifelong imprisonment under the Taliban. In the first episode, a young man who had failed to leave the country in time said that the defining difference between him and Erdbrink was that he was born in Afghanistan and Erdbrink was born in Europe. That coincidence. “Fate behaves like an idiot,” wrote Euripides.

So do we have anything to complain about? Those hips, those calories, those earthquakes, those cancers — don’t they all matter? That would also be a strange conclusion. Then you belittle everything in your own life because it could be so much worse. It’s not an answer to deny life here all meaning and just mutter “thankful, thankful.” By the way, you also belittle the people there by just seeing them as miserable and helpless.

Jeez, is this a sermon or something? No, it’s an attempt to think about how you could be in life. Has something to do with perspective and balance. Everything we do and think matters, but not always to the same degree. Up close everything is important, from a distance nothing matters. There is no ideal distance.