Fun & Famous

People that post Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra quotes

May-Britt has an opinion about it

I’m not one to shy away from using a quote every now and then. Along the lines of ‘if one door closes, another opens’. That sort of thing. I love wise words too. A couple of words that have massive wisdom in them.

When my internship in Singapore ended (that’s right, about seventy years ago), my dearest colleague Jesse with who I spent 18 hours a day for six months straight wrote: ‘In order to discover new oceans one must first lose site of the shore’ in his goodbye booklet. I loved this. And I have another one. ‘What if I fall? But darling, what if you fly?’ Oh, and this one: ‘Those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.’

Moral of the story: I have a thing for proverbs and wise words. Seriously. But I don’t always think that they’re used in the right way. If they’re sold on a foam board in a homeware shop for example. How pretty the words may be, it’s a fail for me. The words are too pretty to be sold by the dozen. I want the saying to be for me only instead of being mass produced for one and all.

“I should’ve known, all of a sudden he quoted his ‘biggest role model’ the Dalai Lama”

Then there’s the phenomenon of people that have such a saying as their Whatsapp tagline. Or at the bottom of their e-mail signature (read more about the stupidest e-mail signatures here). You’re going back and forth about some dinner you’re not in the mood for/a sitter that cancelled on you/the garbage not being picked up and then all of a sudden there’s this life mantra. And the same one every time. The idea behind is good and all, wanting to give their reader something extra, but whenever I’m in the middle of an e-mail conversation, even Deepak Chopra gets on my nerves.

There are also people (who will be named later) that compare themselves with the world’s greatest thinkers. ‘Martin Luther King also said it…’ ‘What I’ve learned from Nelson Mandela, like Plato also said before.’ I believe the word ‘uncomfortable’ is what described my feelings about this best.

My daughter had a test for her swimming certificate the other day (something all Dutch kids must do in elementary school, seeing as we live under sea level). I was watching her from the sidelines, breathing heavy with a pulse of about 200 because, was she gonna make it? Ohhh the stress. There were about 200 shaking kids and other parents like me in front of me. Sitting on the edge of their seats, elbows on their knees, hands together and camera on stand-by. The swimming school principal tried to calm everyone’s nerves by giving a speech. We were welcomed, the process was explained and, I should’ve known, all of a sudden he quoted his ‘biggest role model’ the Dalai Lama.

My parent on my right also found this preaching of big words to little kids pretty annoying and eased my pulse a little by saying:  “What on earth does the Dalai Lama have to do with this? Did he also stay afloat or something?” He fell quiet and then mumbled: “My biggest example is Jesus Christ, who walked on water. He didn’t even need a swimming certificate.”