Today I have been 52 times around the sun.
When I was younger, I always wrote a piece of music through the evening and night - so I had a fixed point to look back on. And through it remember where I was when that year ended and a new one began. A kind of mnemonic anchor in consciousness, which always allows me to travel back and feel what I stood in there - and see and experience it with everything that came after. Sorrows, worries, anger, joys, hopes, dreams, longings and faith woven together in sound.
In recent years I have written words instead - and saved the music for something else we shall do together.
This year I allow myself to share my words, which are otherwise reserved for myself. Perhaps they are useful to you, here where we are right now.
For there is something about standing on the other side of half a century which - if one has taken the task of looking inward seriously - makes it easier to see what actually carries, and what just makes noise. And it is absolutely not because one becomes wiser from time passing in itself - but because the layers, if one has taken the trouble, begin to peel off.
The things one thought were oneself turn out to be clothes one had on. Roles. Positions. Markers. Thin identity. Irrelevant. When you look at it properly. And what remains is something that was there all along, and which was there before everything else. That which captures and writes down the music and the words.
Human.
For underneath everything we call ourselves - all labels, all diagnoses, all identity markers, every sexual observance, religiosity, political affiliation, every single group membership no matter how fine and how much it cost to become a member of - there we are. You. And I. The same incomprehensibly beautiful, complicated, interwoven being, stretched out between flesh and spirit in the short time we are here. We are born into the same condition. We love and fail and fear and hope within the same field of tension. And we die out of it again, all of us, without exception.
We forget that so easily.
And we forget it extra easily nowadays, where the spirit of the age grabs us by the throat through the screens we have had installed everywhere - screens that constantly want to influence, massage, nudge, regulate and spin - if not shame and cancel - until we stand there, where something or someone can benefit from us meaning, saying and doing exactly what they need.
In other words, we live in a time where everything is reduced to the very topmost layers in us. Right or left. Oppressor or oppressed. For Israel or for Palestine. Body or identity. Believer or enlightened. As if a human being can be contained in a simple binary. And it is no coincidence that this happens - for a human being reduced to their position is far easier to move than a human being who rests in their depth.
But there is a law here which we keep overlooking.
The more we reduce the model, the framework we think and live within, the poorer the Story about ourselves becomes, about who and what we are. And the less room there is for the full, whole Human - the one who can stand in harmony with reality, and the one who can fall into collapse, chaos and dissolution. Both are us. A model that can only contain one half understands neither of them. And the poorer our ability to describe - to put precise words to what we stand in - the dumber we become. And the dumber we become, the worse the solutions we can come up with.
That is why the ancient stories carry such deep value, once you catch sight of them and understand what they are trying to communicate. They do not have value because they are old. But because they tell of the Human before our time's polarisation - about shadows that must be met and integrated instead of projected onto the neighbour, about the Darkness in oneself that becomes hate when one refuses to acknowledge it. Those stories knew something we are busy forgetting - that the split outside always begins with the Split within.
And that leads directly into what I actually want to say this year.
We stand in a time of breaking that calls for the exact opposite of what we are drawn into by the spirit of the age.
The True Spirit - regardless of what you choose to believe it is, and where it comes from - calls for Gathering.
For by far most of the West's - and therefore Denmark's - most essential problems right now are not the usual small political games about a bit of local or national power.
They are civilisational.
They are fate.
Decisive for the meeting with the future.
For our way of being Human.
And whether it shall continue to exist from here.
Whether it is the meeting with another world order like the Islamic one, whose civilisational model stands in direct opposition to ours. Whether it is the tectonic plate shift, which AI and robotisation rolling in over us in five minutes and changing all conditions from within. Whether it is the production of an abundance of stable, cheap energy for both current and tomorrow's needs. Whether it is the ability to build economic locomotives again - in a Europe that has not created a single new company of global weight in half a century, while everything that changes the world is built elsewhere. Whether it is the will to rebuild and defend oneself, now that war stands again on the continent, and the question is no longer theoretical. Whether it is the population collapse and the resource-related and economic earthquakes that follow right after. Whether it is language itself, which has become so mined that reality can barely be described anymore - and therefore is no longer done so at universities and higher educational institutions - for what cannot be described cannot be solved.
And under it all, under every single one of them - the unhitching from the faith that built Europe. The foundation on which everything else stood - and which we continue to live on as inherited capital we have forgotten where comes from. Which is rapidly running out...
NONE of those questions can be answered from one of the sides alone. They are too big for the model.
And those we have set to lead us thunder undeterred - and apparently unconsciously - deeper into the split instead. Every day.
The Human is common. The orders we build are not. I can look any human in the eye as my equal, carried by the same condition and the same dignity - and at the same time say clearly that the civilisational models we raise on top of the common are not equally good, and cannot live in the same house. The two recognitions belong together. And they can ONLY be held together by a consciousness that is larger than right and left.
For the answers are not found on one of the sides. They are found in the synthesis that can think both/and. Both roots and future. Both borders and openness. Both what we owe each other as citizens - and what we owe each other as something far older than citizens.
52 trips around the sun, friends ☀️
If they have taught me one thing, which only seems to increase in strength within year by year, then it is this -
Human first.
❤️🔥🪽
…
And as a sidenote -
It says HEART WIDE OPEN on the t-shirt.
The only way to live.
If you are a Man.
Or a Woman.
And not something with ears, then... 😁😅