Tag: travel

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Is it a fern, is it a tree? Why would it be anything to me? ©2025 Bard

What could possibly be wrong with loyalty?

Loyalty is often touted as a positive emotion, something to be admired and rewarded for. Yet loyalty has been the cause of suffering throughout known history and probably long before as well.

Loyalty pressures the individual into sacrifice and suffering ‘for the greater good’. Loyalty motivates groups into discrimination, exclusionism and violence towards ‘others’. It can even lead entire nations into waging wars and committing acts of mass murder and genocide, driven by the conviction that this is the loyal thing to do.

I have always wondered why loyalty was so often expected of me in contexts I didn’t sign up for. I didn’t choose to be born where I was born. I didn’t choose to belong to the religion of my parents, grandparents, and beyond. I didn’t vote for the crazy leaders ruining the countries I have lived in. Yes, more often than not, I was told I owed some sacred duty of loyalty to my family, tribe, religion, country and leaders, to the point of being expected to commit acts of violence against others and even happily give up my life in service of those nebulous but apparently deeply sacred construct I supposedly belonged to.

It seems to me that loyalty to any particular group is always a dangerous proposition, as it automatically and unavoidably means excluding other human beings from my duty of care. Loyalty to ‘us’ always means turning away from ‘them’; the others that are a threat to us, want the good things we have, and would rob, enslave or kill us is we gave them even half a chance. Any care, empathy or concern I might feel for those others, I am constantly told, means disloyalty to those I should think of as mine. As if my capacity for loving kindness is too limited to be wasted on outsiders.

I have always deeply mistrusted loyalty as a motivator, especially as a motivator for exclusion, distrust, violence and hate. Of course, I feel a special fondness and connectedness towards those who are close to me. Of course, I feel gratitude and even a sense of indebtedness to my ancestors who worked so hard and often suffered in order for me to live the beautiful life I am living. I have no problem with being asked to do something in return; to make positive contributions to my family, tribe and nation. But my loving-kindness, my capacity for helping others, my compassion for any life that is suffering is not limited to my in-group only. I see no reason to exclude any living being from my duty of care or compassion. All life is one, as far as I can see, and therefore has an equal claim to my loyalty and love.

No living being of any kind deserves to be excluded, neglected, humiliated, enslaved or killed just for being not us.

Connecting to the Land: finding the stories

A while back I shared that I felt my Country was reclaiming me. One part of that process was reconnecting with Nature. Feeling in touch with and being welcomed by my re-discovered natural environment gave me a feeling of coming home I hadn’t expect to find.

But there is more to this process. There are the stories hidden in the land I am reconnecting to.

For decades I lived in Australia. One of the comments my European relatives and friends frequently made when visiting was that Australia has great natural beauty, but is lacking in history. They see it as a young country, lacking in monumental buildings, historic towns and the occasional ruins of past civilisations. On the surface they are not completely wrong. Compared to other continents, the evidence of long-term human occupation of the land is far less visible. The actual human history of Australia, however, runs much deeper than most of the monuments and archeological sites visited by tourists elsewhere in the world.

How deep that history goes only becomes apparent when one discovers the oral history, art, music and dances performed by Australia’s indigenous people. They tell stories that are 10s of thousands of years old. Their art contains knowledge and insights that has been passed on for hundreds of generations. And, interestingly, instead of being connected to man-made monuments, most of those ancient stories, songs and artworks are intimately connected with the land itself. Every natural feature has its story, it seems, and is, through that story, connected to many other places in the continent. To an indigenous Australian, walking through Country is never just a walk from place A to B; it is simultaneously a walk through the history of their people, a revisiting of landmarks they see as their ancestors, and a re-activation of all the knowledge and learning of the generations that went before. Every step they take is securely anchoring them to Country, telling them in no uncertain terms that this is where they belong.

I came back to The Netherlands thinking I would find plenty of visible history but little of the non-tangible story kind. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Sure, the visible stuff is easier to find. It is in all the travel guides, after all. But the land here is full of stories, too, if you know where to look for them. They are just buried much deeper than in Australia, where there are still people actively keeping them alive.

There is a little lake near our house. It is man-made. Not because people wanted to have a lake, but because they were digging out the peat they needed for fuel to warm their houses. The landscape is dotted with small lakes and waterways, speaking of people burning the soil because there weren’t trees enough around to harvest for firewood.

Some of the lakes are almost perfectly circular, which gives them an even more artificial appearance. But those lakes, called pingos, are actually a natural phenomena, caused by ice and meltwater during the ice ages that covered all of the land here. Put together, the land speaks of the slow forces of erosion and the much faster forces of surface mining, both creating and recreating a very unique landscape.

There are some ancient monuments here, too, from the time people here were hunter-gatherers. Huge boulders are grouped together and capped with even bigger ones to form hill-graves we call “Hunebedden” (dolmen), literally meaning “beds of giants”. Built long before the later farmers of this land arrived from the East, they were incorporated into local legends about the giants that roamed the land in ancient days. Some of those legends became fairy tales, others got incorporated into local lore, and some made it into religious tales of saints and demons battling it out amongst the giant stones.

It is till possible, with some research and a lot of patience, to piece together a tapestry of half-forgotten, half-misremembered storylines that were once the way our ancestors here gave meaning to the landscape around them. Doing so, I find, is another way in which this Country is reclaiming me and weaving me into its very being. The more I stumble across the ancient stories, the easier it becomes for me to not feel strange, separate and alienated but part of everything around me. The more I retell and reconstruct those old narratives while exploring the land, the more I feel I am becoming a participant and caretaker, not just a curious tourist passing through.

What’s the Deal? – On Contracts and Agreements

For a few weeks, we had a rental car on loan while waiting for our lease car to be repaired. The rental car was organised by the dealer, not, as I expected, by the lease company.

Several people reacted to my story about the lease company’s reluctance to keep us mobile after our car malfunctioned. A common assumption was that a lease contract is a DAAS (Driving as a Service) agreement. The car shouldn’t matter, what should matter is that we would stay mobile.

To be honest, that was also my assumption when I signed the lease contract. Or, to be more precise, when I signed the lease agreement, which was a shortened version of the full contract. The full contract was available on the lease company’s website. I remember looking through it at the time but not taking the time to read the whole thing, as it was many pages long and written in the kind of small-print legalise that makes your eyes water and your head hurt.

As it turns out, my understanding of the agreement I made with the lease company doesn’t quite match their understanding of what we agreed on. The basic contract is little more than a financing deal, with some additional services thrown in around maintenance, insurance and a financially attractive way to switch to a new car after a few years. Whereas the lease company’s website and informal communications are full of promises around ‘driving without the hassle’, ‘carefree driving’, ‘removing the burden of ownership’, etc. the actual contract has been carefully constructed to outline quite a few conditions, exceptions and caveats that undermine those promises. Had I taken the time and trouble to study the full contract before signing the agreement, I might have negotiated a different agreement, or go to a different lease company.

What we are left with is a mismatch between my understanding of the deal and that of the lease company. Whose fault is that? Mine or theirs?

Legally speaking the fault is mine, of course. Though not included in the paperwork the lease company sent me, the full contract with all its clauses and attachments was available online. I should have studied that before signing the agreement.

Ethically speaking the answer may not be that straightforward. The lease company didn’t exactly advertise the fact there was a long and complicated contract behind the simple agreement form I signed, for instance. It was only hinted at in a footnote, printed in super-fine print, at the bottom of the (mostly empty) page. Obscured by their logo and some irrelevant company information. Almost as if they tried to keep me from reading it. And the contract itself required close-reading and a higher-education level understanding of English to fully make sense of what it stipulated. Some very smart lawyers must have heaps of fun finding creative ways of denying essential services while seemingly making them available.

I believe that a customer-focused company, one that really cares about the well-being and satisfaction of their customers should feel responsible for making sure their customers understand the deal they are signing up for, especially when that deal is complex and prone to assumptions and misunderstandings. In such cases moral considerations should inform their duty of care, not legal arguments fuel their tendency to not care a damn.

The Kindness of Strangers

A few weeks ago, on the way back from our shopping round, our car started playing up. The automatic brake system started engaging the brakes at random moments, which was scary enough, before all kinds of warning lights appeared on the dashboard, followed by a warning in bold letters on a bright red background that told me the car would start an emergency shut down in 15, 14, 13, …. seconds, inexorably counting down while I was frantically looking for a safe place to take the car off the road.

We almost made it to safety. The car was half on the shoulder of the road, with only a bit of the rear still sticking out when we reached 0 and the car completely died on me, in the process locking the brakes and the steering wheel. It could have been worse, at least most of the car was off the road, but the bit sticking out, on a 1.5 lane road, in a bend flanked by trees, was dangerous enough to have us worried. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t restart the engine, nor could I unlock the brakes and steering mechanism.

Within minutes, a van stopped behind us, the driver got out and asked if he could help. We tried pushing the car further into the shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge, so he apologised profusely, before driving on. The next person to offer help was a local farmer who had been told someone had parked a car on the edge of his potato field. He was very friendly, too, and suggested some numbers we could call to get expert help.

So we called roadside assist (ANWB, for those that know the Dutch system) and waited, hoping no-one would hit us from behind, or cause a head-on collision by steering around our car without checking if anyone was coming from the other direction. Truth be told, there were some near-misses, but no actual crashes.

About an hour later the ANWB guys showed up. He introduced himself and then spent the best part of an hour running all kinds of diagnostics trying to resuscitate our defunct vehicle. To no avail. We had to call a tow truck and were told it would take at least another hour before one would arrive.

To our surprise, the ANWB guy decided to wait by our side. He had turned on the rotating alarm lights on his van and put a series of witch’s hats around our car to make sure no cars would crash into us. And, as relaxed as could be, we then had a very engaging conversation about his work, my work, the state of the world, even politics and a bit of religion, all in a most amicable atmosphere, almost if we were old friends having a yarn over a beer. When the tow truck finally arrived, with the help of the ANWB guy, our completely dead car was successfully loaded onto the tow truck.

He didn’t have to do this. He could have packed up and moved on hours ago. It was pure kindness and helpfulness that made him stay by our side and I will always be grateful for that.

Below you see me carting away our shoppings in a wheelbarrow we had just bought, not knowing it would come in so handy :-).

My Country of Birth is Reclaiming Me

My Country of Birth is Reclaiming Me

I have been somewhat absent from this blog in the past 2 years. Not completely, but I was far less active than in previous years.

One of the reasons is the fact that circumstances largely beyond our control have forced my wife and I to relocate back to the country we were born in, The Netherlands, and leave our country of choice, Australia, behind.

That process, happening in the midst of the COVID pandemic, was messy, hectic and rather painful at times. But the transition is behind us now and we are settling into our new home, in a beautiful forest in the north of the country.

One interesting thing I am noticing is how the country seems to be reclaiming me. After living in Australia for more than 20 years, I felt (and still feel at times) more Australian than Dutch. I came back to this country feeling a stranger in a strange land; a visitor to a country that didn’t look much like the country I left behind in the previous century.

But in the past few months, that feeling has been changing. Gradually, I beginning to feel my old roots – the ones I thought I had severed and discarded when I migrated to Australia – come to life again and take hold in the soil of the forest around me. I am beginning to recognise the feel of the sand under my feet, the sounds of the birds and insects, the smell of the grass and the surrounding trees. And I am beginning to feel Home again.

What makes this process interesting to me is that it is not the nation or its people that is reclaiming me, but its Nature, its soil, its COUNTRY, as the Australian Aboriginals would call it. It is a feeling that had slowly grown on me in Australia, but – because I wasn’t born there – would never completely take hold: that of belonging to country. Here in The Netherlands, I feel I am welcomed back and told I do belong here; that I never stopped belonging here, no matter how far away I was.

For me, this is an important reminder of how deeply intertwined we really are with Nature, with the land on which we are born, live and die. We are not separate from Country, we are its offspring, and tied to it through many, many invisible roots and connections. We may have created this illusion of man vs. nature, or man over nature, or even man completely separate from it, but we are, in our core, just another form of Nature. Nothing more, nothing less. Only when we acknowledge that and let our country fully claim us as its own can we be truly happy and in harmony with ourselves and the world.

Here is to coming Home and being reclaimed. Here is to Country.

Happy New Future.