75 days to go...

Today I start my Treasure Hunt. I will peel off layers to find out who am I. The layers are what people see about my persona. They are also what I often confuse to be me. But they are not.

By peeling, I hope to find the treasure underneath the layers: the real me.

The first petal to peel is my job. My work is very important to me. People know me as a water resources specialist. Someone who knows about water problems and solutions. From managing water for people, water in rivers, too much water, too little water, conservation of watersheds, to water policies, laws, and practices to improve how society manages water.

Water fascinates me, and I consider myself lucky to make a living doing work that I have a passion for. I have welcomed the world of water to live inside me. It’s not a routine job, because it evolves all the time. So my work is important to me. It is a beautiful layer around my core. But it is not the core. I love my work as water specialist, but it is not who I am.

So what about where I come from, my nationality. Is that my identity? I am Dutch, from the Netherlands. Being Dutch is a part of me, because it has been an important factor in shaping me into who I am now. On the other hand, I was not actually born in Holland, but in the island of Curaçao in the Caribbean (part of the Netherlands Antilles). And I spent part of my youth in Texas in the US.

After coming back to Holland, I continuously dreamed of going overseas. For many years I had a conviction to join the navy. At 16, however, I decided that there are better ways of living my life than training to push buttons that kill other people. My interest then shifted to becoming a development worker, to help to make the world a better place. Not in the Netherlands, but in the developing countries in the tropics. So I set out from high school to study tropical land and water management. I am glad I did, and making the world a better place is still my passion.

People who know me will attest that I don’t display much affinity for being Dutch. While I have always valued my nationality, I have never felt that it was a defining factor in my life. For sure, I realize that being a citizen of a small but well-connected country has offered me great opportunities to become a citizen of the world. And that has been the aspiration throughout my life so far.

In fact, I have turned down several Dutch job offers over the years, simply because I felt they weren’t the right things for me to do. I also remember declining on two occasions to join the training program for the Dutch diplomatic service. I thought about it carefully, and I felt that my calling was to do other things with my life. So, while being Dutch has been important to me, it doesn’t define who I am. Being Dutch is not who I am.

How about my name? It is intimately connected to who I am. I respond when people call me by my name. I am happy and take pride in my given name and my family name. It is part of my identity, for sure. But my given names are not me. Neither is Saxman, my nom de plume to date. I am not the names given to me, and not the names I have given myself.

I need to dig deeper now, to peel off more petals of my identity. I turn to the ones about religion, beliefs, and lifestyle. These are surrounding my core. I was raised in a liberal Christian tradition. I went to Sunday school, and attended church occasionally. Mostly though, my weekends were spent on the sports field.

Religion entered the core of my life when I joined a fundamentalist Christian movement during my high-school years. This influence lasted until my early years in university. There is no doubt that it infused me with many positive core values. I think it also shielded me from benefits of experimenting with life as daringly as friends without a strong religious calling. In retrospect, it meant that it took me a bit longer to grow up.

During my first adventures overseas, I landed in Indonesia, which for many generations had been the abode of my ancestors from father’s side. Living with a Moslem family for the greater part of a year, I experienced first hand how people from Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and Animistic religious traditions could live together in this great country. Their different beliefs were supported by the Indonesian state philosophy of Pancasila. This experience changed my beliefs deeply.

From then on, I could not fit myself any longer within the confines of the fundamentalist (evangelical) Christian tradition. (On a sad note, I add here that the divisive influences that have sown so much distrust around the world between followers of different religions, have also succeeded in destabilizing many local communities in Indonesia in recent years.)

My “religious” education continued through my succeeding years, when I completed my studies and left the Netherlands to live in Sri Lanka and later in Thailand. In my next posting, I will reflect on how this influenced my core beliefs, and I will address the question if these beliefs are me, or are precious petals around my core.

Photograph: Uncovering the core – the Awareness card in the Osho Zen Tarot deck.