There was a strong, cold wind, leaving snow flakes on my hair and in my face. I almost felt like Laura Ingles Wilder’s dad when he was on his way home and found himself in the middle of a snowstorm and then got attacked by a bear and all. I had gone for a run in the forest but had gotten totally lost. Google maps on the iphone is great, but you do need to go in the right direction! My ears were tingling and I had tears in my eyes. How wonderful to feel such intense cold, to hear myself breathing, to worry about wild boars ready to attack.

I kept on running and felt so alive.

Wasn’t it Descartes who shook the world when he said: ‘I think so I exist’, because for the first time in history he explained the world around him in ways in which he perceived it. His idea was that you can never be sure that the things that you are experiencing are true, you might actually be dreaming everything and suddenly wake up in a completely different reality. The only thing you can be sure of is the fact that you can think about the things around you. And that is how you know that you exist.

Anyway, there were lots of other very smart guys (and probably also girls, but somehow they never got famous) who developed these ideas and came up with other factors that determine our sense of being. Heidegger wrote a totally unreadable book about ‘Dasein’, in which he says that we can be conscious of the fact that we are conscious and that should be enough to give life its meaning.

Well, the tricky part of these types of explanations is that they are very self-centered. They focus only on our own perceptions. We value our lives by what we experience. And depending on whether that’s good or bad, we either become depressed or happy, but in both cases will always struggle with the pursue of the best for ourselves. And somehow never be able to answer the questions of meaning.

But then there were a few other guys (and probably also girls but somehow they never got famous) who lived through the Second World War and personally experienced the dangerous results and emptiness of this way of thinking in its extremes. Because where is the other in our self-perceived reality? If what we experience is the rule, we automatically value ourselves above others. If we decide that others do not fit in how we want to experience life, why not just ignore them or worse, get rid of them? And that’s what happens.

To cut a long story short, they found that we can only find what it truly means to be human if we live in response to the lives of others and what happens around us. If we stop looking for meaning in what we experience and start putting meaning in it ourselves. Stop trying to prove the existence of God, but start responding to what His existence means. Stop being stuck in preconceived ideas and unshakable truths about other people, but start valuing each one of them as much as ourselves.

I was driving through the streets of Luanda when all of a sudden I saw a lady stumbling on the pavement. She had obviously had polio, was walking very slowly and I could see that each step hurt. I felt so sorry and awful, like I would do a gazillion times a day when seeing the most pitiful people in the streets. Normally I would try to ignore them and shut my nagging conscience up for a sec. But not this time. I stopped, let her in and took her home.

It was an hour detour and I was late for a meeting, but I felt so alive.