History
of my
passions

 

My name is Justinus, I was born in Freiburg a cute little town in southern Germany in vicinity to the Black Forest. According to my Mom I opened my eyes immediately after emerging from the womb. I was curious for this world from the first moments on.

Later, I must have been two or three years old -- my first words were "water" and "light" by the way -- I was fascinated by holes in walls that were built along roads through vineyards. These holes obviously where there with the intention to let the water drain from the fields in case of strong rain. I articulated my fascination by pointing with my fingers at each hole and commented on it in the following way "water comes out!", although most of the time there was no water anywhere to be seen.

When I was a bit older, about seven years old, I became passionate about volcanoes. I just could not think about anything other than volcanoes. Also fumaroles, hot springs and caves were high on the list of things that fascinated me. Even today I feel a strong awe for our planets eruptive gestures. On a visit to Iceland I spend hours watching and listening to fumaroles, holes in the ground where a constant stream of hot steam keeps a couple of gallons of grey mud in a bubbling and burping movement. The consistency and thickness of the mud determines the particular musical character of each individual hole. The fumaroles are part of and surrounded by a landscape made of vivid colorful soil patches. Some are beige almost bright yellow or white, other parts are reddish tending towards a dark umbra. The whole scenery including particular smells and sounds had a profound impact on me. The idea that our planet is alive and kicking rather than a solid piece of rock is very fascinating. Basically we are standing with our feet on a thin crust of soil floating on top of an ocean of semi liquid rock, just a few miles down. If we are lucky we can spend our whole life on that crust without ever realizing that it actually moves, stretches, shivers and sometimes even burps.

I think my next fascination was with minerals. I became completely obsessed with crystals and minerals, which can come in funky shapes and shine in bright sparkling colors. Some of them look dull in ordinary visible light, but if you shine ultra violet light onto them they shine back in bright green, red or blue colors. Unfortunately, all the cool places where one could possibly find exciting minerals were far out of my reach. My parents were not particularly adventurous and insisted on recreational vacations versus trips that would involve climbing through mines, camping in the outback or some other rather hostile place.

At some point I got interested in chemistry. One day my aunt gave me a chemical experiment box as a present. I was immediately hooked on it. The problem was that all the really cool and exciting experiments needed ingredients like highly concentrated saltpeter acid or sulfuric acid which my dad refused to get for me. I was of course under age to buy these chemicals myself. One day I spilled diluted sulfuric acid--which he generously permitted me to use--onto my mattress. I immediately cleaned the sheet and also tried to rinse the acid from the mattress. It looked all right at first, but after a couple of days there suddenly appeared a gaping hole in the mattress.

This and other experiences slowly deterred me from chemistry as a means to express myself. I don't know how it happened, but at some point I started disassembling electronics devices as a new hobby. One of the first victims was my neighbors TV set. My buddy at that time was the neighbor's son who insisted that the TV set was no longer in use; he even declared it broken.

That was absolutely fine with me. So we took the bounty up to my room and ripped the whole thing apart. It was an absolutely amazing trip into the unknown. We had no idea what all these funky shaped little devices were for. Unfortunately, my friend's dad was not very amused by the transformation his TV set had undergone. But luckily he was not too mad about it.

Slowly I started building amplifiers, receivers and other small electronics gadgets. I had a lot of trouble getting all the required parts. Somehow there was always a problem, something missing or something I just didn't understand. And of course all the math and the physical properties of electronics devices are based on was way beyond me. Luckily one day my family visited the family of an ex school mate of my dad. He is a math and physics teacher. In his house I saw for the first time in my life a real computer. He had actually two or three computers. One was a Commodore PET (http://www.vintage-computer.com/pet8032.shtml), which had a green screen and a keyboard all build into one big box. The other one was a portable one with a little black and white LCD screen. It looked like a giant pocket calculator.

Well guess what, I became completely disinterested in anything else besides doing something with these mysterious, awesome machines. My dad's friend helped me type in a BASIC program and tried to explain to me how it worked, without much success. The program involved sin and cosine functions and some other math that was years ahead of me. It plotted some pretty curves on to the screen. Later my dad went with me to a computer store and bought a Commodore 64 computer for us. This event was quintessential for my further development. Because for the first time I didn't need physical material, like acids, expensive or unobtainable electronics components to express my ideas. I started to use something more abstract namely programming code.

The fact that there is a whole world beyond the directly perceptible physical one, consisting of abstract thoughts and ideas was very intriguing to me, although I probably didn't even understand the concept of it. For me a program was still something very physical and solid, although, if one was not careful and didn't save the work of hours, it could disappear any moment if the computer crashed.

From my work with the computer my math skills quickly improved. I was very bad at math in school, because I found it hard to concentrate on these calculations, and I tended to do stupid mistakes that would lead to the wrong solutions of the assigned exercises. But with my computer I was suddenly able to visualize mathematical functions graphically. I wrote a nice function plotting program and some other tools that would allow me to do experimental math. Once I wrote a program to simulate the movements of stars attracted to each other by the gravitational force and baffled my math teacher completely. He thought with what I knew about gravitation and my lack of understanding in differential equations I could not possibly write a program that would accomplish such a feat. But I just did that, by experimenting with algorithms and by applying just plain common sense.

So I suddenly developed an intuitive way of looking at mathematical formulas and my grades improved steeply. I found myself able too look beyond the mere numbers and symbols, although the latter achievement took me at least two years while studying math at the university. I was probably not a very gifted student. I was very slow at absorbing all the new material that we were supposed to learn. Some things that one would consider essential for a mathematician to know I could never quiet grasp like higher algebra for example. It just seemed terribly dry and hard to approach. But nevertheless, I became very passionate about math despite the fact that I felt I sucked badly at it. My take on this is that I become passionate about things that are just outside of my reach, that I can just barely grasp. They have to have to be deeply mysterious to me--the opposite of the obvious, repetitive, flat and boring thing.

The intellectual world aside I find myself being passionate about sensual experiences that include food, music, art and of course love.

I started to cook when I was a child by helping my mom in the kitchen, and I think she contributed a lot to my aptness for cooking. After a phase of sticking strictly to recipes and figuring out different ways to prepare meals my style became more experimental. I no more heed traditional ways of using certain ingredients for certain dishes. I like to use a spice, vegetable or grain in an new unexpected way. For example, I use Thai fish sauce to prepare tomato sauce for pasta and sometimes include shitake mushrooms. Since I came to the USA I had even more access to unknown ingredients that I could use for cooking experiments. For example, once I bought a bunch of cactus leaves without having a real clue how to prepare them.

More often than not my explorative mind has caused me a great deal of suffering. I developed a strong urge to find some secret deeper meaning behind all the superficiality, something that's more real than mere every day reality. After watching my own history of getting enchanted about something--just to get disenchanted after a while-- a certain disillusion started to kick in. Frustration and depression started to become a real challenge for me. More and more I saw myself pondering and questioning about a possible true meaning of life. That might explain why I became more and more interested in religion/spirituality and religious/spiritual beliefs. As a teenager I would have never considered that to be fascinating topic. But suddenly (I also ascribe this to a certain level of maturity), I felt a profound respect for the truly religious and spiritual.

I got the chance to do some meditation retreats in Buddhist centers, and I'm trying to keep up a daily meditation practice, although I'm generally not very disciplined at doing things regularly. The intimate contact with the Buddhist teachings has opened my mind in a way that I find myself more welcoming to things that I would have automatically rejected before, and it certainly helped ease the burning desire to find some definite answers. The teachings somehow made me understand that there are no definite answers--at least not to my questions. In that sense the spectrum of my passions has broadened. I came to think that everything can be fascinating if one just looks at it in a compassionate open minded way. At the same time, my passions changed towards the quiet and more insightful ones. They don't depend so much on a specific physical object or experience. And as such they became more stable and independent.

I'm curious how my passions will change and develop in the future, and I have confidence that they will. I'm glad that I'm able to be passionate. Because the mere fact that I have passions, and that I seek out experiences in a passionate way (although they often lead to intense suffering), is a strong sign that I'm in fact alive. The way I think of it now is: life is something that we just do, it just happens in some mysterious wondrous way. We can look at all the details, mechanisms and inter dependencies and we can try to understand how the cells of our bodies work. But in the end we cannot give a definite answer as to why or how life is happening to us. It just is and remains a complete mystery in which we will never be able to completely comprehend. And I think this points towards the ultimate passion there is, the passion for life as it really happens, without theories, without explanations, without doctrines, just the down-to-earth get-your-hands-dirty live-the-life-to­-the-fullest kind of passion. And that's just the right one for me.

 

by Justinus Menzel