If the Dalai Lama took buses...
With my state of being having improved slightly throughout Monday from the low 40's to the mid fifties, I was hopeful to wake up Tuesday morning at about 80% - hopeful but wrong. Much to the delight of Nick and Will I'd risen with the sun in the low 60's, a percentage of strength at which I now believed Nick hoped I would remain for the rest of our lives given his journal entry. This therefore meant that Nick and Will were off the hook regarding morning activities and we collectively agreed on some intense lounging by the pool, saying goodbye to out hosts Ivan and Keira Knightly and then packing to leave.
Nick, Will and Keira Knightly, as she was to us.
Frankly this sat unexpectedly well with me as I've been reading a lot of Daniel Kahneman recently, and dear reader may I strongly suggest, nay impose, that you do the same, as I'm finding his take on hedonic psychology fascinating. Daniel Kahneman knows what he's talking about. In 2002, Kahneman, despite being more of a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and is best known for his work on decision making and behaviour.
Kahnman says that we have 2 parts to our mind, our remembering self and our experience self, the former finding satisfaction in things we have done, the latter in things we are doing. There must be a balance between the two but now we see far too often a heavier weight on the former as we are beginning to prefer to have done things than to do them. He uses the example of a holiday you will never remember and a disturbing number of people say they wouldn't bother going. For this reason if nothing else, we did a lot of sitting around and chatting, just because it's fun. We did attempt a few villa activities such as a brief sauna trip the highlight of which was Will asking how to turn a sauna on, to which I replied, 'I would start with some flowers and light petting and take it from there, mate.' I felt very good about that joke and wrote it down in case Nick claimed he had been the producer.
I made the mistake of letting slip to Nick and Will the anecdote that the Dalai Lama had once told a friend of mine that worrying about things you cannot help is self-destructively futile and you should save any worry for other things. For some reason, this seemed to give these two expert horizontalists unexpected ammunition to see how late we could leave the villa to drop me at the bus stop, their defense now being, 'well, don't worry if you miss it. The Dalai Lama wouldn't.' Yes, you bastards, but he never said to deliberately cut it fine. Much to their delight and my frustration the following 20 minutes then became The Croatian Job and we bombed around cobbled streets in our black Peugeot 208 getting me to the drop off with exactly 1 minute to spare. 'What was the worry about?' They sung in chorus. Cheerio lads.
The bar dwellers of Split are not know for mincing their words
The bus journey itself was a rigid dichotomy of enjoyment and annoyance; the fun part of it was that the bus was relative empty and I could spread out and write some notes : the tortuously annoying part of it was the god awful music they insisted on playing. It was random Moroccan screeches like Rick Astley was being strangled by a cat in Algiers. It dawned on me that this was another reason that trains were far superior to buses. It was genuinely unpleasant but, a little unlike me, I didn't ask the driver to turn it down. I thought there was nothing I could do about it and the Dalai Lama would have just dealt with it. Or would you, Tenzin?
I arrived in Split wondering what witticisms I could scribe into my journal the following day about decisions, a ten pin bowling situation or indeed a gymnastics move, but faced with too many options, I've kept it simple as it was giving me a headache anyway. Yup, you know what kind of headache. As luck would have it my mate Toby was in town who said that I could stay with him. Always a great man to spend time with as his passport is as worn as a sommelier's cork screw and having been to 110 countries around the world and counting, he's got a great few stories to tell. For example, he did begin one at dinner with the words, "I was at this golf club in North Korea where the recorded best round was 18 hole in ones by Kim Jong Il." Apparently this is true and therefore makes the Former Supreme Leader the best golfer that ever lived. Sorry Tiger. I couldn't resist the lure of squid ink risotto once again but with my constitution now only just making its way through the 70s, I thought best not to push it much beyond that. After dinner, like a pair of sporting cricket batsman, we retired. Only 2 days to the wedding.....