How old are you?
Here is an overview of all the topics that are dealt with at the respective age of the reader.
It goes without saying that the topics described cannot accurately reflect a reader's life to date, just as it is not possible to predict their future. Every life is unique. The questions in this book encourage you to look at your own life with new eyes:
Where do I notice that I am losing my zest for life and how can I bring it back to life?
How do I wake up in the morning? What would I like to wake up with?
What goals would I set for my future life if I had twice as much courage as in my previous life?
Reading samples
An introduction to the book
"It's never too late to become what you could have been."
George Eliot, English writer
This book changes the way we calculate our lifetime. Imagine your whole life in 24 hours. All the important topics and events that normally take place slowly year after year are suddenly experienced from a different perspective - with a clear goal: to be able to decide anew in which direction you want to develop in each phase of your life.
Why 24 hours? 24 hours correspond to one day. Every single day is a small unit of life. We have a good grasp of the course of a day because we have lived through days thousands of times. We know how days begin, how days run and how days end. Depending on the phase of our lives, our days have a certain structure that determines when we get up, work, take a break, eat, enjoy leisure time and go to sleep. Above all, we know exactly how long a day lasts and we almost always assume that there will be a next day. We can also imagine a successful day because we have experienced it many times before.
What does a successful life look like? The arc of an entire life is much more difficult for us to grasp than that of a day. We do not know when it is half-time in our life and how long it will last. What we do understand as we mature, however, is the cycle that a life goes through, which is comparable to the changing of the seasons. Spring represents growth, which reaches its peak in summer. In the fall, everything diminishes in order to retreat in the winter and gather strength for the next spring. We go through this cycle again and again in our lives.
The idea of my book is to give life a familiar structure. Life in this book lasts 24 hours. In this way, it becomes manageable. Each hour represents a certain period of life from two to five years. The twenty-fourth hour is open so that centenarians can also find themselves. The life themes described in the 24 hours should enable you to look at your life like a researcher. As a good researcher, you are not just looking for confirmation of what you know, but are curious about the many questions that will arise. The aim is to find out more about who you are and who you could be.
Every life is unique. This is symbolized by the hands on the cover and the back of the book. Every hand is individual. On the one hand, the hand lines are already formed in the embryo in the womb, on the other hand, it is up to us what we do with our lives. Consequently, the themes described in the respective life stages cannot exactly reflect your life to date at the respective age, just as it is not possible to predict your future. The selection and chronological allocation of topics is written subjectively from the perspective of a 57-year-old author - but not arbitrarily. The treatment of the individual life topics follows concepts of developmental psychology. The topics range from the results of studies by renowned universities to the wisdom of Seneca or the Islamic scholar Rumi and the teachings of the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast.
It is a book of life. But you can make it a book of your life. Each of us has our own story to tell. If you keep a diary or other regular records of your life, you will be surprised at how differently you assess your life in retrospect from today's perspective than you actually felt at the time. Our judgment of ourselves and others is usually softer as we get older. For all those who have not documented their life, this book could serve to relive it now in retrospect. So ask yourself at points of particular interest to you: "What could this mean for my life?" instead of thinking "It was different for me at this age". You will make an experience: We can't help but judge our past life from today's subjective perspective. If we are happy at the moment, we will evaluate our life positively overall; however, if we are shaken by a crisis or have lost our bearings, our view will be more critical. In both cases, the structure of the 24 hours can help us to better understand what has been and to recognize what could still come. Before every major life decision, it is important to ask a question: Will this path help me grow or will it make me smaller?
Imagine you could count the years ahead of you just as accurately as the years that have already passed. How careful you would suddenly be with your time. In contrast to other scarce goods such as money or food, time is something intangible, not tangible. Therefore, we cannot estimate how much of it we still have available. We would never think of giving away our visible goods indiscriminately. However, we are wasteful with the most valuable commodity, our lifetime. It flows unchecked, our time, and cannot be stopped or reversed. We only realize at some point that the time ahead of us will pass faster than the time that has already passed, and no one can guarantee whether you will actually experience the twenty-fourth hour in your life. That is why there is a twenty-fifth hour in this book, the meaning of which we will come to in a moment.
What you should not expect are the five, six or twelve rules for your perfect life. These obviously don't exist, otherwise there would only be happy people running around everywhere, constantly achieving their goals. I don't believe in the easy shortcut to a fulfilled life. I believe in the vulnerable person who is capable of love and compassion; in the discerning person who knows how to use their mind; in the seeker who thinks beyond their own existence; in the curious person who never stops learning. And I believe in the power of stories. Here is one of my favorite stories about the lucky ones who have been learners all their lives:
All the stories in my book are true. You will also find some autobiographical experiences from me as the author. You will recognize these because they are written in the first person without the addition of a name. Based on feedback from my readers, I know that many of them appreciate hearing personal stories from my life and thus being able to understand a little better the person behind the author. I therefore ask for your understanding that my personal passion topics of learning and self-knowledge will crop up again and again.
This paragraph is inspired by Seneca's "On the brevity of life".
How to get the most out of the book
The book should be a pleasure to read. Unlike a set dinner with a fixed menu, you don't have to wait through endless starters and entrees until the main course or dessert you've been waiting for is finally served. Imagine a round table in an Asian restaurant where all the dishes are served at the same time and you can enjoy them in any order you like. You can read the individual chapters in the same way. For example, chronologically from the first to the twenty-fourth hour, or you can start with your current age and then read the chapters that are of particular interest to you first. As a guide, the topics covered in each chapter are described in the table of contents.
In the table of contents you will see that there is also a twenty-fifth hour. Please read this chapter immediately after the one on your current age. It makes sense to read it again at the very end after the twenty-fourth hour, probably with a different perspective on your life. The twenty-fifth hour will not exist for anyone. We should never forget that our lives could end earlier. That is why an attempt to answer the question of the meaning of life is waiting for you there. The answer consists of a single sentence. There is profound wisdom in this sentence. What this sentence could mean for your life is the subject of the twenty-fifth lesson.
From the big things in life to the small things that are at least as important. A successful life should always be a celebration of vitality. Simple questions can help: How can I take special care of the areas that make my life vibrant? Where do I notice that I am losing my zest for life and how can I bring it back to life? How do I wake up in the morning? What would I like to wake up with? Sometimes it helps to open your eyes, as Marcel Proust recommends:
"The true journey of discovery is not to look for new landscapes, but to see them with new eyes."
PS: How you can use this book for a special experience
At the end of the book, you will find a suggestion on how you could use this book to go on a whole day-long retreat with yourself. This idea is intended for the one percent of readers who want to test their limits. In the excursus, you will also learn how the idea for this book came about from a 24-hour seminar.
Why we usually think of the Nobel Prize and not dynamite when we think of Alfred Nobel.
Alfred Nobel threw the newspaper away and buried his head in his hands in horror. The year was 1888 and "The merchant of death is dead" was the headline of the French newspaper that now lay on the floor in front of him.
He had just read his own obituary. But it wasn't him who had died, but his brother Ludwig. The editor of the French newspaper had mixed up the two brothers and written a long obituary for him, Alfred Nobel. In it, he was portrayed as the inventor of dynamite, who had become rich by helping people to kill each other more efficiently.
Alfred Nobel was so shocked by this erroneous obituary that he decided to use his fortune to leave a more positive legacy when his final hour actually came. When he died eight years later, he donated 95 percent of his fortune to a fund that awards prizes for the benefit of humanity. These prizes became known as the Nobel Prizes and are still regarded as the highest honors for scientists and artists.
About the lucky ones who have been learners all their lives.
Viktor E. Frankl, psychiatrist and founder of existential analysis, was a lifelong learner. He was not afraid to take his pilot's license at the age of 67. In a lecture in Toronto in 1972, he told how his flight instructor inspired him to gain new insights into therapeutic work with people. His flight instructor had explained the principles of navigation to him on a blackboard: "If you want to reach point B in the east with an airplane from point A in the west and there is a crosswind from the north, you would land much further south if you don't take the wind into account. Therefore, you have to head for a point in the north far above the actual destination in order to reach the desired destination." At that moment, Frankl realized that this flying technique could also be applied to humans. He realized for himself: "If you take a person as he is, then we make him worse by treating him this way. If, on the other hand, we take an idealistic view of them and see them as better than they actually are, what happens then? We help them to develop into the person they could really be."
Frankl pointed out to his students that this insight came neither from his flight instructor nor from himself, but from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "If we only take people as they are, we make them worse; if we treat them as if they were what they should be, we take them where they should be taken." For Frankl, the application of this principle was the most important success factor for all psychotherapeutic work: look for the best in every person and in yourself.
You can buy "Ich bin für Dich da. The Art of Friendship" from your local bookseller in person or online, or order it from Amazon.
Tell Andreas Salcher what you think.
