Good night, Mr. Fournier

I am on a long but not thin road, not thin like the road to Aşık Veysel's house, but on a wide highway with two lanes going and two lanes returning. The rain is blowing from both sides through my windows. Like the tears in my eyes. But I am a person who loves my solitude, the solitude of driving on a long road. I like solitude that is not forced, solitude that is chosen, solitude, Mr. Fournier, just like you.

I arrived in the rain in the car I rented from the airport, in the city of my birth, where I live with homesickness. Soon it will be night, I enter my parents' apartment. It is dark, the times when silence reigns supreme.

Whenever I stepped into this house when my parents were at their summer house, the first thing I would do was to open the blinds and ventilate the house. You know, Izmir gets very hot in the summer. I would call my father and mother and remind them to drink water. How many glasses of water did you drink today, mom? I would ask my mother to drink water as if I were a small child. As you can probably guess, Mr. Fournier, my parents never drank water, they often forgot to drink. Your relatives who were close to you at first and then became distant from you, they used to remind you to drink water too, didn't they? It's very hot today, drink a lot of water, won't you? Would you get angry with your relatives who told you to 'drink water'? My mother used to get angry with me a lot, stop asking me! If I said I drank, I drank! Oh now, what would have happened if she had gotten angry again!

This house is quiet, stuffy. The shutters are closed. It's night, but I still pulled the living room shutters upwards, all the way. I did this because I want to see the lights of the Gulf, the lights of the ferry going at night, the lights of the "Al flag". 

My parents' neighbors in the garden apartment next door. I want to know that they live in their house, I want to see inside through their windows, to see the lights on. I lift the shutters of the side windows, and unfortunately they are not at home either. Their shutters are closed. I feel sad that it is like this. Desperately I sit on the armchair, meanwhile for some reason there are no ferries passing by. There are no shutters open. It's almost midnight, there's deep silence and I'm road-weary, Mr. Fournier. 

What has happened to us? Roads and journeys have become the center of our lives, those who go miss those who stay, those who stay keep an eye on those who go. 

It is a fact that inner conversations are comforting; I have been talking to myself recently with the writer Jean Louis Fournier, whom I read and loved, in the books he wrote with what remained of his experiences. In his book "My Northern Mother", he started from the days of his childhood and shared with his readers the last times he spent with his mother. As sincere as he is, when I read him, I am just the child listening. He spontaneously accompanies me in his lines.

Whether my journey is short or long, I always have a book in my bag, I love reading. It is a fact that it reduces my stress. We cannot realize the effect of our troubles on our body and soul, but when we read, we understand a little bit. We can develop the idea that I am not alone, that there are others going through what I am going through.  Being treated with books, Biblio therapy involves realizing with poems, stories and words what our mind and body do not realize. 

There are books on the road to happiness. 

For example, Prof. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of 'The Science of Flow and Happiness', draws attention to creativity in this book. He interviewed leading successful people in the fields of art, business, politics, education and science. He found that creative individuals mostly realize their work with passion. Passion reflects the intense feeling of pleasure we get when we make physical or mental effort while doing something. Csikszentmihalyi argues that every individual has the capacity for passion. As a result of his interviews with the most creative individuals in the world, he suggests that the first step towards a more creative life is to nurture and nourish our curiosity and interests. How can we achieve this? 

Surprise yourself every day; you can do this by seeing, hearing or reading interesting things. Immerse yourself in a lecture or a book on any subject. Be open to listening to what the world is telling you. Life is a flood of experiences. When you swim deep in this flood, your life will become even richer. 

Try to surprise someone every day. We have to be planned and organized in many things we do in daily life. Do something different for a change. Ask a question you don't normally ask. Offer to take someone to a show you've never been to or to a museum you've never visited. 

Write down events and situations that surprise you every day and how you surprise people. Most creative people keep a diary, take notes and record the results of their experiments so that their experiences do not fade away and are not forgotten. Start with a specific task. Start by recording every night your most surprising actions that surprised you during the day. After a few days, read your notes and review your past experiences. After a few weeks you can see your interests and areas for deeper exploration that will emerge in your notes. 

When something catches your attention, follow it; often when something catches our attention, a song, an idea, etc., we give it a very short attention span. We often don't have time to look further into the idea, song or flower that caught our attention. Or we think that these are not our business, because we are not experts in these areas. But the world itself is our business. We cannot learn about the phenomena and events that interest us without living and experiencing them on as many levels as possible. 

Wake up in the morning to do something you look forward to doing; creative individuals are eager to start their day. Why? It is not because they are cheerful and enthusiastic individuals, but because they have something meaningful to accomplish every day and they cannot wait to get started. 

Spend time in environments that stimulate your creativity; In the Csikszentmihaly study, participants were given a pager and alerted at different times of the day. When the participants were asked how they felt, they stated that they thought most creatively while walking, driving and swimming. I think most creatively while brisk walking. The types of activities mentioned allow for semi-automatic thinking. In other words, it is possible to direct your thoughts and make connections between ideas while paying a certain part of your attention to what you are doing at that moment. 

How about bringing Csikszentmihaly's suggestions into your daily life?