So, as you might have noticed, the blog has changed its looks. I'm not really sure yet if I'm going to keep it like this, but it's a bit less cliché. The picture at the top basically says: 'Chaos can sometimes have positive consequences'. And chaos is one of the things I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about chaos, courage and Halloween (even though I expected Ilse to write about this).

Why talk about chaos? Basically, because of the fact that chaos can have positive consequences. According to me, chaos is a point of too many things. Too many choices, opportunities or things to do. The beauty of chaos is that it forces you to stop for a moment, look into the mirror, and reorganize the chaos. If you do this the right way, you'll might end up with something beautiful. If you don't filter the right way, you'll basically end up in deep shit.

To keep from getting into deep shit, we humans thought about something: 'Planning'. True, it's useful and gives you a lot less stress than a moment of chaos. Downside is that we don't tend to follow our thoughts. If you're living according to a planning, you get locked in, the bad thing of getting locked in is that you're not prepared to deviate anymore. So if we are walking the streets, heading to a record store because we had fifteen minutes to spare, and we're crossing a beautiful garden that we've never seen before, we usually think: 'Wow!'. And we walk on, because we decided for ourselves that we have to go to the record store. We are not walking into the garden, look around for five minutes, smell the flowers in there and enjoying the opportunity we just got to find some peace around us.

I think chaos is beautiful. It keeps us flexible. The moment I started writing this, I had an overload of possibility's of subjects to write about. I chose three to eliminate the overload, or to avoid chaos. Even when I decided to just use three subjects, I still could head in every possible direction. What I'm trying to say is that every story that I write is written in a certain degree of chaos, and I think that the blog has quite a couple of things of which I can be proud of. For an example: this is my 23rd story. That makes the blog a diary combined with various other subjects.

In my opinion it sometimes takes a lot of courage to make decisions in a moment of chaos. But what, according to you is courage? Is courage doing what you feel is right at that moment? Is that facing your fears, and being prepared to leave certain things behind? Is that to be willing to learn new things, even if you don't know what it is? Is it to follow your own ideas, no matter what others think about them? Or is it doing something of which you thought that you'll never be able to do it, and to cross a mental barrier?

According to me, there are a lot of kinds of courage. And every question above, requires some kind of courage. You need indeed courage to cross a mental barrier, or to do something frightening. But in the meantime I think it also needs a lot of courage to stand by your own opinion if the rest of the world disagrees with you. So, if you look at it that way, everybody is immensely courageous. Because making your own decisions, makes you who you are. And everybody needs to make at least once in his life a very difficult decision, or needs to top himself.

But let's get back to the question 'What is courage?'. When they asked me I answered: 'According to me courage is to follow your own ideas, no matter what the others think of them.'

But let me ask you guys once again: 'WHAT IS COURAGE ACCORDING TO YOU?' I have to say that I'm really curious to your reactions. SO PLEASE REACT!!!!

Finally: Halloween!

Halloween is as we all know mainly an American holiday. Here in Italy they used to don't pay any attention to it. But last Monday I witnessed the contrary. Halloween here in Florence is huge. The entire city went out on Monday evening to party. At least half of the people were dressed up and wearing some kind of disguise. When you see that you're really wondering how comes that such a crazy thing is so big.

According to me there are a couple of reasons for it. First of all, the 1st of November is a holiday over here. So offices, schools, stores, everything is closed. That means that the nobody has to wake up early that day. This creates an extra day to go to bars and party an entire night: the 31st of October. Since there are a lot of students here in Florence who always like to party, this opportunity is used to the max. Then half of the foreign students around here are Americans, who have a rich tradition of celebrating Halloween.

So we have a couple of things here that make Halloween a real party. Opportunity, a theme, party animals, and people who are supporting the holiday.

According to me, these ingredients are all the ingredients needed to have a successful holiday. I actually think we could compare it to Queens-night in Holland.

Reading what I just wrote, I think I can say that all the subjects that I chose to write about, contain one ingredient. An important one: Opportunity. So, if there is a great opportunity for you, if it's a reason to party, to overcome a fear, or maybe you'll find it in a moment of chaos, please use it. Grab the opportunity and make the most of it. That's what I'm trying to do here as well.

On this I want to end, because I still have other things to do, like having dinner at somebody else's place. I wish you all a nice evening, and a lot of beautiful opportunities.

See you soon.

Laszlo :-)