This way or that? Magnificent!

Regular readers of 22C+ will be aware that I am in Europe at the moment on a month-long vacation. I made the decision to come to Europe several months ago. At that time I had several options up my leave. One of the other major choices was to go back home to Australia. After all, I have not seen some members of my family for several years, and my mother is now past 70 years of age and has had a few health problems. I could also have gone to the United States. It was an option that my wife was keen on (and she liked the idea of Europe to).

To be honest it wasn’t an easy decision to make. There was a sense of being pulled in more than one direction, and I felt a little guilt at the possibility of not visiting my family members after such a long absence.

When faced with decisions like this, where the future meets me face to face and asks
“Which way now?”, I go where the energy leaves me. Another way of putting it is that I allow myself to be pulled by the call of Spirit. Those of a more skeptical mindset might prefer to call it plain old intuition.

I used the Quick Check, and listened to my feelings (intuitive methods I outline in Sage of Synchronicity), but this was one of those choices where it seemed that there was energy on all possibilities. And because of the emotional side of it, I wasn’t sure that my feelings weren’t distorting the issue.

So I put the question out to Spirit one night as I was retiring.

“Dear God, which of these three choices has the highest resonance with my spirit?”

After I fell asleep, a song came to me during the night, filling my dreams. The same song kept popping into my head in the following days, and I knew that it was a strong message from Spirit. What was the song?

The tune was “Magnificent”, by U2. You can have a listen to it now, if you like. The meaning of any piece of guidance depends very much upon the contents of the perceiver’s psyche, but it might be easier for you to gauge the significance of this “sign” after checking the video.

The song is actually the band’s tribute to the city of Fez, Morocco, where they wrote and recorded the song. It features a great deal of footage of the history and architecture of the city.

I knew that the song was an invitation to holiday in Europe. That might seem obscure to some people, but the essence of the song is about the old world and its energy. That was the meaning for me. Much time working with the intuitive mind has taught me that you cannot take guidance too literally, but should intuit, or feel the energy of it, just like intuition in general.

And magnificent iEurope has been. As I reported two blog posts ago, I flew into Paris first. The magnificence of the architecture and history are a joy to behold. It is a truly beautiful city. My good friend Simon Buckland (www.blogoflove.blogspot.com) allowed me to stay at his place for a while. Next I flew to Lisbon, Portugal, where I met my wife and her friend (My wife came out here two weeks before me). Lisbon is rather quiet by international standards, but fascinating in its own right. Unfortunately it was excruciatingly hot much of the time we were there, so this limited our choices, and our physical energy.

 The beach just north of Lisbon (it's even hotter than it looks)

 One of the old buildings near the beach

Now we are in Barcelona, Spain. I must say that this is a very impressive city. It is spacious, with wide roads, but relatively few high-rise buildings. This is more than compensated for by the countless ancient and historical buildings which populate the landscape.

So here I am, sitting in Frankie and Bennie’s New York bar and restaurant, (an irony?) in a far-flung suburb of Barcelona. One of the things that I really like about Europe is that it feels very slow compared to Asia. In Hong Kong where I live and work, people rush about like headless chickens, never seeming to stop to breathe. “Convenience and efficiency” seems to be the motto that everyone lives by. My experience of Europe so far is that it is far more pedestrian. There would be a riot in Hong Kong if it took you twenty minutes to get served in a department store. Here, nobody seems to care. It’s frustrating, but kind of quaint at the same time. Money consciousness isn’t the focus of each minute of the day, unlike much of life in Hong Kong. As my Chinese colleague complained yesterday:

 “It’s very strange. It’s as if people don’t care about money here.”

That should tell you something about the difference between the two continents.

Of course, it’s a vast generalization, but it seems to have a great deal of truth to it thus far. The Spanish do care enough about cash to charge you a hundred US bucks for a small hotel room in the burbs, but I do digress. The irony is that Europe is a very expensive place to visit!

I am not entirely sure why Spirit guided me here. Maybe it’s just time for me to get my head out of the breakneck speed of Hong Kong life and see things from a different perspective. I may see the bigger picture in time. At any rate, I am enjoying my time here, and my wife loves it to boot. What more could you ask from a holiday?

Marcus