The Pint Is a Pound, The World Around

The Pint Is A Pound, The World Around - Hi everyone! My apologies for not having kept in touch with you in a while, but we more or less just returned from an awesome and busy 16- day vacation in my beloved home country Austria. As usual during the intense and lengthy process of traveling, I once more found plenty of opportunity to reflect upon human similarities as well as differences on an international level. After all, having to share relatively confined spaces with multiple nationalities over a considerable period of time such as in airports and particularly on airplanes does in fact leave you with a great deal of time for observation and comparison. I used to like those transitioning phases travel generally brings with itself at a time dating back thirty years when our globe appeared to be at much greater ease still. Sadly, the very latest of terror attacks, which occurred only a few days ago, and what's more repeatedly on European soil, is presumably putting an enormous strain on most travelers booked on current flight schedules now, as I could imagine. No doubt, that incredibly heinous act of terror which was again deliberately and cowardly aimed at random or rather soft targets by a bunch of life- despising, ultra radicalized Islamists can't but put a drastic damp on most passengers' spirits. However, for the mere sake of preserving your mental sanity, you just cannot help suppressing that looming threat of possibly being struck by the same fate when you're actually at least theoretically exposed to such in the most direct way and for quite some time. Surely enough, every once in a while, the probability of a dreadful happening alike roguishly pushes itself into the forefront of your mind, but for the most part, you manage to just tug it away and focus on the hustle and bustle taking place all around you instead. This way I still find myself genuinely able to oddly rejoice in the serenity and tranquility amidst hundreds, sometimes thousands of travelers, a truly enlightening and humbling experience I simply love to compare to that of the proverbial kid standing in the candy store. So there I was again sitting in the outbound terminal of one of this country's biggest and busiest airports. While we were waiting to board our airbus to Germany, I got way too anxious and curious as to just stick my head into a book, magazine or any other mind- numbing and distractingly secluding electronic device. Just like a sponge I was quickly gathering, analyzing and processing all sorts of visual, auditive and olfactory sensations and impressions as my eyes were wandering around in pure awe. Referring to my fetish of eagerly evaluating similarities as well as divergences as previously mentioned, who in the hell came up with that superficial proverb, "A Pint's a pound, the world around", I would really love to know? Not only has it proven to be absolutely wrong as far as the measurement of a pint not exactly adding up to that of a pound, it furthermore also and by all means exclusively alludes to Great Britain and the United States. No offense fellows, but trying to span the rest of the world solely around those two poles strikes me as somewhat too narrow- minded. Nevertheless, sticking with the sheer essence of this still commonly used quote, I'm ever the more coming to the conclusion that we human beings are definitely much more alike than we may think. Of course, we largely differ as nations especially in a linguistic, social, religious and cultural sense, but generally speaking, in the end there's by far more that unites than separates us. Lots of those so- called convergences definitely lie in instinctive and reflexive behaviors which mysteriously enough never seem to lose their spark but return refreshingly revamped. Even with respect to language related deviations, I often detect or rather sense common grounds which has led me to believe that we are indisputably of one pretty similar kind. No matter whether from India, Australia, the Everglades, the Kongo, Siberia, West Europe, Asia, Oceania or some remote island, we are basically all the same sort of creatures equipped with similar needs, dreams and goals in life. It has therefore become my unshakable conviction that the process of general tolerance towards the Xeno- or foreign originates just there at the crucial point of awakening awareness according to which we are all made by the same divine source and are consequently entirely equal to one another.