April 13, 2025

Hundred Days of Happiness – Week TwentyOne

Amid global turmoil, I cherish my friendships and community, acknowledge my own anxiety, and celebrate my father's new book.

Glad for a new month, but it honestly feels crazy how fast everything is moving. The speed with which the Trump Regime is destroying alliances, the global economy and our sense of decency is dizzying.

When I lived in Argentina, I lived with a pretty consistent ball of anxiety in my belly. The stress of not knowing if you were or how you were going to make it to the end of money money-wise was one thing. Constantly being on edge for your physical safety of yourself and your possessions was another. The general instability of the political and economic systems were ever present, but that malaise was at “a higher level”. When we moved to the Netherlands in 2018, I noticed after two weeks that my general state of anxiety was gone. I could breathe normally, relax and not always be constantly on edge. That sensation has come back, but it seems to be at a much more existential level, not at such a personal threat level of constantly being on edge where I have to monitor my surroundings for safety threats.

One thing that has personally helped me with depression and anxiety in my life is physically saying out loud “I am depressed” or “I am anxious”. I don’t understand the difference between thinking and saying, but it truly relieves some of the pressure I feel and I am able to deal better with every day life. So this past week (March 31-April 6), I said out loud, “I am anxious”. Acknowledgement helps. And the quicker I acknowledge my feelings, the shorter the amount of time the severe stress lasts. Yay for learning better coping mechanisms as we age.

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Mar 31 – Day 142

The signs of life and spring in my garden bring me joy.

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Apr 1 – Day 143

Some friends now have a yearly tradition of having a picnic underneath the cherry blossoms in Leidsche Rijn. Due to scheduling, we had to wait over a week until we could all meet up and thankfully the blossoms hadn’t all come down yet. It was really lovely to meet up and catch up. We’re all trying to process the realities of the current world events and maintain our lives, communities and our sanity. So glad for friendships and honest conversations.

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Apr 2 – Day 144

This piece of paper is posted on the wall of my office but I don’t read it enough. Good reminder - again.

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." – Marcus Aurelius

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Wednesday evening I participated in the Annual General Meeting of the IWCU as a board member. Officially I am the Website Coordinator for the club but I do a bunch of technical help. I gave a presentation to members proposing we switch from using WhatsApp to Signal for our groups. My pitch was successful and we are now in the process of recreating all our groups and moving everyone over. The switching costs are non-trivial, but I am proud of the group of mostly middle-aged and elderly women sticking up for using a better platform that doesn’t invade privacy so much and gets us one step closer to getting off Meta.

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Apr 3 – Day 145

My father has a new book out - available May 8 in the UK and in July 15 in the USA via Faber & Faber. I am so super duper proud of him. It took him years to write and the team at Faber & Faber came together to wrangle all the parts together. He sent a series of photos of him (taken by Mum) unboxing the preprints and holding his creation and even though I wasn’t there, I’m super happy and had to share.

You can read an excerpt here: https://eatdrinkfilms.com/2025/03/15/suddenly-something-clicked/

In the UK, you can preorder direct from Faber & Faber, and in the US you can preoder on BookShop.org and other booksellers.

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Apr 4 – Day 146

We had a long-standing dinner party with friends that kept on getting postponed and it finally happened! We went over to their house for dinner last fall. DH (Dear Husband) made a delicious dinner of “Tortilla de Papa” and “Humita” with green salad and then fruit salad and vanilla yogurt. I did not think he would be able to buy fresh corn for the humita, but thanks to the wonders of globalization, we got eight cobs for the recipe. When it is a main dish, it calls for 1½ per person, but we were 8 people in total.

It was such a lovely evening that we sat outside in the front garden. Our boys are school friends and the family is lovely. I was impressed by their older kids not being too bored and enjoying the evening as well.

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Apr 5 – Day 147

I was invited to a symposium in Ledien at the University to talk about “burgermoed” (Civic Courage) and commemorate Professor Benjamin Telders. Prof Telders was a legal scholar who paid with his life for helping Prof. Cleveringa deliver a protest speech in 1940 after the Nazis ordered the University to fire all of its Jewish staff. This speech led to a student strike in Leiden and was the start of many student resistance movements from Leiden. Unfortunately Prof. Telders did not survive the war and died in April of typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before the end of the war.

This year his death was more extensively commemorated as it is now 80 years on and because of what is happening in Western Democracies world wide and unfortunately also in the Netherlands. After the lectures, a procession walked to his former residence a couple of blocks away from the Academy Building to lay a wreath in front of his house.

During the symposium there were three main speakers:

Tamara Trotman: Dutch Supreme Court justice and president of the NGO judges for judges. She talked about the role of the judiciary and the pressure judges can come under when defending the rule of law.

Bastiaan Rijpkema: a professor of legal philosophy and has extensively researched the citizen's position in a resilient Democracy.

Hubert Smeets: a Dutch historian and journalist with extensive experience in Russia and Ukraine. 

I understood about fifty percent of the talks but definitely got the overall gist. When they introduced us to Benjamin Telders’ early life, the description of him as a child was so close to our son that it really hit home and brought tears to my eyes. I left the afternoon wrestling with the questions of: What does it mean to be heroic? What are you willing to do to stand up to injustice?

April 5 saw massive protests throughout the US and also worldwide. I was heartened to see so many photos of friends participating in their various locations across the states. There was a protest in Amsterdam as well, but I decided to go to the symposium instead. We are currently seeing school administrators and regular people in the USA who have more moral backbone than prestigious institutions who have caved to the Trump regime thinking that will save them. It won’t. Mobsters always up the ante. As they say in Canada “Elbows Up!” Stay strong everyone, but also stay safe.

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Apr 6 – Day 148

Sunday afternoon we had some hyper-local community action on our street as neighbors came together to do some gardening in the middle of the street where everyone plays together. We did some serious spring cleaning. It was really good to build community together.

Once we finished that, our little family rode our bikes to the local mall to have a family date of dinner and a movie. We had some very Italian-styled pizza and then saw the Minecraft Movie. DH and I were not the target audience, but our son loved it, so that’s all that mattered. It was a lovely evening out all together and we rode home in the sunset.

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DH shared a couple of links to bands touring in Europe this summer and we got tickets to go see them in June & July. The first is Manu Chao. His most famous song is “Me Gustas Tu” (I like you). The second band is from Uruguay called “No Te Va Gustar” (You Won't Like It). Their concert is in the Melkweg - hopefully this time I will go to the right concert hall. ;)