Hiking in Neuss

Today was pretty much the day, where we could feel that winter is entirely over, especially after the rain we experienced last week. As always, the weather forecast was predicting cloudy weather. Tell me what you think after taking a look at the pictures (although I must admit I’m by far not the best photographer…)

To be honest, I was terrified by the number of participants that I had seen on CS: 41 (+ my colleagues that I invited). In the end, however, we were something like 25, which still marks the highest number of participants, but compared to the growth we had seen until two weeks ago, it seems to start stabilizing. My plan was to organize the event every week, so that not all of them appear every time, in order not to have to put any limitation on number of participants. This seems to be working now. So perfect.

The hiking route, which you can find here, was probably the easiest so far, which was also what I wanted, as today was the first day after it changed to summer time. It’s gonna be fairly easy next week as well, but I guess as soon as we don’t have to carry heavy clothes, I’ll certainly organize more thrilling sessions.

At the end of the day, as always, we could find a nice bar near the main station of Neuss, drinking beer under the brilliant blue sky. Maybe this is the highlight of the day 🙂

Well, that was what it was like for today. From here it’s a little bit of side story, which came to my mind after today’s session: before meeting Adrian, who was my flatmate back in Lyon, I never really thought of doing anything in a large group, because I didn’t really think I was able to do so. Essentially, it’s something I learned with him through the interactions with a lot of people in Lyon. So now I’m trying to find someone who wants to co-organize the sessions, just as I used to do with Adrian, but so far I haven’t met anyone like him, so I’m still doing to just myself. Organizing a session like this is not difficult. I just look for a route, which can be easily found in the Internet, I just create an event on CS, then people sign up. Basically, that’s all. However, the difficult part comes after this. Whenever I make a new WhatsApp group on the previous day, or taking a break during hiking, I promptly think why not creating new rules. The limitation on the number of participants that I mentioned above is one of those. The thing is, as I am organizing it all alone, I painfully realize how easy it would be to become a dictator this way. Well, this was one thing, but today, in addition to this, I got another issue from another perspective, when we were making a break on the riverside of the Rhine. As I had to make a decision on how long we were staying there, I spontaneously said 50 minutes, which was based on nothing, maybe except for the fact that it was slightly less than 60 min so that including the delay we would anyway have, we could go on after one hour, although this ONE hour itself was again not based on anything. In the end, I myself had a delay of 10 min, since I went away to grab a cup of coffee. Then it turned out that there were people who seriously thought it’d be important to be there on time, so that they decided not to go grabbing a beer which they would have done otherwise. Here, I would like to sincerely apologize for causing the trouble. At the same time, I just wonder how to create a self-sustainable group, where they may have been able to change the length of the break according to their needs for example. I could be a moderator and make a collective decision out of what people say, but I don’t want to be a dictator, which I don’t think solely applies to what happened today, but as in today’s society, despite the notion of democracy, we tend to blame the politicians for the problems in our daily lives, as if they were living in a separate world and governing distantly. I think it is important to realize that politics is also just a compressed version of what we are, and it’s up to us to change something. In this sense, the politicians may moderate it, but I don’t think I would expect them to do more than that.

In this sense, I’m not offering empty apologies to those who had to undergo this trouble today. I’m going to keep moving on and figure it out.