There weren’t many passengers, as I already mentioned, and the staff were clearly bored with themselves. I inquired if there was an internet connection on board, which there wasn’t. There were four movies scheduled during the next 24 hours but I wasn’t really interested. I settled down in a corner with my first cup of Greek coffee (“ellinikó métrio”), black with a bit of sugar, and started reading “Synchronicity” by Joseph Jaworski. Yvonne had given me this book for my birthday, but I had merely glanced in it during the 3 weeks leading up to my departure. Now I had plenty of time, nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

Peter Senge (of The Fifth Discipline fame) introduces the book as dealing with the subject of leadership. I found it dealt with a whole lot more than that, most of which I only barely understood. It’s not “heavy” reading, in that the author tells a highly personal story which is easy to follow. He describes the evolution and changes he went through forced by the breaking up of his marriage — not in the least caused by a highly successful personal career — at the one side and intensified by the events which would later become famous as the Watergate scandal at he other side. He has inside information to what was really going on behind closed doors because his father is the special prosecutor in this case. These events together smash his whole value set to pieces. In this crisis he goes off on an exploration to his real self first. In this discovery journey he meets with people like David Bohm (professor theoretical physics at Birkbeck College), who talks to him about “folding fragments of space and time”, about the shortcomings of existing languages to deal with this subject, Bells’ theorema, the relation between everything and everyone, collective intelligence and the blockades that we put up in ourselves. If you’re into relativity theory, quantum physics, plasma physics and the likes you’re probably familiar with Bohm. I am clearly not. But somehow Jaworski manages to present these topics within the context of his book in a way that makes some sense, even though most of it is still Greek to me… It’s like understanding (or at least enjoying) a highly complex piece of classical music without knowing how it is put together. I’m going to need to read this book many times over before some of its content will stick. I’m still not sure what to think of it, but somehow this book was meant to come on my path at he time it did (there you go, I’m already talking in the same way as the author). There is much more in the book, but you’ll have to read it for yourself if you want to find out.

I read it cover to cover in six hours, then I went to bed. It was almost midnight and I wanted to get up early to get a glimpse of the sunrise at open sea. To be continued…