HOPE.

My second favourite french expression: Profitez bien! Use your time well. Or get the most out of it. Maybe even take what you can. I begin my last month in Paris, and a quick tour back to Norway just proved the fact that I am in the age where everything that happens around me seems to be of more important character. People get engaged (gratulerer Elin&Andres!), married, pregnant. And people even die, their death tying a ribbon of black around the eyes of those around. The enormous kingdoms of death and life turns your stomach into a battle ground when you realize that yes. Death is there, now recruiting one of your loved ones.

It will make you feel drained, as though salt and sorrow are stuck in your muscles. For a long time, maybe forever. But it will also, hopefully, give the reaction I know I would like people around me to have when I go: Crap! I wan’t to live! I want to enjoy! Okay I’ll do that thing I wanted to, I’ll putain merde just go on and try! And then, after that blast of mania has gone away (I don’t believe anyone has ever done anything in that kind of euphoria) maybe you’ll sit at home and just nod silently and say: Okay. I think I want to do that thing now. I think it’s about time I’ll try.

So I end up in the middle east again (as I will until friday). Cause the thing surprising me the most was that the ordinary day existed there as well. People were playing basket in Ramallah, they were even dancing. People smoke water pipe on a roof top terrace in old Jerusalem, dancing to arabic music. People everywhere opened up their homes, showing a hospitality most Norwegians never dare display.

And yes, people are depressed also. Because people they love die, are imprisoned, are living with fright of an attack by Palestinians or israeli, men beat their wives, parents teach their children to hate and fear, and sad frustration transforms faces into abandoned images of resignation -they are the faces scaring me the most. And that resignation we can find everywhere, and I come to realize that death don’t scare me nowhere near as much as people not living their lives. The Radiohead song True Love Waits has a phrase summing up almost all the patients in my service in psyciatry: I am not living, I’m just killing time. People wanting to sleep and forget. Depression is thought to be the number one disease by 2020, outclassing cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Depression saps energy, steals away motivation, leaves no room for believing it will work out. That’ a battle. That’s the battle.

But again, people fly kites. And people still know how to profit well from a beautiful warm sunset, like in Haifa, no matter what lies in the history or in the future, that moment is lived as a good one. And from Haifa I met 80-year old Dafna, a Palestinian christian who had to leave her home with her family during the establishment of the state of Israel, mother of four children who were the success of her life, cause she had raised them and they had not become crazy and hateful. She believed in peaceful co-existence, and one thing she said will stick with me forever: Faith is hope, and hope drives us on.