More than just your own wisdom?

Interview Hans Peerden

In September, I interviewed Hans Peerden, who stepped down as a board member of the Walk of Wisdom. If I were to characterize Hans as a general practitioner and NEC football fan, I wouldn’t do him justice: he has great difficulty with fixed identities that “solidify life and record too much.” A conversation about form and experience and the bridge between personal and collective wisdom.

On the road with something extra

“What is the Walk of Wisdom?” We sit on a bench in the Goffertpark in Nijmegen on a rather cold, but sunny autumn day and look at the question together. It is Hans’ farewell interview after four years on the board. Fifty meters from us is the home of the football club where he has a season ticket. A little further on is the GP practice where he deliberately works part-time to have room for free time.

Hans: ” Is the Walk of Walk of Wisdom the ritual of the departure ceremonies, the pilgrims’ lauds, the silent walks, the route with the symbols? No, it’s not just about the form of the ritual, but also about the experience of it. Although you can’t have one without the other. “

The forms of the Walk of Wisdom can help to experience a deeper layer of what we experience on a daily basis. Hans: “Compare it to saying goodbye. It is important to do this together. Thanks to the ritual of saying goodbye, you make explicit the connection that was there with each other.”

What becomes visible in the Walk of Wisdom? Hans: “You can walk as a Sunday pastime, but with a pilgrimage you go out with something extra. Sometimes to let go, sometimes to find openings. It’s often about making something better. A better connection with nature, a freer contact with people – from openness instead of the functional. The extra is in the emotion, the experience, the perception.”

I tell Hans that I once proudly showed a family member photos of my pilgrimage. Nice, he said, but it strikes me that there are no people on it at all. For me, that ‘extra’ of pilgrimage is apparently the experience of a natural landscape without people. Very different from Hans. His distinction between form and experience nicely confirms how ritual scholars compare a pilgrimage to an empty ship: the forms of the pilgrimage are the ship, how those forms are filled in – the experience – depends on the pilgrim himself.

Out of the ordinary

Hans: “I have always felt the desire to be more focused on nature and to experience the connection with people. But if you’re in fixed structures of work and family, you often don’t get around to that. I had to make an effort not to be lived. Gradually, I started to feel more of a need for personal space.

Apart from the mundanity of our work and the things that need to be arranged, there is a whole world of experience. By making time for that, my life has become richer. It is that extra in life that some people pray for, but which for me becomes explicit in nature and new encounters. That ‘extra’ is more than just a fun hobby for me. Having fun with a group of friends and choosing fun and each other’s company also makes sense, but my need was to consciously experience the meaning about why-are-we-here-on-earth and to make something beautiful together with others, to add something.”

In addition to being a board member, Hans was one of the initiators of the annual series of silent walks ‘The Walk of Wisdom in a year round’: “Without talking, you can enjoy being outside even more. At the end of the day, you think: we didn’t say anything and yet we were together and we have a bond.”

Personal and collective wisdom

I confess to Hans that I struggle with that ’empty ship’ where the pilgrim decides for himself what the Walk of Wisdom means. I feel that freedom is important for the success of the pilgrimage route, but I find the emphasis on ‘own wisdom’ very non-committal. The world needs more than just its own wisdom.

Hans:“Life is something special, but you can’t control it and it can sometimes be very disappointing. For me, wisdom is insight on how to deal with it properly and committedly. This requires time and commitment, but also openness to the question of how to live life in a good way. To me, that good is something of which you intuitively say: this is good. We all experience something together all day long and to do that with an openness to the good is valuable. We are not at the mercy of the situations that come our way. “

That’s exactly, I tell Hans, why I was one of the initiators of the Walk of Wisdom in 2011. I didn’t want to passively surrender to the problems of our time, such as climate change, the large-scale destruction of nature and the task of living together with billions of people on one planet. I wanted to help find solutions by inspiring a connection between people and the world, for example through the symbol of Huub and Adelheid Kortekaas and a worldwide pilgrimage route that was in the bud. For me, the Walk of Wisdom was more than just a search for your own wisdom: take good care of yourself and the world we are all part of.

Hans: “Is what’s good for you good for the world? Of course, I like to have contact with people who have the same sense of what I do. Only: to make that shared sense of what’s good absolute, I find link. A lot of bad has happened by people who believed they were pursuing the good. Nazis, Christians and Muslims murdered in the name of goodness. Those who are frozen in their own right become blind to the boundaries of others. Then you come to ‘Truth’ instead of wisdom. In ideology. “

Hans is silent for a moment and looks at me with a mixture of sobriety and compassion: “The best thing to stop the human contribution to global warming is for all of us humans to cease to exist.” His eyes round the line of reasoning: an absurd idea, of course.

Ok, but that doesn’t take away our responsibility as individuals to contribute to the solution of problems for all of us, does it?

Hans: “How we deal with nature now is part of the possibilities of our power as human beings. We struggle with the fact that that power also does harm. But I don’t think the blame game is productive. More important is the question of how we can make choices again to shape the connection between people and the world. It’s about how we can move forward.

That doesn’t mean we don’t take action, that’s also doing something, namely: making it happen. With a pilgrimage route you can stimulate the connection with the landscape, but everyone will have to make the choice for themselves to help keep that landscape liveable. I would like people to make that choice, but to ‘take action’ for that and overrule people, no, then I cross a line'”.

That sounds sensible. Although my hubris sometimes longs for bigger steps, Hans reminds me of the irritating first lines of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prayer for Calm:

“Give me the calmness to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can change, and the wisdom to see the difference.”

My irritation is useful information. Maybe it’s time for me to start praying.

Around the world

Hans has one piece of advice for leaving: don’t stick too closely to the forms that work well in the Netherlands when it comes to the global ambition of the Walk of Wisdom . Shapes must fit the perception of people in another country. How the seed of our concept germinates in other countries, we cannot determine from here.

But we don’t just have to let it happen, I would add. The Walk of Wisdom is not a franchise multinational. As far as we are concerned, the symbol and pilgrim’s lace remain the same, but what the rest will look like… will depend on the openness with which we enter into new collaborations, our own compass for what is ‘good’ and what arises in dialogue about it in another country. Incidentally, Hans’ style of pilgrimage with curiosity for new encounters is clearly more appropriate there than mine, in which man is missing.

Hans: thank you for this honest, but also optimistic conversation and four years of volunteering for the Walk of Wisdom!