Jeroen Sleurs




A new series: Living and working in accordance with the seasons



From today on I will do a weekly post from a book that has been inspiring me for 10+ years. It is written by Mr. Jaap Voigt, in Dutch, and is called Living and working in accordance with the seasons. It describes pretty detailed how you can let nature and the daylight more specifically, guide you through life. You can see it as a guiding light, without becoming too specific. When I bought the book over 10 years ago I decided to implement a "rule" from day 1: Let the daylight determine your bedtime, i.e. go to bed when it gets dark and wake up together with the first light. As you can imagine, this has a lot of consequences on your private and professional life. You can´t ignore everything, right? Friends were for example wondering why I left early on parties, or my partner wondered why do you get out of bed so early... It took a couple of weeks to implement, but actually I got used to it pretty fast. And of course this wasn´t too rigid. But as a base 80% of the time I was able to maintain it. After more than 10 years I have felt that this is one of the best things I could do to handle my sleeping problems I was experiencing in those days, and we all know, sleeping is a crucial element in our health, right? I got to know this book via a 1 year education I did, learn to grow and cultivate your own land and crops. The course was entirely based on the permaculture gardening model from the 70ties, by Holmgren from Australia. Permaculture has since those days been my underlying motivator to do what I´m doing. I´ll talk about permaculture more later. This book has, is and will continually be my guiding light to live my private and professional life. I´m not a huge fan of a sustainability policy as such, but rather living the theory. I´m writing a sustainability policy for KABIN Sweden, not because it is a trend, but because I need to show my guests how things can be done differently. Living in line with nature instead of just taking what you need without considering the consequences for others. For me this starts with understanding nature and the process of understanding is not through studying, but living differently. Today is December 14th 2020. The day after Lucia, one of the darkest days of the year. Tomorrow I´ll do the first post about what can be a recommendation how to behave or live around these dark days.