What did you learn the most from during your college days? How has that determined / changed how you live your life?
When I came to study in Leiden, I immediately became a member of the Panoplia student association. My expectation was that with my traditional Christian background and interest in theology and philosophy, I would feel at home there. This expectation turned out to be well-founded, but in a very different way than I could suspect at the time.
At that time my worldview was most strongly determined by the church in which I grew up, the Catholic Apostolic Church. That is a small church association with a very close community. Thirst for knowledge was a great virtue, and through sermons, circles, weekends, camps, and internally distributed literature, the uniform ideas were transferred to me there too. This was the bastion from which I looked at the world.
In Leiden I had no intention of changing this, not even as a member of an association full of orthodox Protestants. At the same time, I did intend to open up more socially to dissenters. But this turned out to be more difficult than I thought. Because of the bastion just described, I missed the right attitude for meaningful contact. The existentialist literature of Simone de Beauvoir and especially Anna Blaman could therefore also touch me considerably in those years. I discovered in it my own loneliness and my inability to understand and be understood by my fellow students.
But it was Martin Buber, the Jewish-German religious thinker, who really opened my eyes after that. It is indeed possible to meet someone else, but this is a special situation to which you really have to open yourself up. Anyone who turns to the world in this way with his whole being, can really be moved by that world. My upbringing did not have to go overboard, but fortunately neither did a new insight, a friend who came out of the closet or a church leaver. I slowly noticed that my basic attitude with which I approached others was changing. Discussions became conversations, monologues became dialogues. And with that my contact with others became much more valuable.
Hans Schravesande writes in his dissertation on Buber that Jewish adolescents in the XNUMXs spoke about their 'Bubertät'. That term also applies to my student days. In this way I could open myself up to my fellow student and I felt free to have conversations in such a way that I did not have to reject a new thought for myself in advance. I expected to feel at home at Panoplia because of the overlap in ideas that I was likely to experience there; I seemed to feel at home because of the valuable contact I had with others because that person was different from me. This has strongly determined how I have come to life since then.
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