Yesterday we had dinner with friends and we were talking. All my lovely German friends were sitting there and asked me ‘Swami Ji, what do you think about people here in Germany?’ I said ‘Oh, I love them and living here, being here and spending much time I know very well how generally the thinking goes.’
I gave an example: A German man is driving the car. He knows the directions because he looked it up before on his map. But suddenly he sees a wall on the street in front of him. It is just built fully across his lane. Fully confused he stops, sitting there and just thinking in shock ‘Why? How come there is a wall? There was no wall on the map!’ He doesn’t know how to handle this situation. And you know, he doesn’t look to the right or the left of the wall. There is a way around. His problem is: he is not flexible. It is just impossible for him that there is a wall.
If something suddenly happens, it is for Germans sometimes difficult to handle a situation and hard to accept that it is like this. Exceptions can be anywhere of course. But you know what I like about this? Germans will go with what they decided to do. You can rely on them, they decided this way and they will not go left or right. You can trust. Everybody laughed about this picture and we enjoyed the evening very much.
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I like that you see the good qualities in the German’s typical un-moving attitude as well as seeing the “roadblocks” it can bring. Two sides for every coin.
I love Germans, they are great house guests.
This is so true. Many german people don’t have that flexibility, but if they promise something, they will never leave you in the lurch. But of course you can’t measure with the same yardstick. There are germans who can be very spontaneous and also there are some unreliable people.