About Rolf Reinhold

In contradiction to his time ... but with decreasing distance. 
The clear sight of bare processes how you can watch with little children in former times were less possible than today. Rituals and forms as pure form are disappearing more and more out of our social life in favour of more direct and more emotional behaviour.
 
 

Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1945, my first hard experience (before school!) was a one year long stay in hospital from my 5th to 6th year because of tuberculosis. It was as I think my first possibility for meditations, as I had to lay hours and hours in the garden of the hospital high above the river Elbe fixed with wool blankets, alone with the environmental nature and the huge and small ships on the river. 
In primary school I had no real problems, except my perpetual "looking out of the window". But that seems not to have been my problem, more that of my female teacher, who I had the first four years of my school life. She often asked me something, when I was looking out of the window, so she said once to my mother who much later told this story to me. And, so the story goes, she always got the fitting answer, I never was as absent as I seemed to be. 
Two years ago on a Christmas evening I suddenly remebered a small event and told it to my family. When I was about between six and seven years old I stood in the second floor of our stairwell in Hamburg and was looking down to some people on the sidewalk. Short time before someone must have told to me that the earth is like a ball. And suddenly these - really not very small people down there - inspired me to think about an apple with ants on it. I thought that those ants on the apple were not able to see me as a living being like them as Iwere too huge for them. And perhaps thus we: Too small to see the huge beings who were looking down to us ants on our apple earth. So now for me I had an answer on the question what is outside there and I had got rid of all these boring questions other children had to get clear with. I believe that up to this evening I never had told about it, never thought again about these questions as I was satisfied with this "may be ...".

Why do I tell you these stories? 
Some decades later I began a research for those differences in my life, which had brought me to this kind of deep thinking about all these little things in life, which for others are only banalities or platitudes, not worth to think about. Later on for my great joy I found that Zen-Buddhism equally makes all the little things of life to a center of awareness. 
Another but for sure determinative origin for deep thoughts was the behaviour of my mother who in contradiction to her social environment never punished her children, never talked about things like guilt or punishment by any higher might. In the center of her education was the attitude to solve problems together and always talked to her children about the connection between humans and things, actions and their origins. For her nothing in life was absdolute and isn't up today.  "Everything is relative" I often heard her say to us. 
Now you perhaps can understand that my attitudes (that what others can't see) were rather different and brought often confrontations to me which others never had in this way. But I think that just these experiences were able to produce deep thoughts about the little things of life.

So my time at highschool was hard in so far as my kind of thinking about theories the teachers couldn't accept at all. Because I thought and sometimes said: "All this is thought and said by a human being! All knowledges are only thoughts of a human being about something, and nobody knows if this is right and reality." Oh I can tell it to you, teachers didn't like such thoughts. So I had to keep them for me and changed highschool twice until I found teachers with a preference for reflexions and deep thoughts on a private highschool. 
Corresponding to my highest ideal I married in 1967 and began to study educational sciences in 1969, the year of birth of my first daughter (second daughter 1970, third 1972). While working for my family in several different jobs (as, for instance, driver, registrar, waiter, scrub-man, barkeeper, gardener, helper in nursery, clerk, seller, educator in "kinderladen [german kindergarten self-managed by the parents]", and some more) I gathered rich experience in working-life. 
Besides this, I studied educational theory, psychology, social-psychology, sociology, with the main points supervision, leading of institutions, adult further education and further learning. In addition to this, I created my own theory of thinking and learning. 

In the beginning of the 80's I started my first dissertation project, out of my practise of teaching adults, "Topographical Teaching and Topological Learning (c)" and with a change of my point of interest at the end of the 80's I started my dissertation project "Language in Systemic Management", which both stayed unfinished until now. 
Since 1977 after divorce I am living in the countryside in a big rented farmhouse, nearly three hundred years old, about sixty miles from Hamburg, green, silence and a big garden with many old trees around. 
From 1980 to the end of 1990 I was the leader of a small "Adults-Teaching-Workshop" with the three parts joiner's workshop, mason's workshop and machine builder's workshop, each leaded by a master of this profession (by the way, I learned these professions nearly as good as the learners, as I often worked as the absence- and vacation-substitue of the masters). 
Besides in these years I went on studying, finding intellectual stimulation in some postgraduate seminars and as a member in a special working-psychology PhD seminar at university. In the last year of my employment at the workshop, I had there my normal work, and afterwards, as a preparation for self- employment, I went to university joining several different seminars. Everyday 120 miles, back home shortly before midnight. Very good experience. (By the way, at this time I've had no family and lived with no partner!) 
From the end of 1990 I worked as a selfemployed trainer, seminarmaker, consultant and coach. 
 I earned my money with "Open Seminars", sellers seminars (with my personal concept of "selling as a cooperation between partners"), consulting small firms, training and  coaching. 
 

As a boy I liked to read the german edition of the "Reader's Digest" and especially the rubric "Human Beings As You And Me" (retranslated). There I found one day a little story about an old woman who was asked "What do you think about this ...?" and answered "How shall I know what I think before I have heard what I will say!" 
I never forgot this sentence and it became very important for my own experience. Hearing my sentences in every kind of communication again and again brought new understanding about my own thoughts to me. EVERY discussion and each talk in this way is offering me new thoughts. 
Now you might imagine how welcome you are with every kind of thoughts about all my written and verbal stuff! Especially if you think all this stuff to be too hard to understand. 
One time I was asked by an aggressive member of a seminar what kind of expert I am. With a little smile nothing else but "Expert for learning" happened to come out of my mouth. Seems that I think so. 
The smile was brought into my face by the thought that I am often feeling like a fool, idiot or goofy with any process of learning. Do you know that feeling? 
This project "SystemBuilding By pepaccel©" is a learning process for me, learning both writing in English and programming quick html-pages ... and last but not least producing new thoughts. 

And so each of my discussions, talks, seminars and coachings is a process of learning for me as it might be for each other participant. 

Each of my seminars seems to me as a kind of "entire work of art of all participants together as partners in learning". Unique each of them and none like the others except the main topics. 
In these seminars there is no plan restricting creativity and  there's only an ensemble of topics around the core topic. 
And there are all the members (me included) with their specific emotionalities, feelings, personal experiences and personalities, who in cooperation are creating this 
"entire work of art". 
 
 

... and click here for a foto of Rolf
 
 
 

For interested people: 
Fax under +49 47 79 82 32, 
fone under +49 47 79 82 87 or 
eMail: to@fitforfuture.de
 

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© 1990-2007 Rolf Reinhold 

Last updated at 07 Nov 2007