If you have a few space minutes of time, I’ll tell you how

Back in 1671 a man by the name Niels Terpager decided to establish a new facade for his house.

The house was located in a small danish town called ribe.

 Back in the days when Niels was alive, things were a little different than they are in these modern times of today.

They didn’t have fancy supermarkets where you could buy all sorts of stuff in convenient packaging from all around the world.

There were no garbagemen emptying your bins, which in fact didn’t really exist at the time either.

Food was grown locally and milk was collected from local cows that lived in a symbiotic relationship with its fellow humans.

Now, going back to Niels Terpager and his facade;

The idea of establishing a facade was to let the house face the street, rather than the backyard – as it did originally.

When building the face of a house, a key factor to be considered is the aesthetics and how it appeals to the viewer, and this was certainly important for Niels Terpager too.

He lived in the 1600th century in which the style of the Baroque flourished; a catholic style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture and other arts.

In the Baroque the artist’s goal was to awaken the viewers inner spirituality and encourage the audience to connect with the subject.

It can be thought of as a style so different and, dare i say, crazy, that it inevitably provokes some kind of emotion in its audience.

This, Niels Terpager’s newly established facade, definitely managed to live up to when he built it back in 1671.

But time moved on…

 And as new owners took over, Niels Terpager’s facade slowly degraded into a more business-oriented functionality.

Big glass windows replaced the old barred windows and all the colourful and detailed decorations were painted over in a solid colour.

All these changes were made in order to make the owners businesses more visible to the pedestrian.

But then in 2016 two people called Charlotte and Ole, decided to reestablish Niels Terpager’s original facade.

When they had finished their project, not everyone involved was equally pleased with the result.

The man running the pizza joint in one of the shops in the building, complained that the new facade was too pretty for his business and that people wouldn’t be able to tell what was behind the walls.

 Off he went to find another place for his shop, leaving Ole and Charlotte with an empty shop to rent out.

That was when they got the idea to call up a young man, who happened to be their son, and ask him if he’d like to help them start up a cafe.

The young man agreed right away, and when he came home from his travels around Europe, he and his parents began establishing the coffee shop that they for obvious reasons decided to call Terpager & Co.

During their time running the cafe many experiences emerged, both pleasant and less so.

But as time moved on, certain truths started to reveal themselves to the young man in charge of running the cafe.

It seemed as though he had forgotten how to love what he was doing, to love the life within himself and to love the people around him, and so he had to learn it anew.

All these experiences that didn’t seem very pleasant in the moment might actually be part of a journey, part of a bigger picture.

What the young man was beginning to see in those experiences, was that they were simply opportunities to learn and evolve; for him to become a better version of himself.

The young man in our story was learning how to love. To love what?

Well, what else is there to love than life?

Life resides in all humans, it is that which keeps everything in the universe awake; what makes plants and trees grow and makes the sun shine.

The young man was on a journey of learning to love life but as he went along, he would sometimes find himself getting angry.

Have you ever been really angry and then as time passed looked back and laughed at yourself?

When you were angry, you were dead serious, and your perception was limited solely to what you regarded as a problem, unable to see the other factors in play.

The young man would have a specific idea of how he thought things were supposed to be, and when they didn’t, he’d get caught up looking for the cause of the illusional problem.

Had he been in a state of amusement, he would have seen the situations for what they were instead of getting angry at life for not giving what he was asking for.

Awakening to this truth led him to discover what makes the journey towards the goal pleasurable; to laugh.

We tend to discriminate certain experiences in life as bad and you might have pity for the young man in this story for the experiences he has gone through but anything in life happens for a reason. The reason they happened in the young mans life ended teaching him the meaning of his life and while discovering his destiny; to live to love to learn to laugh, and to share his lessons with you.

You might wonder what this story of the young man and his parents has to do with Niels Terpager who lived centuries ago.

You see, when Niels Terpager established his facade, he drew inspiration from the collective consciousness – the spirit – of the era.

Creative energy flowing with a specific purpose; to open people up spiritually.

He didn’t paint those fancy colours on his building for people to admire him.

He painted them for people to help them provoke a joyful feeling from within.

This is one of the truths the young man learned along his journey, which is exactly why he decided to reincarnate the cafe, this time calling it Barok, honouring the spirit rather than the man.

Whether the lessons of the young man happened coincidently or not, i’ll leave up to you to decide.

Perhaps it was his destiny, perhaps the spirit of Niels Terpager is still roaming around the building, who knows?

Thank you for reading my story

– The Young Man