2024 – Beginner’s Mind

One of the lessons I learned on the street when I was young is to never forget why you started to like something. When you get better at something it is so easy to change the idea of why you do it as getting better so often leads to success, financial gain, more attention and starting to forget what the initial reason was to start doing it.

For me, having grown up next to this tiny road with water on each side of it, it took a lot of courage to even start with driving lessons as I kept thinking ‘how do I not end up in the water’, But once I did get my license it was the best thing in the world to have. Starting to drive tours with Alice Donut, Snuff, Schwartzeneggar, GvsB and later NoMeansNo in the 90’s was the best thing for me
to do and to keep that pleasure and spirit of driving intact.

Now, living in Tanzania half of the time, I still need to go out and do these road trips when I have been sitting at home for too long (and too long is almost always less than a month), going from Mambo in the Lushoto district to Dar es salaam, Tanga or Moshi. The road to is usually more important than to arrive and be at such destination, it is that inner drive to drive that pushes me. In Europe I have come to the point that I concluded during a tour with a horrible band that I still love driving these same roads, but why do I need to have a band with me in the van, so I made the conscious decision in the early months of 2023 to not go on tour again. Obviously immediately after that I got asked by friends to do a little road trip with them and did not hesitate and said ‘yes of course’, it had been close to 30 years since I toured with them.

BUT to remain to that beginner’s mind is not easy now that environmental issues are making driving with diesel cars much more difficult in terms of demands by all sorts of local, national and European authorities. But it is also playing with my mind, what contribution do I need to make to stop our earth from warming up. All those vans we use to tour through Europe are diesel cars and we also need to contribute in trying to keep the earth livable, we being both Smoeff and all the bands we work with.

SO we choose to renew all of our vans this years for the cleanest newest models so that we can continue to drive them until at least 2027 in Holland without any obstacle, what it means for the rest of Europe is still to be seen, as all the rules are not coordinated but vary from country to country, from city to city even. Also our two partners in Belgium and Germany are renewing their vehicles and so for the most part by the end of this year we will just drive around vans that have been delivered to us in 2024.

It does mean that the prices of vans have gone up this year to the extent that it is mind boggling for me as a puritan of ‘let’s keep it all financially as easy as possible for everyone’. We have had a few bands who were sourcing vans elsewhere and we try to avoid that as these vans are most likely older and less environmentally friendly but also one of our trademarks is to deliver van and gear together to bands so that the start of the tour is all easy and comfortable. Therefore, we have chosen to do a ‘package deal’ for van and gear in terms that we make the gear a bit cheaper so that the total is still acceptable. I think we all have to get used to higher prices for vans, as environmental demands will become stricter and this will without doubt lead to new techniques that will make us pay the price (and in a different way not pay the price in the long run!)

I have turned 60 earlier this year and how difficult it may seem sometimes to keep the beginner’s mind, I think at Smoeff we do a pretty damn good job to keep the initial spirit alive. Bands with their managements and bookers can help by flying less and do longer tours to reduce our footprint and make it possible to keep doing what we all love to do for much longer!

Cheers
Gijsi Manura