Part 4 of 4 · About Me

I wake up and my solar plexus feels like a clenched fist. Fucking hell. How did I end up here? What happened?

I get up, walk barefoot the two meters to my kitchen and make a coffee. Look out at the fog over the Santa Clara lake. It’s January 2018, in southern Portugal.

The last four days I drove from Hamburg to Portugal, after my twenty-year relationship had ended.

Deep inside me, underneath the clenched fist, I feel something that keeps me from turning the fist into an action. Into fighting. Into drinking. Into destroying. Not this time. This time you really let go, Dirk. It feels like the big lake I’m looking at.

I haven’t had a glass of wine in four days. I have 3000 euros left in my account. I don’t know how this goes on. But I know I’m alive, and in a place I love.

I sit down at my table, hold my coffee mug in my hand, and the tears come.

I put the empty mug back on the table, put on my shoes and go out. The air is fresh. It smells of eucalyptus and sauna. I breathe in deep and start walking.

“Why haven’t you learned anything from your mistakes,” I hear in my head. “Why have you ended up here again?”

I start thinking. I don’t know. It isn’t the first capitulation. There were others. At 19, at 24. And now this one.

I look at the path ahead of me. Hear my steps. Enjoy the quiet and the wide view over these hills.

“You fucked it up,” I hear myself say. “Royally.” Again.

The sentences are like stings. And even though I can feel the fist they are stinging into, this time I let them stand and don’t fight them. I just feel how much it hurts.

Good that I’m walking. Good that I can move. The movement and the surroundings give me strength and room not to fight the thoughts.

Beyond the next climb, the fist has loosened noticeably.

“I have never really taken a long time alone,” I think. “Always straight into the next story. Relationships, jobs, ideologies.”

“Why isn’t insight enough?” I ask myself.

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Walking down the hill, the question comes up: how did the breakdowns begin? Is there a connection? Can I see a pattern?

The first breakdown, clearly: release the tension. Escape. Numbing. Then dependency.

The second time: “Now I’ve learned how to use it in moderation. Can’t be that hard.” Within a short time I was deep back in dependency and self-destruction.

And the third and last stretch, by far the longest, was subtle and insidious:

I had fallen in love. Head over heels. Two watercolor paintboxes meet, and suddenly there aren’t two boxes anymore, but one, with all the colors run together. I didn’t know where I ended and she began.

I stop. Stand still for a moment and let my eyes go over the wide land.

“I didn’t manage to stay with the inner movement that being in love had set off in me,” I think. “I mistook it for something else. This means us now. Forever. There is no you and me anymore. I moved it from the inside to the outside and gave away my own responsibility.”

Again I feel the fist in my solar plexus. A small sting.

“Shit. Why didn’t you stop it? Because I couldn’t. Because it went too fast. Because back then I didn’t know what I know today.”

I give away the responsibility for the price of being liked and loved. Then I fight the thing I gave the responsibility to.

I give away my center and my yes — which, back then, had apparently never formed at all. There were only impulses I had to follow like an autopilot.

And I ask myself: Fuck. Wait. Where is my paintbox, and what is actually in it?

By now I’ve walked five kilometers through the hills to Santa Clara. In the small mini supermarket I ask myself, with every little item, whether it makes me happier. I buy oats, pasta and tomato sauce and start the walk back.

It’s a sunny day in April and I’m sitting on the sand by the Atlantic, looking at the sea.

Weeks have passed since I left the lake. For a few days now I’ve been volunteering at a retreat center a bit further south.

The fist comes up again. In the solar plexus. I can see that it has already changed. It has become an open hand, turned upward, that opens or tightens again depending on the mood. I’ve been watching this for a while now.

Mostly it’s a signal that something is working. The time at the lake taught me to sit with it and not fight it.

Right now it tightens again. A memory comes up. I’m 24, in the time when my first daughter was born. Inside I felt lost. Like a paintbox where the single colors could no longer be told apart. Muddy. I was restless, sad and angry. With alcohol and substances I tried to numb that muddy mixture.

Back then I wasn’t able to be a hundred percent present for my partner and for my child. Everything revolved around me and my terrible life. I had given the responsibility away. To my parents and to the state. Someone had to be to blame for my situation.

While I look at the sea, the clenched fist presses against my solar plexus. I want to get up and leave. Instead I breathe in long, keep looking at the sea, and breathe out longer. While a tear runs, the fist slowly relaxes.

Back then I had nothing that felt like something I could return to, again and again. There was no such thing as a center. There was only that muddy mix. And I wasn’t able to hold that inner state, let alone heal it.

During the time at the lake something grew that felt like a home. I slowly felt contact again. Contact between my eyes, the tree, and what the tree sets off in me. Or the pencil, the way it touches the paper. Or my lips on the coffee cup and the feeling when the first warm sip touches them.

Suddenly there were edges everywhere. Points of contact. And a quiet inside me, from which I was able to meet the stings and the pain that kept coming up.

And now here. At the retreat center I start asking what these edges are, and which colors are in my box.

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My truck stands crosswise to an aqueduct on one side, looking out over the wide hills of the Alentejo on the other. I’m sitting at the same table as a few months ago at the lake. Same cup, new coffee.

In front of me my A4 ring binder and my pencil. The empty page makes the fist come alive again. A slight unease. The impulse to act immediately. As if it were life and death.

I can calm myself down. It’s only an empty page.

I start by collecting. What is this about? What is here right now? What do I see? How am I? I write for a while, and apart from a vague overview nothing concrete has come out of it.

My impulse pulls me outside. Move. Walk. Into nature. While I walk, my attention keeps landing on objects. A branch, a leaf, a stone. And the object sets something in motion inside me. It feels like a trail.

At a clearing I stop. This place looks inviting. I sit down on a tree stump and let my eyes wander. A stone catches my attention. Very concrete. Solid. I put it down in front of me and look at it. What is moving in me? The question I wrote down at the table takes on a concrete form.

The stone looks stable. Firm. Solid. Strong. What is the stone in me?

Steady, immovable presence. I am here. I stand here. And I can trust myself.

I see that the stone marks itself off clearly from its surroundings and at the same time touches the ground at its edges. I lean a stick against the stone, and there is a point of contact there too. But the stone doesn’t become the stick, and it doesn’t become the ground.

While I watch the stone, the still slightly tense fist in my solar plexus opens. A physical opening.

Tomorrow I’ll go out again and see what I meet.

Today is a Tuesday in August 2026. I’m sitting at a different wooden table, in Vietnam.

I sold my truck at the beginning of August. It was my home for ten years. The table where I cried in Portugal and later wrote belongs to somebody else now. Everything I still own is a backpack with seven kilos in it.

Eight years have passed. To this day I don’t drink a drop of alcohol, and I’ve reduced every form of numbing to a minimum.

Ring binder and pencil lie next to me. Always within reach. Still full of empty lines.

Out of the experimenting on that clearing, four words have grown:

Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

You have already read them three times in this text. On the hill above the lake. At the Atlantic. On the tree stump. Back then they just didn’t have a name.

That’s how every morning starts. Empty page. Pause. I write down what is there: Notice.

I look at what has energy. Is there fear sitting in it? Do I dare write that? Am I holding something back? Okay. That’s where I stay. And I express it anyway. That is Choose. A decision can be that small.

Then I look at how it feels. A cup of tea. A candle. Arrive.

The fist is still there. It has become a moving hand now, one that speaks up when something is working. It is my measuring instrument.

Why isn’t insight enough?

Because insight is an event. It happens once. And then, snap, the colors run together again.

What it takes is nothing to understand. It takes a place I come back to. Every morning. For eight years.

What I did with my partner, I did with every world I moved into. Kitchens, schools of therapy, systems. Move in, mix the colors, disappear.

The conductor is the man who has learned to move inside a world without losing himself in it. And the step back with which I once saw the whole garden is the same step I take every morning now. Only smaller.

What would get me mixing again?

Even today I feel the hand when I post something and no feedback comes. Did I do it right? Shouldn’t I mix in some orange and green after all? No. The stone was right today. Done. Today it gets no feedback. Maybe tomorrow.

Who cares.

The workbook I built is called SELF / AUTHORED.

Twenty-five pages. Four stages, twenty-four fields, a lot of white space.

It solves nothing. It is not a system, and I’m not claiming it works for you.

It is what came out of a clearing, a stone, and eight years of empty pages.

My version.

The last question in it is not mine. It’s in the book somebody put into my hands when I was nineteen and thought I was going crazy.

Take a pencil. Start by pausing.

And the fist comes back. For me anyway. That’s the moment you open the workbook.

Thank you for your time.
I don’t take it for granted. If these thoughts help you on your way to more autonomy and clarity, here is how you can support this project and dive deeper:

• Share this perspective: Forward this email to one person who is currently navigating a difficult choice or feels stuck in a system that isn’t theirs.

• Join the conversation: If a specific part of today’s letter sparked something, hit reply. A single word is enough. I read every message.

• Get the Map: The Pause Workbook is my gift to this community. It’s a tool to help you distinguish between what you must do and what you choose to do.

  • New here? It should be waiting in your welcome email.

  • Already a subscriber? Thank you for staying. You can download your copy here:

Stay aware,
Dirk

Subscribe now

You can walk through the wild without a compass. You can look at the stars and hope for the best.

But with a compass, you can stop. You can look around. You can check the terrain against your direction and find your way back to yourself.

Most things we consume, we lose:

• A newsletter: 7 minutes. Gone.

• A post: 10 seconds. Scroll.

• A book: Full of highlights. On the shelf. Unused.

We consume more than ever and integrate almost nothing.

This Workbook is not for reading. It is for using.

A compass only makes sense in the terrain.

You are the traveler. This is your handbook.

Inside, you’ll find the four movements:

Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

Take it. Go outside. Get started.

Part 3 of 4 · About Me

After Part 2 gave you a sense of my mission, today is about what sets me apart from others.

I’ve spent most of my life walking into other people’s worlds. Simply because I was fucking curious and still am. Like a dog that’s picked up a scent and won’t rest until it knows where it leads.

As a kid I tried everything: sports, musical instruments, whatever grabbed me at the time.

Table tennis was interesting until I understood how the game works: ball there, ball back, win. Okay, got it. But now what?

I wanted to know why people do things, what the core of it is, why they play this game at all, whether it makes them happy — and above all, what lies outside the playing field.

I asked myself: “Ah, you’re supposed to win. And what for? What comes next? Win again?”

This pattern has followed me through my entire life: Psychology, therapy, systemics, NLP, Gestalt, Buddhism, Design. Art, Culinary, Meditation, Advaita, Satsangs, Business, Money, Bitcoin, Relationships, Nature, Travel, Creativity and more.

I didn’t look at these worlds from the outside. I went inside. I learned their content and patterns. I immersed myself in them.

And no, that doesn’t make me an expert in all these things — that would be absurd. In every single field there are people who have gone much deeper than I have. But I’ve spent enough time in these kitchens to know their taste.

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At 17 I started a cooking apprenticeship. And not just anywhere in some small pub, but in a five-star hotel.

I was right in the middle of that world: in the kitchen, in the rhythm, in the hierarchy, in the rules, in the standards, in the whole damn system. Michelin-star kitchens in the 80s were rough.

I learned how a kitchen at that level works, and I took the craft seriously and learned a lot.

And at the same time I noticed pretty quickly that this system and my reality at the time didn’t harmonize. The rules were clear. The hierarchy was clear. Everyone had their place, their station, their job.

The system knew exactly how a chef was supposed to function. You go along or you go under. I couldn’t do it.

I didn’t become a Michelin-star chef. And I would never claim to be one. But I know what that kitchen feels like.

I know the smell, the noise, the pressure, the hierarchy, the craft and the taste.

I’ve sat at the table and I’ve been in the kitchen. I’ve drunk the wine, slurped the oysters and watched how they end up on the plate at the same time.

I don’t need to spend twenty years perfecting the same sauce to know it’s good.

That’s maybe the best metaphor for my whole path.

I’ve walked into many kitchens. I’ve learned the recipes, tasted the ingredients and immersed myself completely in the kitchen often enough.

Some dishes I loved. Some chefs I admired. Deep connections formed. Some kitchens were my home for a long time.

But at some point I wanted to know what’s cooking in the kitchen next door. And above all, I wanted to understand what all these kitchens have in common.

That’s exactly why I didn’t become an expert in a single field. Other people are here for that. There are people who spend their whole lives perfecting a single sauce, and who see and taste things in it that I will never see or taste. I respect and admire that.

For most people, expertise means going deeper and deeper into a single area.

For me, going deeper also meant reaching the edge of that area and getting curious about what lies beyond.

I didn’t just want to collect disciplines. I wanted to understand what connects them. What does a therapist see that an economist might not see?

What does a Buddhist understand about attention that a business strategist misses?

What can systems theory tell us about a relationship?

What does Bitcoin say about dependence and sovereignty?

Why do the same fundamental questions keep appearing in completely different fields?

From the outside, my life can therefore look pretty chaotic.

A lot of stations. A lot of interests. A lot of things that seemingly have nothing to do with each other.

From the inside, it doesn’t feel chaotic at all.

There was always a red thread.

I wanted to understand how people work, how systems work, how I myself work, and what happens when we stop unconsciously living in structures we never consciously chose.

The topics change. The question underneath has remained remarkably constant.

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And then comes the part that is easy to romanticize in hindsight. Because I didn’t just explore systems. I got lost in them.

Every few years I found something that felt like the answer.

This is it. This explains it. This is where I belong.

And because I take things seriously when I commit to them, I don’t stand at the door, take a quick look and leave again.

I go in. I learn the rules. I give myself over to it. I invest my time, my energy and eventually my identity.

I fell in love with almost every world I entered.

Whether cooking, violin, outdoor, therapy or any of the other fields:

I don’t just try them out. I inhabit them.

I go all in, learn the patterns, build relationships and make them my world for a while.

That’s exactly why letting go was never easy.

When I eventually had to leave them, I didn’t just switch hobbies.

I had to say goodbye to something that truly meant something to me.

Because at some point that moment came again: The system became too small for the questions I was now asking.

From the outside it might look like a simple “Doesn’t fit anymore, so moving on.”

It wasn’t like that.

I had to learn to love something completely and still let it go, without devaluing it in the process.

Every goodbye cost something, but it also gave me insight:

a new perspective, another experience, another piece of the picture.

Only over time did I begin to understand that the individual worlds were not separate destinations, but parts of the same landscape.

Back then, I didn’t see it that way though.

What came first was often something entirely different:

Fuck. Screwed up again.

You failed again.

You’re quitting something again.

What’s wrong with you?

You’re clearly incapable of staying anywhere and just seeing something through.

And when the next world appeared, I didn’t just think I wanted to learn something.

I also thought something was still missing in me.

Another book. Another teacher. Another training. Another experience. Another model.

I felt like I was still missing 36 more aspects before I would finally figure out what was actually wrong with me.

At some point life itself seemed to say to me:

Dirk, that’s enough. We’ve gathered enough. You can stop searching for everything outside. Now it’s your turn.

- The Life

And this is exactly where I stand today.

Not that there’s nothing left to learn — there will always be a new book, a new person, a new experience, a new idea that adds another nuance to the whole.

But the ingredients are there. The kitchen is there. I’ve tasted enough.

Now I get to cook.

I think that’s the biggest difference between the person I once was and the person I am today:

I’ve gone from player to conductor.

I try to bring the different worlds into conversation with each other.

Psychology is an instrument. Philosophy is an instrument. Spirituality is an instrument. Systems thinking is an instrument. Economics is an instrument. Personal experience is an instrument. Even my mistakes are instruments.

And just like a conductor, I don’t need to play any of these instruments better than the specialist who has spent their entire life mastering it.

My job is different. I hear how they sound together. I hear the faintest disharmony when something doesn’t fit, when an instrument gets too loud, another disappears, or an idea works on paper but sounds wrong in real life.

I don’t just hear the orchestra — I also hear the room it’s playing in, and the reaction of the audience.

And when something is off, I don’t sit back and admire my perception. I step in.

That’s exactly why my relationship with systems is different today.

I can enter a world, learn its language and take its truth seriously without having to join it.

I can learn from a Buddhist without becoming a Buddhist. From a therapist without being a therapist. Engage with Bitcoin without turning it into a religion. Love an idea without belonging to it.

That is my work today.

Not drawing a final map, but one that is allowed to change.

To keep stopping, listening, recognizing what is really happening, making a decision and then acting on it.

I don’t think I’m finished. I only think I finally have enough material to begin.

Of course more will come. A new voice, a new nuance, maybe even an entirely new melody. But I don’t need to run off and look for the missing instrument anymore.

Now it’s orchestrated.

And if you’ve come this far with me, I’ll show you in the next part what you can take from this conductor for your own life.

Thank you for your time.
I don’t take it for granted. If these thoughts help you on your way to more autonomy and clarity, here is how you can support this project and dive deeper:

• Share this perspective: Forward this email to one person who is currently navigating a difficult choice or feels stuck in a system that isn’t theirs.

• Join the conversation: If a specific part of today’s letter sparked something, hit reply. A single word is enough. I read every message.

• Get the Map: The Pause Workbook is my gift to this community. It’s a tool to help you distinguish between what you must do and what you choose to do.

  • New here? It should be waiting in your welcome email.

  • Already a subscriber? Thank you for staying. You can download your copy here

    

    SELF / AUTHORED Workbook

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    Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

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Stay aware,
Dirk

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Part 2 of 4 · About Me

Last week I told you who I am. The two moments that prepared the soil for everything I do today. A place, connected to an unshakeable trust, that I return to again and again. I call it Zengarden.

Having a place like this — somewhere you can return to, refuel, rest, and get inspired, independent and free from external circumstances and noise — is pure gold.

Today I’ll show you what has grown there since. And why I’m here. And what for.

Everything I do follows an inner attitude.

In Tibetan Buddhism, motivation and dedication are the essential bookends of every spiritual practice. And for me, every second of my life is spiritual practice. I don’t separate life from practice.

The saying goes:

I do this not for my own ego, but so that I become wiser and more compassionate, to be of use to others.

During “practice” — in my case, writing — I check: Am I still connected to the mission or have I strayed? Is it ego-driven or does it come from the Zengarden, to stay in my image.

So every action becomes meditation. Whatever you do: writing, eating, taking your kids to school, gardening. Whatever it is.

That’s the place we’re starting from.

The Roots

We saw in the last newsletter A Letter to You that I was flat on my face at a young age and had to learn my lessons in life. Life humbled me. And softened me. Even though I was already asking questions and was curious before the breakdown at 19 — the collapse into psychosis — my excessive lifestyle had completely clouded my mind. That breakdown changed everything. I suddenly developed a deep connection to something “Greater.” Many call it God. I’ve always called it Life.

From that moment on, I asked myself: “OK, Life, why am I here? What should I do?”

After 1989, I entered one path after another. And with each one I thought: “Ah, this is it. This is my mission.”

• Disability care at 19 → “I want to support people.”

• A store turning over €500,000 at 30 → “I want to build something that holds.”

• Therapy training (Gestalt, NLP, Systemic) at 38 → “I want to heal people.”

• Gestalt therapy practice at 40 → “This is really it now.”

• Outdoor educator at 50 → “In nature, with young people — this is it.”

• Coaching (OUTJOY) at 54 → “Now I’ve got it.”

Every one of these paths was right at the time. And every one was sincere. At the same time, looking back, every one was a misinterpretation. I thought every path had to be the whole answer.

In truth, every path was part of the garden. And the garden could only appear when I stopped looking for one path and started seeing them all together.

I walked through this garden for 45 years. And the same thing kept happening: a spot would pull my full attention. I wouldn’t just stop and look. I’d start digging. I’d build a completely new bed right there. Put a fence around it. Lay paths. Build a greenhouse. I created a garden within the garden.

And while I was building, I forgot the bigger garden still existed.

One of my teachers back in the days, Sogyal Rinpoche, said something that burned itself into me:

“What is so important that we forget what’s most important?”

For me, every one of those phases was exactly that: an area of the garden that became so important the whole garden disappeared behind it.

Disability care at 19: a whole bed, lovingly planted, watered every day.

The store at 30: a greenhouse that took over the entire yard.

Gestalt training at 38: a tree that overgrew everything.

Outdoor educator at 50: a wildflower field I mistook for the whole world.

Always with full devotion. Always thinking: This is it. This is the garden.

Eventually, after years, I stepped back and saw:

Wait — I’d been in the garden the whole time.

Here, the beds I’d forgotten. The paths connecting the areas that I never finished walking. Plants that had grown without me.

Every area belonged. None was wrong. But none was the whole garden.

The last bed I planted flowered until this summer. And then, for the first time, I saw the whole garden.

The Summer I Saw the Whole Garden

At the end of July, I sold my beloved 50-year-old Mercedes truck — which I called Haubi (short for Kurzhauber, a short-nosed truck). For 10 years it was my home.

I’ve always loved writing. Even in the Haubi. Just for myself. Every day. The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages.

After the Haubi was sold and all my focus energy was freed, it suddenly became clear: I write regularly now — and I publish too. Once a week. And I started thinking about myself, the world, who might read it — my themes and my mission.

The sale let me step back from my garden so far that I saw the whole. Full of wonder and humility, I walked through the garden and saw all these areas: the old tree, the greenhouse, the wildflowers. And I knew: I’m home. I created all of this in my life.

It took me 45 years to understand what I’d been doing all along.

And now that I see the whole garden, I can say what it is:

The source of my inspiration, creativity, and power to create.

What I Hadn’t Seen All Along

From all the areas of my garden — and from what had always been there — one thing becomes clear:

I help people recognize the invisible forces that keep them from living their own lives, and develop the awareness and agency to choose for themselves.

Concretely, that means:

• Helping people pause when the world says: keep going!

• Reminding people to distinguish “I have to” from “I choose.”

• Helping people notice their own patterns.

I check this mission daily. Is what I’m writing right now coming from the Zengarden or from the ego? Am I acting from connection, or am I already building another bed that swallows the whole garden?

The Buddhist bookend is not decoration. It’s the tool I use to ask myself:

Is this bed or garden?

What the Bed Sellers Won’t Tell You

When I look at the market — and at my own life — I feel like Siddhartha.

Wandering everywhere. To the Samanas, to Gotama, to Kamala, to Vasudeva. Knocked on every door. And behind every door they told him: Come in, I’ll explain how it works.

I know that feeling. I stood at similar doors.

A. The Frameworkers say: Apply this and it’ll work. Here, 5 steps. 3 buckets. 9 habits. The system. Works for everyone. Guarantee included.

B. The Answerers say: One thing, found correctly, solves everything. Find your Why. Unlock your potential. Your purpose as the holy grail — you just have to discover it.

I was in all those rooms. Learned methods. Applied systems. And thought:

This is it.

What I found: Not the one door. But the realization that I don’t need to knock on any door at all.

A mission that sounds like everyone else’s mission is not a mission. It’s a category.

That’s why I’m not offering a catalog of beds. I’m opening a garden.

The difference?

• Add vs. Remove. The bed sellers say: Add. I say: What do you need to let go of? Transition always starts with an ending.

• Concept vs. Attitude. The bed sellers say: Do it this way. I say: Look. Then you decide.

• More vs. Clearer. The bed seller turns up the volume. I turn up the presence.

• Guru vs. Counterpart. The bed seller has the overview. I have an empty chair.

• Found once vs. Checked daily. The bed seller hangs their mission over the desk. I ask myself a question every morning.

• Universal vs. Personally tested. The bed seller says: Works for everyone. I say: Here’s what worked for me. Your path looks different.

And Still, I’m Giving You a Map

Here’s the uncomfortable paradox. I’m fully aware: As humans, we don’t escape this contradiction. I’m showing up with a concept myself. With a map.

Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

Four steps. A framework. Exactly what I just argued against.

But here’s my take on it:

I didn’t copy this concept from a bestseller. I found it over 45 years. Not in a training. Not in a book. On the floor of my living room at 4 a.m. when nothing worked anymore. In my truck at a rest stop. After every failed bed, when I stepped back and saw the whole garden again.

I lived every one of these four steps. Not as theory. As necessity.

I’m not giving it to you as the solution. But as my solution. To look at. To try. To throw away. Maybe it helps you find your own. Maybe you’ll see that your steps have different names. Maybe you only need two. Maybe six. It’s playfull.

Here’s the difference: I don’t claim it works for everyone. I only say: It worked for me. And the people who write to me — “What should I do?” — they’re not asking for a system. They’re asking for a beginning.

This framework is a beginning. Not more. Not less.

The four steps, offered as an invitation:

• Pause. Stop functioning. Stop pushing. Just stop. Open a space where everything that’s there is allowed to arise. I am here. Nothing has to happen. I’m simply here. Without this step, nothing works in my world.

• Notice. Read your inner system. What still carries you? What exhausts you? What is being kept alive only because it’s always worked? How do you function? Where do you fall into holes? Where are you chasing systems that aren’t yours?

• Choose. Given what I now see, what do I choose? Not: What must I do? But: What do I want — in light of what I now see? A small first step. Often one insight is enough. Let something go. Recalibrate the compass.

• Arrive. Live what you’ve chosen. Check in. Next week, start again from the beginning.

Take it with you. The Pause Workbook

SELF / AUTHORED Workbook

4.79MB ∙ PDF file

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Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

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A workspace I’ve been using myself for years. No promise of salvation. No 5-day transformation plan. An empty room you can fill with your own things. Step in. Play with it. Make your own space out of it.

The Garden Is Waiting

This is the garden I wanted to show you. Not a bed I’ve planted for you. Not a system you just have to work through. Not a single answer that solves everything.

A space. Your plants. Your questions. Your pace.

I walked through this garden for 45 years, planted every bed individually, mistook each one for the whole garden. I built, gave up, started over. And somewhere along the way, I stepped back and saw: There’s more. Much more. Always was.

That step back — I wish it for you too.

Not my path. Yours.

Next week, I’ll show you the systems that shaped me most on my journey. What they revealed about the invisible forces that steer us — and how we keep ending up in the wrong bed without noticing.

Until then, a question that made me step back:

What is so important in your life right now that you’re forgetting what’s most important?

Thank you for your time.
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Part 1 of 4 · About Me

Dear Reader,

After publishing several essays on this channel, I realized I never properly introduced myself.

Maybe you’ve read a thing or two from me already. Maybe you stumbled upon this newsletter by chance.

Either way — you don’t really know who’s writing here.

I want to change that with this newsletter. The next few editions are meant to serve as a foundation: to get to know me and my work, and to build a bridge between my life and yours.

So let’s begin.

Who am I, anyway?

My name is Dirk. I’m 56 years young and I live without a fixed address, out of a 7kg Osprey backpack that holds everything I own and everything I need to keep my life light.

Before this, I lived for 10 years in a 55-year-old Mercedes-Benz truck converted into a camper. I sold it last month to start a new chapter — to live even lighter at 56.

Maybe I’ve played through the level Earth and now I’m entering the phase of lightness — Air.

That’s the current state of things.

Why I’m telling you this at all

Motivation and curiosity are two of my strongest drives and strengths. My Why.

I’m writing this letter as if you were sitting right in front of me. I don’t like writing from some elevated, detached meta-perspective. I prefer a human, honest, direct voice.

It’s about connection. The fact that you’re reading these words I’m writing right now means we already have a connection.

Author and reader.

And first, I want to thank you for taking the time to read these lines. That’s not a given.

I want to deepen this connection that already exists. To underpin it.

What do I even want with this newsletter? Am I selling something? A book? A course? Consulting? Maybe someday. Not right now. Since honesty is another important resource for me, I’ll answer this question you might be asking yourself right up front.

Trust needs clarity.

Today is about something else.

Today is about: Where do I come from? What brought me here? And why is it worth it for you to stay?

You can probably already see — this won’t be a 5-step-to-enlightenment channel. It’s an attempt to build a bridge from my world to yours, from someone who has lived through systems and is now writing about what he sees.

Before I tell you my story

What comes next is not easy material.

I’m not writing it to shock you, or to sound dramatic.

I’m telling you because — after sitting with it for a long, intense time — it is the key to everything I write and do. My perspective on freedom, on systems, on control and surrender doesn’t come from books. It comes from two moments when I stopped fighting.

I call them my capitulations.

Maybe you know the feeling. When something inside you says: Fuck, that’s enough. It can’t and must not go on like this. This is the end. Maybe you also feel a crack in your life. A quiet restlessness. The feeling that you’re living a life that isn’t yours.

Then these stories are for you.

Mine begins in 1989.

The first crack

I was 18. Outwardly a young, wild punk in the eighties.

Conflicts in my childhood and teenage environment led to unrestrained rebellion.

Questioning everything. Upheaval. From age 11: cigarettes, alcohol, theft, crime — all of it shaped my late childhood.

At 15, I was sent to a Catholic boarding school. I couldn’t and wouldn’t adapt, let alone submit. To anything.

So my early youth ended in a dead end at 19, after years of alcohol, drugs, and self-harm.

One day, in my shared apartment with my roommates, I took psilocybin mushrooms.

With that, I opened a door I couldn’t close again. A doorway to my soul that my psyche had kept locked for good reason.

A battlefield. My deepest state of mind, shaped by years of struggle and violence. Psychic and physical. I was now face to face with it. My greatest enemy until then. Not outside.

Inside. Myself.

From one moment to the next, there was no separation between inside and outside. I was the outside. I was the inside. No distance. No observer. Only direct experience.

Afterward, I perceived this experience as an enemy, as an attack. With all the respect and humility you can muster when the ground is pulled out from under you.

Still, I wanted to know. From then on, I treated psilocybin like candy and took more and more, until I developed a severe psychosis.

In the final phase of that time, I had to numb myself with high-proof alcohol from the moment I woke up until I passed out, because I couldn’t bear it otherwise. My nervous system was in permanent overdrive. Like too much electricity on every wire.

One day, it became clear. Like a miracle.

You cannot take your life. What you can take is the aliveness of your body. But you are not your body. You know that. Your suffering will not end through suicide.

So choose.

Left: Put the glass down. Walk into annihilation. Let yourself be devoured by life. And see if you survive.

Right: Stay trapped in your mind. For eternity.

I chose left.

What happened next, I can only describe as an implosion. The fear and panic became so intense that everything condensed — until it burst.

The so-called I am experiencing exploded.

There was only Nothing and Everything at once.

After that, everything was like glass. Unexplainable to anyone.

Until months later, I found the book. Or it found me.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
— Sogyal Rinpoche.

A friend gave it to me. I read it and thought:

Oh. So this is normal.

Someone had words for what I had experienced. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t alone.

The second capitulation

I can imagine this sounds hard to read. It was. But I’m not one for sugarcoating. I had no choice. I had to face the facts.

You might think: That was it. He stayed clean. Got his life together.

Unfortunately — or fortunately — it wasn’t that simple.

For some reason, years later, I had landed in that hell again. Pain. Desperation. Self-hatred.

Why? Because I thought, after being completely clean in 1989, I had to try it one more time.

This time was different. No psychosis. No panic attacks. A different layer. Creeping.

It started with harmless beer drinking with friends and my brother. 1991 or 1992. Step by step, I slid back. Self-pity. Hopelessness. Meaninglessness. I found my home in consumption. A genuine longing for that world of pain.

Then speed. Amphetamine. Combined with extreme alcohol consumption, the crashes got worse. During a speed run, you don’t notice you’re getting drunk. You suddenly feel strong. Fulfilled. On fire. Alive.

Supposedly.

Later, cocaine joined in. My daughter was born around this time. And I wasn’t able to be fully present — something I would later feel deep shame about. My partner kept me at a distance. A vicious cycle.

Until she fell in love with someone else and moved to the Baltic Sea with our daughter.

I followed. Left everything behind in my old town. Winter. Right before Christmas.

Eventually I found a shared apartment near Hamburg. In an alternative newspaper.

Coincidence?

A doctor lived there who worked at a facility for drug addicts. He recommended inpatient therapy.

I was terrified of it. Psychiatry. The system. Surrendering to the system I had fought against my entire life. That was worse than any capitulation.

I did it anyway. As a punk. As an enemy of the system.

But that decision — like the first one in 1989 — laid the foundation I stand on today. When I lose everything, I know it goes on. Always.

An unshakable basic trust in life has never left me since.

And I am grateful that I surrendered to life with open arms without losing my autonomy. Only through that did I find it.

What comes next

First of all — thank you for making it this far.

Maybe you’re asking yourself: What does this have to do with me?

The next newsletters will show exactly that. What I learned from these experiences. The systems I moved through. The insights that only revealed themselves years later. Why my perspective is different. And what that has to do with your life.

This newsletter will be personal. If you read here, you’ll know who writes here.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, I invite you to do it now.

Back then, I didn’t know that surrender was the beginning of everything.

Years of this. Everything tracked. Everything optimized. My HRV has never been better.

Still awake at night: How do I even know that I’m living my life?

The Zen Garden and the Hydroponics Man

I keep my notes in a vault I named the Zen Garden.

Every plant watered by hand. Fragments, observations, sentences that belonged nowhere yet. I sat there in the mornings and tended it. The garden had no purpose except this: it was mine. I had built it, and I knew every path through it.

Then someone arrived with a voice full of certainty.

An AI influencer. Credible. Convincing. He said:

Zen gardens are dead.

What you need is hydroponics.

A system run by an army of AI agents, humming like a company.

More output.

More efficiency.

This is how you build a knowledge base now.

I felt it immediately. That familiar tightness in the solar plexus.

But alongside it, something else: a pull.

Greed, I guess. Or fear.

My system was no longer good enough.

Everyone else was already ahead of me.

And there was this one second. A split second where I thought: Really? Is that true?

But the pull was stronger.

So I built it. Three months of energy. Three months of attention. It was laborious, and it felt productive the entire time.

Then, one morning: What am I actually doing here?

The tightness was still there. I had just stopped noticing it. The system worked, technically. But it felt like it sat outside my own inner world. I was feeding someone else’s garden. Or worse: I was feeding nothing at all. I was just running the machine. Even though everything looked polished and efficient.

I had followed a voice that told me where to go. I had never asked who programmed the destination.

What We’re Actually Looking For

A Substack essay made its way to me recently.

What the attacks on Steven Bartlett say about a shift in our culture.

Its argument: we are in the middle of a cultural shift away from perfection. After a decade of optimization, people are exhausted. Bartlett, Whoop, the relentless tracking.

For ten years, the message was: Get better. Measure yourself. Wake up at five.

Then came the counter-offer: Make mistakes. Be unfinished. Celebrate anyway.

Charli XCX’s Brat Summer was the signal — an album that placed self-acceptance above self-improvement. Messiness was back.

I read it. I recognized myself in it. But something felt incomplete.

The essay frames it as optimization versus chaos. Discipline versus letting go. And I understand why this frame works so well. It is simple. It gives the reader a side to stand on.

But the fight between the two camps is the wrong fight.

Here is what the essay does not tell you: the counter-offer can become a cage too. Brat Summer celebrates disorder. The anti-optimizer wears his I am not perfect like a uniform. He chose against tracking — but did he really choose? Or did he just run in the other direction, away from one voice and into the next?

Both sides can be borrowed certainty. One says performance. The other says liberation. Both say it with the same authority. Both spare you your own question.

So the question is not: To track or not to track?

The question is not: Brat or Bartlett?

The question is: Who decides?

People also look for efficiency. But deeper down, they look for something else: orientation. We want to know: Am I living well? Am I on the right path? Is this it?

• A tracker gives you an answer.

• A guru gives you an answer.

• A framework gives you an answer.

And then something quiet happens: orientation becomes identity. I am the person with the perfect recovery score. I am the one who does it right.

From identity, dependence grows. A prison without a warden.

Viktor Frankl Knew This Room

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our freedom.

Frankl wrote this after surviving the camps. He knew something about what remains when everything is taken. The last freedom is not the freedom to do what you want. It is the freedom to choose your response.

But here is the problem with that space. Most of the time, it is too narrow to feel. Someone says you need this, and before your own question has even formed, you have already acted. Authority has jumped over your freedom.

I am not against tracking. I have nothing against data. I don’t reject a good system.

I am against the moment when someone else’s certainty arrives faster than your own question.

There is a word for this moment. It is not optimization. It is not discipline. It is something older. The Dhammapada named it in its very first verse: All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. What you believe becomes your reality.

The one question no tracker asks: Who told you what to believe?

If this question is staying with you, I made something for it.

Self / Authored is a free workbook for autonomy, awareness, and action.

Subscribe to receive it.

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Three Reasons Borrowed Certainty Wins

The mechanism is not complicated. It works the same whether you buy a Whoop or rebuild your entire knowledge system. Three things have to happen. Most of the time, they do.

One: We are tired of uncertainty.

Am I living right? is an uncomfortable question. It has no dashboard. No score. No green or red light. A tracker takes that discomfort and replaces it with a number. A guru takes it and replaces it with truth. Both feel like relief. For a while.

But relief is not an answer. And the relief wears off. Then the questions come back, only now they come at night, when the tracker is silent and the guru is asleep.

Two: It feels like progress.

This is where it gets dangerous. Building someone else’s system feels exactly like building your own. The effort is real. The hours are real. The complexity is real. Your brain rewards the activity, not the direction.

In 2007, two Harvard psychologists ran a study. Eighty-four hotel maids across seven hotels. The women were physically active all day: lifting, carrying, walking miles of corridor. But two thirds of them said they got no exercise at all.

Their bodies agreed with their belief. Their weight, blood pressure, and body fat matched their perceived activity, not their actual activity.

Then the researchers told half of them: your work is exercise. You already meet the Surgeon General’s recommendations. Four weeks later, without changing a single thing about their behavior, those women had lost weight. Their blood pressure had dropped. Their body fat had reduced. Their bodies had reshaped themselves around a new belief.

Your tracker does not just measure reality. It writes it.

Sleep Score 74 % is not just information. It is a verdict. And your body listens.

Three: Someone credible said it.

Not an ad. Not a stranger. Someone you trust. Someone who seems to have figured it out. A voice that says: This is how it’s done now. This is what the best people do.

And the greed kicks in. Or the fear. You want to belong. You don’t want to be the one who missed it. You act.

And only later, maybe months later, you notice the tightness in your chest. You notice you have become a bit duller. The system worked. You just never asked the question.

What No Score Can See

I want to be precise here.

I am not against measurement.

I am not against discipline.

I am not against a body that works.

But there are things that cannot be optimized.

• A sunrise has no metrics.

• An encounter has no dashboard.

• Depth cannot be scored.

• Resonance arrives without a recovery report.

• Love has no calorie balance.

• Wonder burns nothing you can track.

The question is: When does a tool serve me? And when do I serve the tool?

Whether you can still hear your own question beneath the noise of everyone else’s answers — that decides.

Returning to Your Own Question

This is not a protocol in seven steps. I have no system to sell you. But if you feel the tightness I am describing, here is something to try.

Day one: A morning without numbers.

Wake up. Before you look at your tracker, ask yourself: How did I sleep? Do not test yourself. Just listen. Your body knew how you slept before you ever bought a device to tell you.

Day two: A decision with a pause.

Today, when a voice says you need this, stop. Five seconds. Maybe ten. Before you act, ask: Do I need this? Do I want this? Or do I just believe I need it because someone else said so?

Not every answer will be no. But every answer should be yours.

Day three: An evening without metrics.

Make one choice today that cannot be tracked. Eat something because it tastes good. Stay up late because the conversation is right. Say yes to something that improves no score at all.

Day four: A different question at the end of the day.

Do not ask: What did I achieve today?

Ask: Did I choose today? Or was I chosen?

The Campfire

I picture a fire. Two people. Neither of them brought a tracker.

The flames do not ask for your recovery score. The night does not care about your step count. The only thing that matters is how it feels to sit next to you.

We will meet there one day.

Then I will know whether you are living your life.

Thank you for reading SELF / AUTHORED

If you want a place to begin,

I made Self / Authored — a free workbook for autonomy, awareness, and action.

Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

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Your brain has already decided.

Up to seven seconds before you have the impression that you’re choosing, the signals are measurable. This isn’t esoteric talk. Max Planck Institute, Nature Neuroscience, 2008. The researchers could predict which button a subject would press before the subject themselves knew.

And the daily decisions?

65 percent aren’t consciously initiated.

88 percent run on autopilot.

University of Surrey, 2025.

You think you’re running your life. Your nervous system is running you.

Now the question:

Who wrote the script?

The costume is not your skin

You put it on. At some point. The costume, the role, the lines. You learned them, you delivered them.

Applause. Repeat. Applause.

At some point you forgot you were acting.

The costume became skin. Someone else’s lines became your voice. You’re on stage, the audience is long gone, and you’re speaking words someone else wrote.

The problem isn’t that you’re performing.

The problem is: you no longer know how to exit the stage. Because you no longer know who you are without the character.

You’ve felt it somewhere. An itch beneath the costume. A question that wouldn’t stay down.

A crack.

Story and encounter

Two forces are at war here, and almost no one names them.

Story. The sentences you never wrote. “Success.” “The good life.” “Enough.” The grammar was fixed before you could speak. Your parents, your teachers, the first groups that took you in — they all contributed to this script. You use these words every day without questioning them. Until one day you stop mid-sentence and think:

These aren’t my words.

Encounter. No theory. No concept. The moment you look the hole in the sidewalk in the face and recognize it as yours. Not the story about the hole. Not the explanation for why it’s there. The hole itself. Directly.

C.G. Jung put it this way:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

As long as you don’t see what’s steering you, you call it fate.

Encounter means: seeing it.

Why we stay in costume

Three guards keep the prison locked. None of them wears a uniform.

First: The illusion of choice.

We mistake conditioning for personality. “That’s just how I am” isn’t character. It’s a tape on repeat. If your brain knows what you’re going to choose seven seconds before you do, then who chose? The thought you take for your own is often just the fastest reflex of a story that was there before you were.

Second: Fear as the magician.

Fear is not the problem. It’s the door. The actor feels the costume beginning to loosen. The first reaction is groundlessness. Shame. Failure. The reflex: reach. For the nearest anesthetic. Brain afk.

Fear says: “Don’t go in there.”

The magician says: “That’s exactly where the entrance is.”

Third: Systems built on dependency.

It starts with parents who lay a template over the child before it can reveal itself. It continues in every job, every ideology, every self-optimization loop. The system has nothing against your freedom. As long as you exercise it inside its scenery.

A night I didn’t come back from

I was 18. I took psilocybin mushrooms and thought they’d be like beer or schnapps.

They were the opposite.

Until that moment, the curtain was closed. I had sensed what was behind it, subtly. A contraction in the solar plexus. A pulling. But I had numbed it. After the mushrooms hit, the scene flipped. I was no longer the spectator. I was the stage.

No curtain. No separation. Pure hell. A battlefield. Every belief I had ever believed, suddenly live and embodied.

“You’re not good enough.”

“You’ll never be enough.”

“You don’t belong.”

Every sentence a physical blow.

What followed was weeks. Months. Psychosis. High-proof alcohol every day, to stop feeling what wouldn’t stop being felt. Multiple attempts to end my life.

But there was something I had understood that night: This life you’re looking at, you can’t take it. It’s not the body. This hell doesn’t die.

And then, one night, the first night clean:

“Leave the glass. Let go. Give up. You’re ready now.”

I surrendered.

Everything inside me imploded. My nervous system compressed itself so completely that it burst. What remained: space. Vastness. Absolute knowing and not-knowing at the same time.

Now comes the sentence I hear most often:

“That worked for you. But I didn’t have a psychosis. I just have a quiet unease and a mortgage.”

I understand it. I’ve thought it myself.

The difference between your story and mine is volume. Not pattern. Your reaching is scrolling, working, the next relationship, the next self-optimization program. Mine was alcohol and psychosis. Same mechanism. Same hole in the sidewalk.

And I still reach. Just more subtly. That’s part of the truth too. I’m not the one who’s past it. I’m the one who now recognizes the hole when it appears. Most of the time.

Same hole, different street

Sogyal Rinpoche painted a picture I’ve never been able to shake:

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it. I still fall in. It’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

I walk down a different street.

This is the gift.

Not enlightenment. Not “everything is fine.”

Agency. Options. You see the contraction coming before it has you. You recognize the trap, and you have a choice. Not always. But more and more often.

The 65 percent don’t have to be yours. 88 percent autopilot isn’t god-given. It’s trained. What’s trained can be unlearned.

From MUST to YES.

The story didn’t write you. It only pretended to.

For those who want to go further

SELF / AUTHORED is not a new role. Not a better costume. Not a system that tells you what to believe now.

It’s an invitation to find out what you’re actually choosing. And who you are when you stop performing.

This is the first morning I wake up without Haubi.

For ten years, this old Mercedes truck was my home. My vehicle for freedom and autonomy. Turn the key and keep moving. Don’t like the place? Move on.

I could reach places — and did — that most people can only dream of. Park somewhere in the middle of nature, open the door, and be right inside it.

But freedom always has another side. I had to take care of things. Where can I stay tonight? Do I have enough water? Where can I do my laundry? What urgently needs fixing on Haubi? How much will it cost? And what the hell is that noise now?

Entropy gets to old trucks, too.

Haubi cost money. But more importantly, he required something we talk about much less: attention.

Yesterday, I sold him. Contract signed, money in my account, keys and papers handed over. Ten years of my life changed hands.

And this morning I ask myself: What do I miss?

The honest answer surprises me: nothing.

The first feeling that comes up is something else: free and unbound.

I was free with Haubi, too. But unbound feels different. Something that occupied part of my energy and attention for ten years is suddenly no longer there.

And it’s precisely this space that interests me.

Between the old and the new

In his book Transitions, William Bridges makes a distinction I find useful. Change is what happens on the outside: a job ends, a relationship breaks apart, a child moves out, someone dies, we move to another city — or we sell the truck we have lived in for ten years.

Transition is what happens inside us.

Bridges describes three phases:

- Ending — something ends.

- Neutral Zone — the old is gone, but the new has not yet arrived.

- New Beginning — something new begins.

I am pretty much right in the middle. Haubi is gone, but the new?

I have no idea.

Maybe you know this place. Maybe a relationship has just ended. A job that had become part of your identity. Your children suddenly need you less. You made a decision you cannot undo. Or perhaps you simply sense that one version of your life is over without knowing what the next one will look like.

You know what no longer is, but you don’t yet know what will be.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Our minds hate empty spaces

As soon as an ending becomes real, the mind seems to start searching for new certainty. I can almost watch it happening in real time:

Is the sale really finished? Was I fair? Did I forget anything? Will the buyer keep calling me? What comes next?

One thought creates another. One becomes two, two become three, and suddenly we are no longer here. We are sitting somewhere in a future that exists entirely inside our heads.

Maybe you know your own version: Was ending the relationship really the right decision? Should I have stayed? What am I going to do without this job? What if I never meet anyone again? What should I have done differently?

Attention gets magnetically pulled into thought, and inside our heads we begin constructing a world of questions, scenarios, and apparent solutions.

But there is something we easily overlook:

Attention is finite. Wherever it goes, something else disappears from view.

If all of it is occupied with trying to make an uncertain future feel certain, it is no longer available for what is actually happening right now.

The old oak tree

This morning, the first thing I notice is a subtle restlessness. Almost like a movement inside me before there is even a clear thought. As if the ground that was there yesterday has suddenly disappeared.

So I check.

The ground is still there. Quite literally.

I go outside. Movement is often my tool of choice — adding an outer movement to the inner one. Not to get rid of anything, but to give whatever is there some room.

I open Google Maps, see a park nearby and start walking. It’s still early, the air pleasantly cool. After a few turns through the streets of Berlin, I reach the park and almost immediately my mind becomes wider.

Green. Water. A small stream winding through the park. I look it up: the Panke.

A little farther on, I stop in front of an old oak tree. It is enormous, its trunk thick and deeply furrowed. I wonder how long this tree has been standing here, how many things around it have appeared and disappeared again.

For a while, I can’t take my eyes off it. I’m simply there.

My inner landscape suddenly feels like a mixture of everything is new and how beautiful this is.

Maybe this is something we easily miss during transitions: while we are busy trying to figure out what comes next, we miss the space that has opened precisely because something is no longer there.

Not every thought is the enemy

Of course, the thoughts still return.

Did I really do everything I could? Was I fair? Did I hide anything?

But this time, I don’t try to get rid of them. I look at them more like I looked at the Panke or the old oak.

There is a thought. Okay. What can I learn from it?

Maybe it is simply an invitation to take one final inventory:

• Did I give the buyer all the information I had? Yes.

• Did I hide any problems? No.

• Did I take the time to explain Haubi to him? Yes.

• Is there anything left that I should actually do?

If the answer to that last question is yes, I can act. If the answer is no, another possibility opens up: I don’t have to produce another fifty thoughts just to get rid of the feeling of uncertainty.

Maybe uncertainty can simply be uncertainty.

Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart about this experience — those moments when the ground seems to disappear beneath us and there is nothing left to hold on to.

Our usual response is to rebuild solid ground as quickly as possible: plans, explanations, certainties, new goals.

But what if, for a moment, we didn’t?

What if this moment could simply be enough for the next five minutes?

The price of closeness

Over the past few weeks, I have also found myself thinking about Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Pirsig’s motorcycle is not merely a machine. The way he pays attention to it, the way he tries to understand how its individual parts work together, becomes an expression of a particular relationship with the world.

For Pirsig, care and quality are closely connected:

“A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares.”

That idea touches something I experienced with Haubi. When you spend ten years with a machine, it eventually stops being just an object. You know its sounds, its quirks, its weak spots. You know when something feels right and when something doesn’t.

You care.

Maybe you don’t know this from a machine. Maybe you know it from a person, an animal, a house, a city, your work. We build relationships, and the more deeply we allow ourselves to enter them, the more vulnerable we become.

Because none of them will remain forever.

At first, that sounds like the bad news. But maybe it is exactly the other way around.

We could try to keep life at a distance. Not get too involved. Not love too much. Not become attached. Maybe then saying goodbye would hurt less.

But what would we have gained?

If I feel grief about Haubi today, it doesn’t tell me that something went wrong. It tells me something much simpler:

It mattered.

There was relationship. There was closeness. There was life.

Grief, then, is not evidence against a good life. It may simply be one of its consequences.

At the same time, there is something Pema Chödrön returns to again and again: beneath all our constructions lies uncertainty. We don’t know how long something will remain, how a relationship will end, whether a plan will work, or what will happen tomorrow.

Maybe this groundlessness is not a flaw in the system.

Maybe it is the condition that allows something new to emerge at all.

The field after harvest

The image that comes to mind is a field after harvest. The old crop is gone. The new one has not yet been planted.

From the outside, not much seems to be happening, but that empty space is not meaningless. Maybe we make a mistake when we try to plant it again immediately.

The Neutral Zone is not just the annoying stretch of road between two important destinations.

Maybe it is an important destination in itself.

A place where attention becomes available again. A place where we can watch old habits trying to reclaim the newly opened space. And perhaps a place where parts of our inner landscape become visible that were previously hidden beneath tasks, routines, and certainty.

The next time something small or large ends in your own life, you might experiment with this.

When you notice your mind immediately trying to fill the space that has opened, stop for a moment. Not to get rid of your thoughts, but to examine them.

Ask yourself:

• What has actually happened?

• Is there anything I can or should do about it right now?

• If yes: what is the next simple step?

• If no: can this moment be enough for the next five minutes?

Then bring your attention to something that does not exist only inside your head: the ground beneath your feet, your breath, a tree outside the window, the sound of the street. Whatever is actually here.

Not as a trick to make uncertainty disappear, but to discover that perhaps you don’t have to make it disappear at all.

What this has to do with sovereignty

In the end, I find myself returning to something I think about again and again: dependency and sovereignty.

For me, dependency does not begin with a visible action. It starts much earlier, perhaps with that tiny movement of the mind toward habit and apparent certainty.

A thought appears. I believe it. Another one appears. I follow it. And another.

Until all of my attention is tied up there.

Sovereignty does not mean never being afraid, never grieving, never doubting — and certainly not never having thoughts.

Maybe it means something much simpler:

Being able to notice where my attention is going without having to follow every impulse.

Sometimes there really is something to do. Then I do it.

And sometimes there is nothing left to solve.

Then there is uncertainty. An open space. The Panke. An old oak tree.

And perhaps, for a moment, the realization:

Impermanence doesn’t only take something away. It also sets something free.

Attention. Energy. Possibility.

Sometimes even a version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

Today, I still don’t know what comes next.

And for the first time in a long time, that doesn’t feel like a problem.

For weeks, I’ve been wondering whether I should sell Haubi.

It isn’t dramatic. There’s no financial pressure. It’s more like a quiet, persistent feeling that something no longer fits. As if I’ve moved through something without knowing exactly where. As if I’m already on my way to something else without having any idea what that “something else” is.

Haubi, once bought as a tool for freedom, slowness, and life close to nature, has quietly become a project. An open loop. Something waiting to be resolved.

And maybe that’s the real problem: that everything—even freedom—can turn into an unfinished task.

By the time morning arrives, the viewing is already over. The couple who came to see Haubi are thinking it over. So am I.

Then, almost without noticing, something rare happens: a day without a project. No pressure to fix anything. No pressure to sell. No pressure to get somewhere. Just space.

After meditation, Morning Pages, and a walk, it becomes clearer with every passing hour. Today, Haubi isn’t something I’m trying to sell. He’s simply what I bought him to be.

I decide to fill up the tank, pick up a few things, and buy a small camping chair at Decathlon. The best days often begin exactly like that—without expectation.

Refueling turns into one of those small French adventures. Several gas stations reject my card. Eventually I find enough cash, buy a prepaid fuel code at Super U, and finally manage to fill the tank. Then it’s on to Decathlon in Digoin. A Compact Chair. Twelve euros. Small. Comfortable.

A few kilometers later, I find a spot beside the Loire. A large black locust spreads its shade across an open field. Behind it, the river moves almost silently. Apart from birdsong, there’s nothing to hear. Another traveler is already there—one of those wonderfully French hippie vans. A small Iveco with a handmade wooden cabin on the back.

I unfold the chair, make an iced coffee, and sit down.

And somehow, that’s exactly what makes the moment true.

Nothing is staged. The tree is simply a tree. Its leaves, its bark, the shape of its crown—it carries nothing except what it already is. The river flows because rivers flow. And I sit because there’s nothing else that needs doing.

The longer I stay, the stronger the feeling becomes. Not that I’ve arrived somewhere, but that I’ve arrived here.

The tree stops being just a tree. It becomes a quiet companion for the day, offering shade, warmth, and silence. The Loire stops being a blue line on a map. It becomes a presence. As if, in its own quiet language, it’s saying,

I’m glad you’re here.

Sometime during the afternoon, another thought begins to take shape. What if I followed the river upstream, all the way to its source at Mont Gerbier de Jonc? Not as a challenge. Not as another route to complete. Just as a loose thread for the coming weeks. An invitation to get to know this river.

With that single thought, an entire landscape opens. The source lies near the meeting point of the Ardèche, Haute-Loire, and Cévennes. I picture narrow roads, quiet villages, volcanic hills, chestnut forests, and forgotten places where no one else is around.

Then another river appears in my mind: the Allier. Memories of possible canoe trips. Paddling from gravel bar to gravel bar. Sleeping beneath the open sky. Not a plan. Just another possibility waiting somewhere in the distance.

By evening, it becomes obvious that the real movement of the day has nothing to do with the map. It happened inside. Waiting quietly turned into discovering.

The question Where should I go? became another question: What might this river want to show me?

The next morning, I wake up beside the Loire. I slept deeply. The black locust is still standing over Haubi. The river is still passing by. Slowly. Quietly.

Slowly and quietly, Dirk.

That’s the first realization of the day. Perhaps the only one that matters.

And for the first time, the thought of following the Loire to its source no longer feels like planning a journey.

It feels like the beginning of a relationship.

Six seventeen at the Lac de la Somme, and the water lies there like something poured. No wind. No bird with any urgency. I sit in the Haubi, the cup still warm in my hand, and the first question of the day is already here before I am properly awake: Do I sell the Haubi, or do I keep it? Right behind it, the second: Where now, and do I even keep going?

Both questions arrive too early. The viewing is scheduled for Sunday or Monday, and nothing about the situation changes before then. Still, they stand there, first thing in the morning, like two guests who show up before the door is properly open.

I let them stand for a while and look more closely. And underneath both of them lies a third question, larger than the two combined: What do I do with my time? Above all here, in the Haubi. Maybe it is not about selling or driving on at all. Maybe it is about happiness and suffering. About emptiness and patience. Themes as old as the first monks who sat down under a tree and simply stayed.

Yesterday evening, just before sleep, I listened to a talk on patience by Oliver Petersen. Words about patience, right before the day closes, and this morning that is precisely the task in front of me. Not as a resolution. As a fact.

Because something deep is making itself known right now, and it comes through the staying. Through being here, at the lake, with no plan for the next step. A small inner fidgeter moves closer, the one who would rather already be somewhere else, who already wants to see the next road, the next place, the next decision. I watch him. He sits there, fidgets a little, and I let him fidget.

Ramana Maharshi barely spoke at all. He sat. In silence. Permanently. Monks occupy themselves above all with the mind, not the next destination on the map. Here at the lake it becomes clear to me what a challenge that actually is: simply holding this silence, with nothing but myself and the water and a few birds calling somewhere in the distance. Everything around me grows slower. Noticeably slower. And the question What actually matters takes on a completely different weight when there is no urgency to answer it.

Can I simply be here? That is the real practice. And: can I recognize condensation, this tightening, this pressing quality, the moment it appears, without immediately doing something about it? Right now, for instance. There is a condensation. I see it. And that is enough.

This takes me back to my time in Portugal, at Monte Sobreiro. My hill, completely alone. Silence so complete it almost had a sound of its own. At some point I had to move on, with the truck, back onto the road. And now I sit here again, at another lake, in another country, and life places me in the same spot: in the silence, in nature, in this solitude that feels like an invitation. The invitation says: Stay here now. Like Buddha under the Bodhi tree.

The place it points to is on no map. It is a place inside me.

Because close, the word that has been with me for weeks, means something other than I thought for a long time. It does not mean that one day there will be a point where I am there, arrived, finished. Close means: let everything that wants to dissolve, dissolve. And give what is happening right now a hundred percent of my attention. This moment, at the lake, with the cup in my hand. This exact one.

Perhaps that is why it is so hard to explain, because it is so hard to convey. At the same time a longing grows louder the longer I sit by the water: simply to stand somewhere in the middle of nowhere and be. Like right now. And leave everything else to life, to the details that sort themselves out when you let them. I need little. Writing, walking, eating, drinking, sleeping. And encounters, when they come. When they do not come, they do not come.

Space exists everywhere, plenty of it. Spain, Portugal, France, Morocco. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos. Asia is perhaps where I would be most drawn to a hut, somewhere in nature. Still. Solitary. Observing, writing, reading, exploring the nature of things. Instagram and websites only when something genuinely wants to be shared, something that arises of itself.

The longer I let this sit here, at the Lac de la Somme, the clearer it becomes what a gift this is: to genuinely be able to be still. The capacity for stillness is one thing. Recognizing it as the greatest thing there is. That is something else. Everything is already here. I do not need to question it further.

From this perspective I see: life has placed me at this exact spot again and again. The spot where life was simple. Simple, without further label. I was the one who made it complicated.

The truly interesting question, then, is not about selling or driving on. It lives here: What actually happens when there is nothing left that has to happen? When there is only you and the silence, not for half an hour on a cushion, then back into the noise. But always. Twenty-four hours, seven days.

Against that background, OUTJOY remains an important place for me. A lighthouse, the image is already in the header. I am here when someone needs me. Freestyle. Less coach in any formal sense, more a mirror. And when something wants to happen, it happens, one way or another.

That is what close actually means. Close to the question: What is actually missing? Snail. Slowness. Sinking. Out there, in the end, nothing stays that brings happiness or fulfilment, nothing you could hold. The actual source lies deeper, where movement simply happens. Without ground. Without purpose. Without goal, without agenda. Simply because movement is the nature of life. Meaningless and completely complete, both at once. Permanent.

And with that view I return to my starting question. Sell the Haubi or not. Where to drive. It feels like a fork in the road with several paths leading somewhere, and yet every path lands again at the same point. I do not have to take any of them. Staying is enough. The paths come to me.

It has always been this way. Everything that truly counted came to me; none of it was plannable, none of it was a goal I worked toward. Even the greatest guru careers land somewhere eventually, and then the game begins again from the start: new paths appear, new possibilities, the next question of where next. There is no destination. You are already there. The mind simply says: This cannot be so simple.

Only in depth, in slowness, in slow motion, do things truly unfold. Only there does it show what something is worth, how intense it is, how full. Perhaps that is what is meant when people speak of patience: with patience, everything becomes very, very slow.

And what happens when everything grows slow? The opposite of what is visible everywhere right now. Reels, Shorts, AI: faster, faster, faster. But around the lake I see little that is genuinely fast. In theory, yes, a stone falling from the sky is fast. But the sun rises slowly. The moon moves in its own time. The breath, examined closely, is also slow. Plants grow slowly. Habits change slowly.

This fits the image of the paths leading away from the fork. They seem to go somewhere, and in the end you land again at a fork, exactly where you already were once. Like a matrix in which you always arrive at the same point.

The water at the Lac de la Somme still lies there, poured out, without hurry. The cup is empty by now. And the question the day began with stands no longer as a question; it simply sits with me at the bank, waiting for me to stand up. Or to stay.

The back pain sits at a 2, maybe a 3 out of 10. I notice it the way you notice weather: no problem, just a fact. Something the day is carrying today. Wednesday, 10 June, just after six, and I lie still for a moment longer than usual. I run the inventory: shoulders, lower back, the spot above the hip that has been loud for weeks. This morning it is quiet. Not gone. Quiet.

I get up, make coffee, and then I am sitting in the Haubi, on the hill above Le Creusot, cup in hand. Nothing is pulling at me. The brake light switch is fixed, the inspection is done, the listing for the Haubi is online, photos and everything. Six weeks ago I drove back into Europe with a list in my head as long as my arm. This morning, for the first time, the list is empty. I sit there with the coffee and think: and now?

And then I simply start writing. No novel, no text on any particular theme. I open the laptop, and within an hour more than a thousand words are on the screen, none of them planned. Something wanted to be thought. An observation wanted space. Afterwards I sit there and read what has come into being. At first I don’t even notice what I have written. What strikes me is that I wrote it at all, this morning, in this sequence, with this much room around it.

Here comes the part that took all morning to become clear. For me, Bitcoin and the question of whether my ideas and my work become money are closely connected; at its core, Bitcoin is my security, my income, the ground I stand on when I think about money. And my reserves are lower right now than they were a year ago. The market is in one of those phases that makes many people nervous. You feel it in the group chats, in the tone of the posts, in how often the word correction comes up.

In the past, that was the moment a very specific reflex kicked in. No general worry about money, but something more precise: an idea would surface, and immediately the test. Can this become money? Who would pay for it? Can something be made of it? Every thought, every text, every project had to pass through this needle’s eye, for years, automatically, like a tax that simply runs alongside you without you ever consciously paying it.

This morning that reflex is gone. The numbers are worse, and still the test is absent. I sit with that for a while, turn it over, because it doesn’t add up the way I would expect: if the reserves fall, the tension should rise; that’s how it always was. Instead, something else is there. A kind of foundational trust that it will somehow work out, that not every thought has to prove its market value immediately. Not because the situation has changed. The compulsion to make everything profitable has simply let go, and in its place is room for something quieter.

I go through the forms my life has taken. A shop in Hamburg. A biodynamic farm. There I delivered boxes, early in the morning, driving from house to house. A retreat center in Portugal, guests who arrived with their stories and left a few days later shifted slightly. Ten years in a truck. Outdoor education: teenagers, rucksacks, a fire in the evening and the questions that only come up at a fire. Vietnam, the beach at twenty to six, the plastic stool, the iced coffee.

From the outside these look like different lives. Different cities, different countries, different jobs, different versions of what Dirk does. But this morning, up here on the hill, with the coffee cup going slowly empty, I see the red thread running through all of it. It has nothing to do with shops or farms or trucks.

People. It was always people.

How they live. How they build a day from the same twenty-four hours everyone gets and end up somewhere entirely their own. What they tell themselves about why they are here. What they believe without ever having consciously decided to. Where their attention goes when no one is watching. Why they get up in the morning. What they call important, and what that word does for them. Why someone stays in one place for thirty years and why someone else moves on after three months: what is actually happening underneath both decisions.

I watch some travel content: vanlife channels, people out in old Mercedes trucks and converted campers, not unlike the Haubi. I enjoy it, and I understand exactly why it works. For half an hour you ride along, see the mountain pass, sit at a stranger’s campfire, watch the drone climb over the valley while the morning coffee steams on the dashboard.

And every time I notice where my attention goes instead. The camera is on the landscape; I am thinking about the person holding it. Why exactly this life, built exactly this way. What they are actually looking for, underneath the thumbnail, underneath the Sunday upload, underneath the welcome back to the channel. What the small community of viewers is directing their attention toward, and why. The video shows the pass; I am wondering who decided the pass was worth showing, and what that decision says about what this person wants from their life.

No judgment. Some of these people have been traveling for years from what the channel brings in, and that is remarkable in its own right. It is simply that I notice where my eyes go. The view is never it.

Lately the word philosophy keeps surfacing when I think about this. Not the academic sense, with footnotes and positions that have to be defended. The older sense of the word: curiosity about life itself, love of looking closely at what is actually there.

Most of what I write begins not because I want to explain something, but because I want to understand it better. Often when I sit down I don’t yet know where it is going. A thought arrives, my fear of money has grown quieter, and I follow it like a path into a forest I don’t yet know. From the entrance you can’t see the end. You go in anyway, because the path is there and something about it asks to be walked. Somewhere in the middle the shape of the thing reveals itself. Not before.

Today, for the first time in six weeks, there is room for exactly that walking.

The practical level has not disappeared. There is still a major service ahead: brakes, wheel bearings, the engine, the bodywork on the box that needs proper attention eventually. That is real, and it will have its turn. But this morning all of that sits further back in the room, alongside the money question. Both are present; neither is leading the conversation.

And into the space that opens, things come in. A glass of Riesling on a table somewhere, and the question of why exactly this pleasure, in exactly this glass, on exactly that evening, counted the way it counted, (and no, I have still not drunk any alcohol for 8 years, it is a memory). The structure of a Sangha: a group of people organized not around a product or a brand but around a shared direction of attention, and what that does to the people inside it. The attention of whole societies: where it points, and who decided that. Why people actually travel, really, underneath the Instagram answer. And the plain fact, here on the table next to the coffee: my fear of money has grown quieter, without the numbers being able to explain it.

It feels as if something has been uncovered that was always there. Not born this morning. Uncovered. A layer of practical necessities had been sitting over it for a while, the way dust collects on a table you haven’t used. The table was there all along.

Perhaps the work was never to find new ideas. Perhaps it is to look closely enough at what is already here.

The subjects are not elsewhere, waiting on a mountain pass or at a border to be discovered. They lie on the table. On the hill above Le Creusot. In a morning that began with a back at 2 out of 10, an empty list, and a coffee cup that went empty while I wrote a thousand words about why none of it is urgent anymore.

I only have to be here long enough, and quiet enough, to notice.

The coffee has long been drunk, and the hill lies still, looking out over Le Creusot in the valley below. Six weeks to get here. What happens in the seventh?

A drop hangs on the wire fence. Outside it is grey, fifteen degrees, a fine drizzle sitting over Rodemack, and the heating is running again. Middle of June. The high-pressure system has shifted. The drop just sits there. Round, heavy, complete in itself. Patient. It waits for the moment that is already on its way. It is just past five in the morning, the dreams of the night still present: murder, theft, prison — everything that wants to be processed. And still, attention keeps returning to something underneath all of it: I am. Simply that. Clean. The dreams have a different quality than before: attention stays with what is there.

The water lily opens when the conditions are right. That is the first image this morning, arriving while I still lie in the dark. The water lily follows a knowing that sits deeper than any decision. It opens because the moment is ripe: finished, complete, ready. I let it be there: this image, the drop on the fence, the still-heavy mood of the night, the grey sky behind it, the heating working steadily. I notice that something in me has stopped needing to resolve it immediately, even though I could — the open question, the restlessness, the dreams, the question of what comes next. That is new. That is the newest thing this summer has brought so far:

Can I watch what is becoming, while it is becoming?

By midday the sky has barely changed. Washing, a ten-kilometre drive to the next village, then to Lidl, then a coffee. That is exactly what I had planned for this morning, and that is what happened. On the way back to Haubi I sit for a moment, drink the coffee and simply watch what occurs. I notice: the chest is quiet. There is the grey and the rain and the unfinished day, and at the same time there is this quiet surface underneath. France used to be the stretch between Germany and Portugal. The transit corridor you moved through as efficiently as possible, because the destination was already waiting at the Algarve or somewhere in southwest Portugal. Four in the morning, coffee in a thermos, engine on, then nine hours straight — eight, nine times this route, ten times perhaps — and France was the road between where I was and where I was going. The body sat in the driver’s seat. The mind was already elsewhere. Mostly, anyway.

Today something else happens. The feeling arrives quietly, almost in passing: back to Rodemack has the weight of someone else’s suggestion. South is the right direction. A sensation. That is all. Open terrain, open next step, a quiet inner movement that feels like the obvious thing. I set off around midday. This is the first time in nine years I have left like this: around midday, slowly, the road the only thing that counts. It was always early, always fast, always a destination already doing the counting. Now the A31 lies ahead, towards Toul, then the D94 towards Neufchâteau, and the landscape grows wider, quieter, the sun appearing between the hills of the Haute-Marne, and I simply drive until something says: here.

Goncourt. A church, a bridge, a stream, a tabac. That is all the map shows, and it is accurate. Somewhere here by this small stretch of water that calls itself the Meuse before it grows large, Haubi finds a spot in the sun, and when I step out it is immediately there: warmth on the skin, light on the water, a silence that feels right — the kind of silence you recognise the moment you are inside it. I walk through the village. Very, very little: a tabac with beer on tap where a man is enjoying what is clearly a well-earned end-of-day drink, the path along the stream with old stones. Completely right. A German woman comes along the path with a dog — the dog sniffing, she smiling. You can walk beautifully here, she says, and gestures roughly in one direction, because the direction is obvious when you are standing by a stream. I say thank you. Then I find the sign.

Circuit des Ponts. 10 km. 2h 30.

I set off on the spot. The way the whole day is on the spot.

First along the stream, the water slow and clear, then along the railway line, the valley wide and open, sunlight on the gravel. Left and right the hills and wooded terrain extend. The trail markers appear: number 36, blue and yellow, on posts, on stone walls, always at the moment you begin to doubt the last direction. One after another. Then the fork arrives, and the sign points left and up, out of the valley and into the forest. The first hundred metres steep, the ground wet from rain, then the forest opens: old beeches, mossy stones, light working through the canopy, a floor of years upon years of fallen leaves that yields softly underfoot. Very quiet here. The kind of silence in which you hear your own breath, your steps, the forest.

Then on the ridge the markers stop. The route had walkers going the other way in mind, and my direction is on its own from here. This is terrain. I check my position on Organic Maps, read the topography, look for the catch line — that is the first thing you learn in the wild: find the terrain feature that holds you when all the markers are gone. The next road lies to the west. The valley to the east. Organic Maps, dotted lines, manageable scale. On the Jordan Trail this was everyday life: through wadis with a compass, on stretches where the promised signage turned out to be a rumour, five days through the southern desert with GPS and the next perceptible step. This is different terrain. Readable on its own terms. I orient myself. Attention stays quiet and alert, the way forward open.

And then, in a small hollow, a handmade construction of stones and wood, and beside it a sign: Source de la Louvière. A spring, directly from the ground. The water is cold, genuinely cold, and I drink, stand there a while, the cool forest around me, the water on my tongue. This spring simply appears. In the middle of the forest. With a sign.

While I pause a moment later to look at an old stone and wonder how it came to be here and what its history is — a deer, ten metres ahead. It stands briefly, looks, crosses the path and is gone. I stay still. Then on. Wild boar tracks everywhere, the ground churned up left and right. Fresh — that was last night. Tall grass, fallen trees, a field at the edge of the forest, then a barbed-wire fence running across the terrain. I walk parallel to it, thirty metres, forty, until the gap comes, and push through. The calves catch the bottom wire. And then: the railway line. The same gravel, the same rails I set off along earlier. Now from the other side, the village in sight, Haubi where I left him. The circle closes.

Ten kilometers on the clock. With the ascents and the cross-country section it will be a little over ten in the end. I am tired and very satisfied — the only right combination after an evening like this. The calves show traces of the last metres through the undergrowth. Haubi stands in the last sun, the summer moving through the valley, and I sit outside, legs stretched out, let the silence arrive.

This Friday still had the face of an empty day this morning: washing, shopping, open terrain. A day that holds what it is until it shows itself. And then it unfolded: Goncourt appeared as the next step, from the single logic of the direction that felt right. The walking route stood on a sign and waited for someone who stops. The spring lay along the path, cold and unannounced. The deer was simply there. The detour through the undergrowth was orientation under different conditions: stayed with it, held the inner centre. Each of these things arose from the one before. Everything from the moment, each one always already the material for the next.

That is the connection to the morning that I see now. The drop on the wire fence, hanging quietly, waiting for its moment. The water lily opening because the conditions are right. All of it from a movement that sits deeper than determination or speed, deeper than any travel plan. On nine drives through France that was invisible. Because the mind was already elsewhere, already in the next chapter, already at the arrival that counted, and France in between simply vanished. Today I was in Goncourt. In this small village that earns only a dot on most maps, that has a church and a tabac and a walking route that takes you up from the valley into the forest, through beeches and mossy stones and a named spring that gives cold water directly from the ground.

The drop falls when it is ready. That is the sentence this day began with. I held it in the morning as an image, as a question, as something on a trail that reveals itself while you walk. Now, in the evening, with tired legs and the last daylight on my face, I have the feeling that the day lived this question — step by step, from the heating in Rodemack to the barbed-wire fence above the field near Goncourt, the direction each time arising from the previous moment, the whole thing out of itself.

There is something here that can be described, and there is something here that slips past description. That is what is beautiful about it. Nine years with Haubi. Almost always a destination. Mostly I wanted to arrive somewhere. And this day — this quiet Friday in the Haute-Marne — is the first time France was a place.

What opens when you let go of already knowing what comes next?

Look at Goncourt.

The screen is black. The future is unwritten. This is the environment I love.

I’m sitting at Good Folks Café in Da Nang. Six more days until I leave Vietnam. Outside, the street is already warm. In here, it’s quiet enough that something else can begin.

I feel pressure to come up with something great. Something right. I notice the pressure the way you notice a hand on your shoulder — and I set it down on the table beside me. This is a different mode than building. This is descent. And descent happens by itself. Like a stone sinking to the floor of a lake.

I see myself standing at the edge of the water. He is the Builder — the one who throws the stone. He seems bored when there’s nothing to construct. But inside him, like those Russian nesting figures where one contains another contains another, there is the stone itself. The one that sinks. I follow the energy.

Steven King wrote about this in On Writing — that there’s a place in you where writing begins. Mine is the Black Zen Garden. Dark first. Unknown. I only arrive here when I’m exhausted by the world, when I’ve spent weeks inside intellectual work — understanding, structuring, building. This kind of writing is the opposite of that. This is meditation. Not knowing. Allow. The rules of gravity don’t apply. Moon boots.

The moment I touch the surface of the water, my shape changes.

I become a diver who can breathe underwater.

I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. I’m not fighting the current — I’m following it. I sink, and there’s something playful in the sinking. Legs kick lightly. Arms move in slow arcs. Then I turn face-upward, arms open wide, and let the weight take me. The world above the water simply ceases.

Even here, a voice finds me: That’s boring. Tell an exciting story. Another voice, quieter: Swim. Let go. Enjoy. I notice both. I keep sinking.

This is where everything I built over the last months was born. I feel it with my body, not my mind — the certainty that this dark, gravity-free place underneath the intellectual work is the source. The code, the structure, the words, the system. Everything. It existed here before I built it. It will exist here after.

The lake is always water. Not earth or air or fire. Water. Movement is slow here. If you want to be fast, you can’t. That’s the whole teaching, compressed.

I feel like I’m in the heart of everything — in the heart of Da Nang, of Bao An, of Minh, of Pai, of Münster. Like a source where all the places I’ve loved appear and dissolve, appear and dissolve, like breath.

Come home, Dirk.

Everything is here already.

I am no longer the diver — I am a manta ray. Broad wings. Moving slow. Each upward stroke is one breath in, each downward stroke is one breath out. The surrounding area becomes visible the way the world becomes visible just before sunrise — not all at once, from the edges, gradually. A grey-dark stone floor below me. The water around me is neither warm nor cold. It simply holds. Then I sense a cave. Something calls from inside it. Come here. Come here. It’s time. My wings rise. My wings fall. I move toward it.

The stone walls are dark grey. They catch no light, throw no reflection. I know who is waiting at the end of the cave before I can see him. The Dread Guy — the figure I’ve been circling since September. The one who sat with me at the fire on April 5th and gave me nothing, no name, only presence. He changes forms. Dread Guy. Shin Li. Magician. A unicorn that shows itself only when you’ve stopped searching for it. He is sitting at the far end of the cave, beside a fire. An underwater fire. I had no idea such a thing was possible. Here it is.

—

In the same way you cannot lose what’s outside, you cannot lose what’s inside. You cannot escape who you are.

I hear it before I reach him. The words are already in me when they arrive, the way true things are — you recognize them rather than receive them. The fire pulls me. He pulls me. I come closer.

We are facing each other now. I’m still floating. He seems to breathe underwater as easily as I do, as easily as the fire burns inside water. He sits in the yogi position, but sits is the wrong word — he floats in it, unheld, unanchored, completely still. Finally, he says. You made it. He says it the way you say something to a person who already knows what you’re going to say. No surprise on either side. Just arrival. You know that I am you and you are me. And I say: Yes. I know.

Nobody speaks for a while. The fire moves. The water holds. The stone walls hold. My wings lift. My wings fall. Across the fire, he sits weightless in the yogi position, eyes on mine.

Across the fire, the manta ray is floating. Wings lifting, wings falling. Breathing the way I breathe.

Roy.

And from the spine outward, the other name.

Yoda.

Across the fire, Yoda sits exactly as before. My wings lift. My wings fall.

Yoda, I say. Of course. So, Yoda — why did you call me? I heard you, even from further away.

Because — and he begins slowly, the way someone begins who is not searching for the words — I knew you needed some support. And some encounter. For clarity. Not for something new. There is nothing new here. We both already know. We just take the form the environment requires. We are both here to remind each other of this. I see it in you and you in me, Roy.

The fire and the water are in perfect harmony.

Then everything softens. The edges blur. The cave, the fire, the stone walls — they slowly dissolve, and my awareness stays, but the water is gone. I’m sitting on a rock in an open field. Flat land, dry grass. A steppe, wide and still. I close my eyes. When I open them — the cave is back. Instant. Yoda is there. The fire is there. I close them again. The field. It’s all there. It’s just what changes.

I sit in Good Folks Café, six days before leaving Vietnam. The street outside is warm. The screen in front of me is full now.

I am the man at the shore and the stone and the diver and the manta ray. I am Roy looking at Yoda and Yoda looking at Roy. I am the cave and the field. None of it contradicts.

You cannot lose what’s inside. That’s the whole thing. That’s what Yoda came to say — or what I came to hear him say, which is the same.

The fire burns in the water. I still have no idea how.

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The appartement is on the sixth floor, small and dark at a quarter to four in the morning. Below the window, a makeshift roof of tarpaulin, hastily assembled. The woman underneath it has already started her fire. The same fire every morning, for the soup she will serve at dawn. A bird sings somewhere, the same four notes it always sings at this hour. A scooter passes on the street. The screen holds a single window of text. Beside it, the bancha tea. Oat milk added until the color was exactly right, the color that already tells you how it will taste. I am reading Piranesi.

Piranesi is about a man who lives in a house with no outside. The house runs infinite in every direction: halls, vestibules, staircases beyond counting, tides that pour through the lower floors and withdraw again with the regularity of breath. Statues line every corridor: minotaurs, angels, a woman carrying a beehive, a figure holding a sphere aloft in the dark. The man who lives there moves through all of it with complete ease. He knows which staircase catches the early light, where the fish swim in with the tide, which alcove stays dry enough to sleep. He is, in a word the book earns slowly, at home.

I read for an hour. Then I set the book down and notice what arrived while I was reading. Not from it, exactly. From inside it. An image I had been circling for weeks, loose and unresolved. A sentence that had refused to come. A direction for something I could not previously see. All of it sitting quietly, the way things sit when you stop moving furniture around them. A fly lands on my wrist. I don’t move.

Something happens in the gap of doing nothing useful.

I keep notes in a vault I named Zen Garden. The name arrived sideways and then felt inevitable. A place where things are not filed so much as composted. Fragments, observations, sentences that belong nowhere yet. Ideas that arrived on a morning walk and landed in a note before they could dissolve. They sit in the dark until something grows from them. The raked sand around the stone. The careful space that makes the stone matter.

A Zen garden does not look like much is happening. That is the point. The emptiness is not absence — it is condition. Without the sand, no stone. Without the gaps between the notes, no resonance between them. Certain old traditions understood this about silence the way the Japanese understood it about gardens: what looks empty is often where things are becoming. The morning this note began, there was no café, no structured session, no agenda. Just the dark, a book about infinite halls, the tea still warm. Most frameworks for creative work would mark it in red.

What is so-called emptiness? Empty of what, exactly?

The discomfort of doing nothing useful is real and worth naming. Its presence tells us something. The guilt about the fantasy novel. The low-grade sense that this does not count. The pull to open a more serious tab. All of it is evidence of how thoroughly we have been trained to distrust the garden. To see only what can be harvested, never the soil it grows in.

There is a fire at the center of everything I build and write. I have used the word for years. Always knowing what it meant, and always finding it means something more when I return to it. Each return goes deeper. Perhaps because I stay away for too long. The fire is not the burning. The fire is the space the burning makes. The ring of warmth and light pressed outward from the center into the dark, the circle that forms around any real heat. People have gathered around fires for a hundred thousand years. The flame draws them. The circle the flame makes holds them. A place to return to. A center that stays. The inner home made visible in the world.

The clearing. That is what the fire actually is.

Below the window, the woman’s soup is almost ready.

A few months before that morning, a woman came to meet with me. She arrived tired in a particular way. The kind that has settled into the bones after months of too much. She worked hard, thought fast, cared about everything she touched. She knew what she needed. When I asked, the answer came quietly: just some space. Just to feel herself again.

Then we looked at how she filled her days. The space she said she needed appeared in her calendar, marked and protected. And each time, something had moved in. A meeting that couldn’t be shifted. A message that needed answering today. She had been diligent about protecting the thing she needed, and had not managed to be inside it once in three months. I reflected it back to her. She sat with it for a moment, then said: I keep scheduling myself further away from myself.

At a certain point she said: I can breathe. I feel space in my chest. I feel myself again.

She was describing the return to something she had always carried. The noise had quieted enough that it was audible again. What we settled on was small. Every evening, twenty minutes with a novel. A real one, with characters and rooms and a world she had never seen. The kind of book where you forget what time it is.

Her version of Piranesi’s halls, if you like. Twenty minutes in an infinite house where she already knew every staircase.

I have spent years building and rebuilding around the center. New systems, new structures, new architectures for saying the same thing in a different frame. Each time carrying the same energy underneath: once the structure is right, once everything is in order, then the home will be possible. It never worked that way. Each structure eventually felt off, and the pulling apart began again. The pattern has a name now, written somewhere in Zen Garden between a note on database queries and a half-finished essay on what afternoon light actually is. Identification. The belief that I am the thing I have built, so when the thing feels wrong, existence itself feels threatened.

The fire underneath the building was always there. That is what the fire means. It does not depend on the structure around it. The clearing exists before the fire is lit and remains after it has gone out. The inner home is not a destination that arrives when the conditions are right. It is the ground the conditions rest on.

Piranesi has this line:

“But what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the world?”

I wrote it into a note the morning I read it. It says something true about proportion. The discomfort of sitting with what is actually here, rather than managing it, is small. Smaller than it feels at the moment. What arrives in that presence is worth more than most of what the managing produces. The albatross is the thing that becomes possible when you stop making yourself useful. That is the return on stillness.

The inner home is not a resting place from the work. It is the ground the work grows from. Zen Garden. The raked sand. The space around the fire. When the garden fills with noise and structure and sub-planets, the stone is still there. The fire is still there, at the center of the clearing.

Go far enough into Piranesi’s house and the halls stop feeling infinite. They start feeling like the inside of something familiar. A man who knows which window catches the morning light is not lost in an infinite house. He is more at home than most people manage in a very small one.

This is what the reading gave me at a quarter to four in the morning. The reminder that the house was already here. That all the building, all the rebuilding, every structure raised and torn apart, has been, underneath everything, a very long way of learning how to stop.

The appartement still quiet. The bancha tea, the right color in the cup. The fire burning at the center. Piranesi in the hall of statues, completely at home. And somewhere in the upper reaches of the house, an albatross.

The last light goes at half past four. We’ve been building the fire since three — splitting birch, stacking it loose enough to breathe, laying the kindling in a nest of dry grass. Now the flames climb and the forest closes in around us like a curtain drawn from every direction at once.

Alex sits across from me, hands extended toward the heat, palms open. Behind her, the trees have disappeared — absorbed into a darkness so complete it feels like a wall. She keeps turning to look over her shoulder. “I can’t see anything back there,” she says. “Nothing.” I turn too. She’s right. Just black. The kind of black that cities never produce. “Strange how fast it happens,” I say. “Five minutes ago I could see the birches.”

The fire pops. A knot of resin bursts and sends a shower of sparks into the cold air. We watch them rise and vanish, one by one, into a sky so black the stars look close enough to flinch from.

The Adjustment

Twenty minutes pass. Alex stops turning around. The fire has become the whole world — warmth on the face, cold on the back, the sound of wood collapsing into itself. Everything else falls away. The day. The plans. The phone, which she left in the car without being asked.

At some point I look away from the flames. Not on purpose. My eyes drift sideways, and suddenly the trees are there again. Shapes. Outlines. I blink. “Alex. Look away from the fire for a second. Just let your eyes go soft.”

She does. A few seconds of nothing. Then: “Wait. I can see the trees.” “Me too. They came back.” “The ridge. There’s a ridge behind the pines. And something moved — a branch, or —” We both listen. A low sound, almost a breath, passing above us. “Owl?” she says. “I think so.”

She turns back to me. “How long has all of that been there?” “The whole time, I think. We just couldn’t see it because we were staring into the fire.” She looks out again. Softer this time. I do the same. The forest has a different shape now — wider, deeper, full of small movements that the firelight had hidden. Neither of us says anything for a while. We’re both doing the same thing. Letting the dark come in instead of pushing our eyes against it.

The North

The temperature falls. We’re deep into the evening now, the fire burned down to a steady glow, the birch logs white with ash. Alex has pulled her jacket tighter, her breath visible in short clouds that the firelight turns orange.

“You know what this reminds me of?” she says. “There’s this old idea — the North as a direction on the medicine wheel. Winter. Night. The place where everything slows down and gets quiet.” “I’ve read about that. The part of the cycle that everyone tries to skip.” “Because it feels like nothing is happening.” She pokes the embers with a stick. The coals shift and a new heat rises. “I’ve been in winter for months. That’s what it feels like. Everything I used to do — the speed, the output, the clarity — it’s gone. I wake up, and the day has no shape. I sit down to plan and nothing comes.”

“I know that feeling. The mornings in Da Nang when I’d sit with a coffee and wait for direction and nothing showed up. For weeks.” She looks at me. “What did you do?” “Sat with it. Badly, mostly. Kept trying to force something. Then at some point I stopped forcing and just stayed in the not-knowing. And it was awful. And then it wasn’t.”

An ember falls through the grate of logs and glows alone on the ground between us. We both look at it.

“Maybe that’s the thing about winter,” Alex says. “It doesn’t come with a destination. It comes with a quality.” “Stillness.” “And the kind of seeing we just did with the trees. Where you stop looking for the thing and let the whole picture arrive.” I nod. That’s exactly it.

The Listening

We sit in silence for a while. The fire crackles. Then Alex closes her eyes. I watch her face change — something softens around the jaw, the forehead. After a minute she says, quietly: “The wind is only up there. In the canopy. Down here it’s completely still.” I close my eyes too. She’s right. Two layers — movement above, stillness below. And underneath that, something scratching on bark. Small. Rhythmic. And underneath that, our own breathing.

“I never hear this much at home,” she says. “There’s always something louder.” “Same. It’s like attention works differently here. Less like a flashlight, more like a —” “A bowl,” she says. “Like it fills up instead of pointing.” “Jon Young writes about that. Wide-angle awareness. The way a deer stands in a meadow. Alert without tension.” “Present without focus,” she says. “The opposite of how I’ve worked my entire life.” We both laugh. It’s the same laugh — the one that comes from recognizing something you’ve been doing for years without seeing it.

The sound moves into the dark between the trees and doesn’t come back.

The Ember

The fire is low now. We’ve stopped feeding it. What remains is enough — a bed of coals that radiates without flame, the heat rising in waves that make the stars behind it shimmer.

“I spent last week trying to map out my next year,” Alex says. “Goals. Timelines. Revenue targets. I filled a whole notebook.” “And?” “Exhausting. Like building a house on a frozen lake. I know the ice will melt. I just don’t know when.” I look at the coals. “Maybe that’s the difference. Between orienting and optimizing. One asks where am I, the other asks how do I go faster. And faster only works when you already know the direction.” “I don’t know the direction.” “Neither do I, half the time. But I know this fire.”

She looks at the embers. The coals rearrange themselves as a log collapses, and for a moment the fire looks entirely different — the same materials, the same heat, but a new shape.

“It moves through phases,” Alex says. “The roar at the beginning — all that flame and heat. And now this. Quieter. Deeper.” “The coals hold more heat than the flames ever did.” “But they don’t perform.” “No. They just radiate.”

We sit with that. The parallel is obvious. Neither of us needs to say it.

The Dark

The coals fade from orange to deep red. The cold presses in closer. The forest sounds have changed — the daytime birds are gone and the night creatures own the air now. The owl calls twice from the ridge. Something moves through dry leaves to the west, stops, moves again.

Alex’s eyes have adjusted completely. So have mine. We’re both looking out into the dark with that soft gaze — the one that doesn’t grab. Just receives. The forest at night is a different animal than the one we walked through this afternoon. More alive, somehow. More honest.

“I keep thinking I should know what comes next,” she says. “But maybe this is the part where I don’t. Maybe this is the part where we just sit here and let our eyes adjust.” “I think that’s exactly what this is.”

The last coal holds its color the way a word holds its meaning after the conversation ends — quietly, completely, without needing to be spoken again.

I put another log on. Not because we need the light. Because the night is long, and some fires are meant to burn slow.

I’m sitting here on the sixth floor in Vietnam. It’s early. The tea is warm. The mountain outside the window stands still, as it always does. I start typing, and while I do, I think of you. I can almost see you — maybe in Berlin, Cologne, or Chiang Mai, maybe somewhere else entirely. The sky might still be dark. The coffee machine just started. Maybe you tried to send one more email or take out the trash when what you really wanted was simply a breath. Around you, things pile up — tasks, thoughts, laundry, expectations. You wonder when it all gets lighter, and when it started feeling this heavy. Was it always like this?

This morning, in the stillness before sunrise, there was that familiar pulse again. No thought, no sentence. More like a fine vibration just beneath the surface — a thin current running through you. On a scale from one to ten, maybe a one point five. The mind moves in to give it shape, because that’s what it does. Call it restlessness, call it flicker, maybe a faint pull in the chest, maybe something without a name. And then, almost like an echo, comes the question: Is something missing? It rises softly, as if trying to give this subtle vibration a body. Something inside feels along the edges, checking if everything aligns or if one small note has slipped out of tune.

Then something in me relaxes. Maybe. Maybe not. I sit here with my warm tea. No pressure. No need. And still — or maybe because of that — this soft vibration lingers, whispering: there’s something here, something asking to be seen. When I stay with it — breathing, sitting, watching — the noise settles. What remains is simple: tea, breath, the mountain, and me.

I’ve tried so many versions of life. Money and no money. Great loves and great losses. Punk, luxury cars, homelessness, designer jackets, cheap wine. The whole menu, every flavor. Each time I thought, this is it. And then again, there came a moment when something felt off. Too much. Too little. Untrue. Now it’s different. Maybe that’s all it is. I no longer push. I no longer wait for rescue, from the outside or from within. I sit here and write. It happens, right now.

Sometimes I sense that you read these words. Out of curiosity maybe, or resonance. Because something inside you hums in response. Maybe just for a second. Maybe like a quiet yes. That soft recognition: Yeah. I feel that too. I picture you reading this. Maybe at the kitchen table. Maybe on the train. Maybe between two moments that don’t leave much room to breathe. And then it happens — a small stillness. Because something inside starts listening.

Maybe you set your phone down for a moment. You take one unplanned breath. You feel the cup in your hand, the sound in the room, the light on the wall. And for a heartbeat, you realize: you’re here. Not perfect. Not finished. Just here. And I can almost hear your mind reply: “Nice thought. Five seconds of calm — and then back to taking out the trash.” Yes, you’ll take out the trash. But maybe this time it feels different. A little more awake. A little more at peace. Because this is it already.

There’s nothing greater waiting around the corner. What matters isn’t what happens — it’s how you move through it. And suddenly, even the smallest act becomes quiet joy, once you allow it. I just want to say this: I see you. Directly. Quietly. The way you see someone when you recognize a place you’ve been yourself — a place I still know. You’re right on time. You haven’t missed your life.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment where someone says something true out loud. No fix, no goal, just truth. That’s why I write — for this in-between space, where two people meet and neither needs to speak louder than the other. Me here. You there. Two open rooms. And maybe, right now, nothing is missing.

The Leather Is Cold

The leather is cold. I’m the first one here. The whole floor is empty — six round tables along the long sofa against the wall, every chair pushed in, every surface clean. That’s one of the things I love about this hour. The café belongs to the silence before it belongs to anyone else.

I slide into the corner of the couch, the one against the wall, and place my hands flat on the wood table. Teak, maybe. Dark grain, a ring stain from yesterday’s cup, a scratch near the edge that I’ve traced with my fingertip a hundred times.

The barista moves behind the counter. The sound of oat milk frothing — that sharp hiss, then the soft pour. A spoon clinks against ceramic. Outside, the street is still quiet. A motorbike passes, then nothing. Then another.

I’ve been sitting on this sofa since August.

Seven Months, Same Table

Seven months. The same leather couch, the same wood table, the same barista who knows my order before I speak. The same glance through the courtyard window where a large banana tree stands still in the morning air, its leaves heavy and wide, catching the first light. Behind it, the opposite building turns copper at exactly 7:45 — three minutes, then white again.

In August, I sat here with a sketchbook and a question I couldn’t yet spell. Something about fire. Something about what remains when everything else is stripped away. Shin Li was three months old then — born in May from silence, from walking, from mornings exactly like this one. I drew illustrations on my phone and posted them on Instagram, three times a week, and it felt like breathing. Inhale the walk. Exhale the image.

That was the beginning. I just sat here and things appeared.

What Grew

The first guest arrives around 8:15. A woman with a laptop, headphones already in. She takes the table by the courtyard, orders something cold, opens her screen. Her lips move slightly, the way people read when the words matter. The café is waking up.

In June, I sat in a jungle hut in Pai and wrote a thousand words before breakfast. The fire symbol became a logo. The website went live — aquarell aesthetics, a fire in the center, everything orbiting. “When you arrive here, I want you to feel welcome. As if you stepped closer to a fire, just to sit down and be.” That line arrived in the hut. It’s still true.

In August, I came to Da Nang and sat on this sofa for the first time. The long game began. Daily writing. Slow building. Instagram and blog, three posts a week. “I’m arriving. Slowly. But I’m arriving.”

In October, everything opened. A hundred and eleven files in one month. The Inner Landscapes card set — published, complete, a creative arc that resolved itself. Flight 307 — a dream about a plane that became a story about trust. Iron Hans. The biography. Empty Page Writing. Medium set up, the first article posted there. Every morning the same: wake, coffee, write a thousand words, walk. The most productive month I’ve ever had. And I was just sitting here, in this café, letting things come.

Then November. Someone said I needed a persona. I built eighteen files in a day. Someone said “do it differently.” I redesigned the website. December brought silence and reading — and from that silence, a name: OUTJOY. Follow the joy. It arrived, it wasn’t invented. In January, the German site launched. A couple in a restaurant said “do it in English,” so I rebuilt everything in English. February brought research — thirteen documents, pricing, a new persona named Alex, a tool I built from scratch called Gravity Field. March: a third website, this time in a single day. Ten articles written. LinkedIn. Calendly. A lighthouse instead of a compass.

Nine months. Each one built something real. Shin Li. The card set. The fire articles. The biography fragments. A tool that works. A website that stands. A name that fits. And between these — the rebuilds, the pivots, the moments where someone else’s voice became louder than mine. Five names for who I should be. Four platforms. Two languages. That part is true too.

But here’s what I see from this sofa, looking back through the courtyard at the banana tree: it was all the same fire. Even the detours fed it. The persona work made my writing more human. The English pivot unlocked a voice I write in now, every morning, fluently. The research sharpened something I could only feel before. Every sandcastle I built and let the sea take — I kept the skill of building.

The Sofa Waits

But here’s the thing about this place. It waits.

Every time I came back — after the rebuild, after the pivot, after the night I finished a website and felt proud for a moment before the voice in the back said it’s not enough, do more, something is missing — the leather was here. The scratch was in the same place. The barista poured the same milk. And the banana tree stood in the courtyard, unmoved, its leaves wide open like palms held up in patience.

The café kept its shape while I lost mine. And something in that consistency, that patience of a place, taught me what I couldn’t teach myself: that arriving is its own achievement. Sitting down is the beginning. The empty page is full already — full of space.

The Room Fills

By 8:30, the café has changed. Two more laptops open. A couple shares a smoothie bowl near the door. Someone speaks softly into a phone in a language I can’t place. The barista is moving faster now — two orders, three, the milk hiss overlapping with the grinder. The glass door opens and closes, opens and closes. Each time, a gust of warm air — jasmine, exhaust, something sweet from the bakery two doors down. Each time, the café swallows the city again.

I watch the room fill the way you watch a tide come in. Slowly, then all at once. And I think about how this is the rhythm I trust most: the empty floor, the silence, the first light. Then the world arrives. It always does. You just have to be here when it comes.

Last week, I had a conversation with someone I hadn’t spoken to in a while. We talked for an hour, maybe longer. He carried a lot — the kind of weight that comes from building too many things at once and losing the ground beneath them. I said very little. Mostly I listened. At some point he paused, exhaled, and said: “I can breathe again.” And I realized — that’s what this sofa has been teaching me every morning. The room holds still. I hold still. And something in the other person remembers how to land.

Two days before that, a man stopped me in a small restaurant near the bridge. I couldn’t place him at first. Then he grinned. “How can you forget me? I’m a special person.” And it came back — a night months ago when something of mine got lost and a whole neighborhood stood up. He looked at me the way you look at someone you’ve shared a storm with. “We like you very much,” he said. “You have a gentle and friendly charisma.”

A friend said the same thing the day before. Different words, same recognition.

Granola and Gold

I take a sip. Banana smoothie bowl today, cold and sweet, the granola still crunchy on top. The sun has moved past the copper phase. The wall across the courtyard is white again. The banana tree hasn’t moved. A motorbike honks somewhere. The barista wipes the counter in long, slow strokes.

Nine months. Shin Li. Eight hundred and fifty-one notes. Two websites, built and standing. Twenty-two articles. Visual poems. An entire card set — Inner Landscapes — drawn from conversations with silence. A session that landed. People who remember my face and say it out loud. A pattern named and seen. Two fires burning at the same time, for the first time, side by side.

And this morning, I woke at 4:45 and wrote in the dark. The screen was dark blue, the cursor blinking. My mind was calm. And I wrote the sentence that might be the simplest thing I’ve ever understood:

Everything is where it has to be.

The Other Measure

There’s a way of measuring a life that counts revenue, followers, impressions. A scoreboard. Numbers that go up or stay flat. By that measure, these nine months look like a long walk with no destination.

But there’s another way. The way you measure a tree — by the depth of its roots, the width of its shade, the steadiness of its trunk when the wind comes. By what it holds, quietly, for anyone who sits beneath it.

I’ve been sitting on this sofa since August. And everything I needed to find, I found by coming back to it. The fire was always here. The words were always here. The people showed up — at restaurants, on video calls, on morning walks along the beach at 5:40 when the light turns gold and the sand is still cool under bare feet and the sea says the same thing it said yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that:

You’re here. That’s enough. Start from here.

Tomorrow, Same Sofa

I close the laptop. The smoothie bowl is empty. The room is full now — voices, screens, the clink of cups, a laugh from the courtyard table. The woman with the headphones is still reading, her lips still moving. The barista folds a cloth. Someone opens the glass door and the city floods in again — jasmine, exhaust, the sweet thing from the bakery. Then the door closes.

Tomorrow I’ll sit in the same spot. The leather will be cold. The floor will be empty. And something will want to be written, because something always does, when you give it the space and the silence and the trust to arrive on its own time.

Thank you for reading.
If this stayed with you, there’s more to come.
Subscribe and the next ember finds you.

See you at the fire

Dirk