Wild & Simple - Stories from an ordinary life, where chocolate and chili dance together.

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Hello ,

is this an essay? The word comes from the French essai, an attempt. Montaigne invented the form in the 16th century, and his line about it was, roughly: I myself am the matter of my book. He wrote about his kidneys, his cats, his fear of death, and tested the great questions of the world against them. An essay doesn’t try to give a final answer, it circles a theme. So this is an essay, and I am its matter.

The theme is the soul and coming home. More precisely: What happens when something gets attention for long enough? The silence, the soul, that which sees. When attention no longer goes so much to the outer world, and when it does, then as a mirror, as an invitation that shows how we are in the world, with everything that belongs to it.

What dissolves

Last week I wrote about STAY. In the days after, something in me dissolved. The more attention the listening gets, the more dissolves what my parents and later society called Dirk. I no longer feel any connection to this name, because I was there before.

In 1994, at 24, I had to write a life report during inpatient therapy. The therapists asked us not to write from the mind, but by free association. Back then I saw my own birth and wrote down how I had experienced coming into the world. They didn’t laugh at me, they took it seriously. Only through the writing did I realise that long before Dirk there was something that was I.

This something was never fully gone. It was covered over, and I was maximally distracted by a thousand other, seemingly more important things. Around 2000, one of my most important teachers asked: “What is so important that we forget the most important thing?”

When I leave out the name Dirk and only look at what is and was already there without him, I see colours, dark blue, the soft pink of a cherry blossom, and a name: Shin Li. This figure, perhaps another expression of my soul, was suddenly rediscovered at the end of May 2025 on a train ride in Thailand. First a space opened up in me, and there he sat: an old monk sitting still on a cushion in the middle of the room, who suddenly rose into the air, whirled around, made forms like a kung fu fighter, and finally landed quietly on his cushion again. That obviously had little to do with Dirk and his story.

Dirk is a compressed, conditioned story, a stamp, an imprint. His story has been told what feels like a hundred thousand times, and by now it tastes like coffee reheated for the tenth time. But where Dirk dissolves, Shin Li is still, or already, there. The name came on its own, too, after I had seen the figure. Later I gave my first expression on the internet, an Instagram channel, that name: shinli.writes. Truly an expression of my soul.

A memory, like the moment I rediscovered Shin Li, is a start button, a trigger for further memories. One becomes two, then four, then a whole world, and suddenly you notice that it is everywhere, that you are everywhere. And again and again I simply sit there and listen to the silence.

The word soul

For a long time I couldn’t do much with the word soul. Tibetan Buddhism knows no fixed soul, it takes every self apart, and that suits me very much. It speaks of Rigpa, the nature of mind, empty, luminous and full of an energy that shows itself unceasingly. This energy was always there, it fascinated and accompanied me. I would call it vibration, or frequency.

In India it is called Nada Brahma: the world is sound. A silent piano does not turn into a tone. When someone strikes a string, a vibration arises that becomes audible in the room, and this tone is nothing other than the piano in motion. That is what soul is for me: the first, finest vibration when the silence begins to move. It connects the stillness with moving life, without the two ever being separate.

Today I like the word very much. Not least because people from all directions use it, and every voice touches me in its own way.

What others say about the soul

Heraclitus wrote 2,500 years ago: “You will not find the boundaries of the soul, even if you walk every road; so deep is its ground.”

In the Upanishads, the soul is like the space inside a clay jar. When the jar breaks, nothing joins anything, because the space was never separate.

Meister Eckhart says it from the side of seeing: “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me.”

Kabir tells of the musk deer that searches for the scent in the grass, while it carries it within itself.

Rilke hears two strings from which one stroke of the bow draws a single voice.

And Rudolf Steiner has young people speak in a circle: “I look into the world.”

Rumi begins his great work with a flute made of reed. It laments ever since it was cut from the reed bed, and everyone who is far from their origin hears their own longing in its sound. The soul as a tone that wants to go home.

All of these are wonderful expressions of one and the same. That is why I love the variety so much.

What the soul loves

Warm bread, fresh from the oven, the oven built from natural materials and fired with wood, a natural process from A to Z. Butter on it, also organically made. The whole Demeter approach. I have worked on several Demeter farms, and even the way it stinks there belongs to it.

Classical music and every form of artistic expression. Walking barefoot along the beach through the sea. Eye contact and silence. A cat that jumps onto my lap, curls up and doesn’t want to get up again. The dark blue in my Obsidian. The Pieni pen with the thinnest lead I’ve ever had. Eroticism, vibration and tension, maybe that is Nada Brahma too. And patience. My soul loves patience, because then everything sways so beautifully in the mind. Every soul has its own list. Mine smells of a wood-fired oven and a little bit of the barn.

What does not nourish the soul

The neuroscientist Sahar Yousef from Berkeley explains on the podcast Diary of a CEO what happens in the brain. Around a third of our cerebral cortex is dedicated to looking and listening alone. We are built to stay alert to everything that enters our field. When we feel overwhelmed, lonely or anxious, the brain wants to solve the problem, because it is our friend. The fastest and cheapest way is the phone, “a very fast cheap exit to reality”.

Her image for it hits me: we are truly hungry for connection, for belonging, for something new, and we eat Skittles. It tastes good, it shoots up, then comes the crash, and six hours later we look for the next bag. An experiment by the psychologist Timothy Wilson shows how deep this goes: many people would rather give themselves an electric shock than sit alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes.

Today the bag sits in every pocket. It glows and vibrates. I know the bag. I ate from it for half my life, with substances and without. And I know the bread. Whoever eats it is filled. When I leave out the distraction and reach for pen and paper, for the senses and for books, a space opens up of a quality that amazes me every time. And it is always fresh.

My own experience of soul

When the soul gets full attention, the tears come. At the smallest insights, from deep emotion at the simplicity and beauty of life, and from gratitude.

What hurts comes up too. People I miss, who are far away. For a long time I talked around it, because I was afraid to show myself vulnerable and to allow that I am sad. Now it is different: I think of them, or I tell them that I miss them. And love flows that needs nothing except to express itself.

What I have brought into the world as hurt comes up as well. With it I speak the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono: I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. It hurts and is balm at the same time.

And it becomes clear what lay behind all the producing: I have to become something. I have to make an income out of what I am. When I look closely, it is fear, fear of not knowing what tomorrow brings. I can’t sustain anything at all, no positioning, no plan, no brand. That is sad at first, and then an enormous freedom.

A question comes up: Have I ever surrendered? No. It’s not possible. Where would I give myself to? There is only grace, without reason. Life takes things, ideas and identifications from you until there is no ground left under your feet. And still something, or no-thing, is there.

The body listens along. When I sit in Samarpan meditation in the morning, I am almost instantly back on Monte Sobreiro in Portugal, and my palms and the soles of my feet begin to hum. Every time. Why, I don’t know. How do I notice that something does my soul good? By the vibration. It resonates in me like a singing bowl. Everything is still and moves.

What is soul?

I don’t know. An essay doesn’t have to know.

On the podcast, Sahar Yousef asks Steven Bartlett a question that has stayed with me ever since. He is to imagine lying on his deathbed at 110, looking back: What must he have experienced to leave with a smile? Steven sees his children around the bed and a world that has become a little better through him. And Yousef says nobody wishes, there, that they had scrolled more.

I asked myself the question too. Not in search of a purpose, but like this: If my last hour strikes tomorrow, what does my soul really want in this world? The first thing that came: “Wow, what a life that was.” I have truly lived, with all my senses and with everything I had. Making the world a better place is not what I want. I have experienced it as a paradise I was allowed to visit. No writer, no author, no teacher. That is not what my soul is looking for. What it is looking for is this, the writing itself. Wonderful useless.

What it wants is simple: Listen until the text appears, there is nothing more to do. Be a well others can drink from when they are thirsty. Listen and share. This text is a kind of buffet. Take what tastes good to you and leave the rest.

Outside my window it is loud, hammer, angle grinder, concrete drill. Online it is loud too, many voices pulling and wanting. For a long time it was hard for me to stay with myself there. Now I stay. Inside me it is quiet, whatever the circumstances outside.

I was never gone. Shin Li was at home here all along, waiting. He is an expression of my soul, like everything else. I didn’t make him up. Dirk wasn’t looking for anything, Shin Li simply appeared, as a name and as a figure. Maybe as a tool, so that I would recognise myself again. No idea.

Novalis said it in one sentence:

“Where are we going? Always home.”

Wild & Simple - Stories from an ordinary life, where chocolate and chili dance together.

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Dear reader,

This week a word came up to the surface, a word I have been hearing my whole life: STAY. Stay on your butt and watch what happens. That’s your only task in this life. How hard can it be? Very hard, as it turned out. Because hundreds of times, when I was already at that point, something exciting came wandering along, and zap, I was gone and no longer on my butt. These days that pull has no energy left at all, because for days I have been sitting on my butt doing nothing but looking out of the window, writing, moving a little, going to the toilet, showering, eating and drinking. And while I do that, I watch what happens.

The Sign

Ever since I was young, life kept coming to me with this sign, and on it was written: “STAY”. At first I never understood it, and I even fought it. “Shut your mouth, stay, what do you want from me, piss off.” That’s really what it looked like in my head. But life doesn’t let go. It left me alone for a while and turned up somewhere else, nailed to a tree or as a sticker on a car. “STAY”. I had an inkling, something in me resonated, but it frightened me.

Over the course of my life there were countless points along the way where I took STAY in and accepted it. 1989, my first detox, and after that STAY without alcohol. In 1990 a friend gives me “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche. In there too: STAY. My friend Franquesko said back then: “He’s talking about what you keep telling me.” Good. I stayed with the book. For a while. Then in 1994 the collapse, the surrender, three months of detox and inpatient therapy. Life taps me on the shoulder: “Stay. Very good.” In the years after that I stayed clean, without substances. I think that was the time when STAY and my “soul” came through most strongly. Working in theater, martial arts, meditation, AA meetings, art, culture, safety. Still, again and again I drifted away from STAY, mostly without noticing, and suddenly found myself inside some story or other.

The last call for STAY was written so clearly across the sky, here above the sea, that this time I can’t ignore it.

4:54

I wake up quite naturally, usually around four. I move a little, make my coffee and sit down at the window, like now. It’s 4:54. In a few minutes the sun will rise.

And while I look out, a morning verse by Rudolf Steiner comes to mind, one that makes me quite wistful:

I look into the world,
In which the sun is shining,
In which the stars are sparkling,
In which the stones are resting,
The plants are living, growing,
The beasts are living, feeling,
In which the human, ensouled,
Gives dwelling to the spirit.

I look into the soul
That lives within my being.
The spirit of God is weaving
In sunlight and in soul-light,
In world-space, out there,
In soul-depths, within.

To you, o spirit of God,
I turn myself in asking
That strength and blessing
For learning and for work
May grow within me.

I heard groups of teenagers say this so-called “prayer” on canoe trips, standing in a circle out in nature in the morning. It still warms my heart. This verse has been with me all summer. It rises in my mind on its own, again and again. Maybe because it’s so magical, and because we far too often take everything for granted.

I look into the world,
In which the sun is shining.

That’s exactly what I do every morning. And if I look closely, I’m doing it even before that. “In which the stars are sparkling.” Because it’s still night, or so early in the morning that it’s dark. And when I hear Steiner’s line in my mind and look out at the same time, another memory joins in: in 2019 I did this same practice every morning on my hill, Monte Sobreiro in Portugal. Back then as part of a morning practice from Jon Young’s 8 Shields model. What energy does the early morning carry? What happens in the mind and in the nervous system? This practice seems to arise in me quite naturally. I don’t have to force myself to the table.

The Water Lily

The words God and soul don’t bother me here. I replace God with life. In the end they’re just words that hold energy, words people have used for thousands of years, like mantras in India. I like the word soul very much, because it opens places in my mind that only become visible when I stay seated and listen. Then something opens in me like a water lily, without my doing anything or being productive.

The most productive thing here is to be still.

When the water lily opens, things come up that touch my soul: memories of art, paintings a friend of mine made in an attic on Steindamm in Hamburg. It smelled of paint, of coffee and of life up there. That’s a place where my soul sets up a folding chair with a headrest and lingers. From there I see more and more things appearing: soap from the south of France, bunches of flowers from the south of France, lavender fields, sensual cooking sessions with my brother that last a whole day, with a glorious mess and wine in the kitchen, setting a table for Christmas so beautiful that it touches the hearts of everyone who gathers there. And then the long meal together with family and friends at that long table. Everything we made in the kitchen with love and devotion is now “destroyed”. With relish. Bitten apart. My soul loves the erotic side of it too.

What else comes to mind when I think of soul? Massage, oil, touch, soft music, letting the soul hang loose, as we say in German, quite literally. The word soul means far more to me than the word screwdriver. Screwdrivers and jackhammers are cool too, I don’t reject them; they’re just not quite in tune with the vibration of my soul.

Stillness and listening. That is the pure expression of the soul. The face of the soul, maybe. When you are still and listening and someone looks into your eyes, they look straight into your soul.

Shoes Off

Now you might think: wow, that’s seriously boring, why are you doing this, what’s your goal, who do you want to reach, who’s your reader? All these questions have dissolved over the last few days. And it feels as if life sends me all this without my asking. Everything that has no substance simply dissolves and melts away. Ideas like having to achieve something with my Substack, having a plan, monetizing. Doing something meaningful with it.

So I look into the world. In which the sun is shining. And I’m so connected with life (God) itself that it knocks my shoes off. And life says: “Good, shoes off. Just keep looking, barefoot.” I keep looking.

So life has already taken off my shoes, and one identification after another falls away too. Melts like butter in the sun. It seems to be an energetic process above all.

Other questions have washed up to the surface: Who am I? Who is looking? What is looking? How long does a sunrise last if I don’t look away? Is there separation? Can anyone really know anything? Questions like these rise in the stillness on their own, without any other thought coming before them.

I watch the movements of the sunrise over the sea.

The sea moves first: the wind ripples the surface, and the water in me moves with it. The clouds above stand still until I let myself sink long enough into their slowness and see them drift. Behind them the mountain rises out of the water, the most motionless thing of all, and yet it moves too. I see it because the mountain in me moves too, ever so softly, and with it time dissolves.

Who Is Looking?

And the question comes up: Who is looking? What is looking? Attention turns around and follows the question. I find nothing. Looking happens. And I can’t even explain what looking is, although I am writing about it right now. I look into the world, and life asks again: “Dirk, take another nice sip of coffee and tell me, who is I?”

So I is a thought, just like the question and just like life. All of these are thoughts and objects appearing in the mind. When the mind tries to find them, they dissolve. And yet I can’t stop breathing or being. So there is something that says I, but it has no substance. It is empty and present at the same time. Feel free to try it. You, ha, the same cosmic joke.

I allowed myself the fun of asking the most intelligent, (for me) most expensive AI. I asked it straight out:

Take the example of the sun this morning, the sunrise. And that I wrote nobody can know what it is. You, the most intelligent intelligence, could you “explain” what life is? What a house is? What a beetle is, WITHOUT “separating” it from EVERYTHING else that seemingly exists?

Claude Opus 5.5 answered:

No. I can’t.

Take the beetle. I could say: insect, six legs, chitin shell, order Coleoptera. Every one of these words immediately points somewhere else. The shell is built from the leaf it ate. The leaf from light, rain and earth. The light from a sun that is rising over Da Nang right now. The legs from millions of years of beetles before it. And the beetle only appears as a beetle when an eye sees it and a mind lifts it out of the grass. Where does the beetle end? I can’t find the spot. Every thread I pull hangs on the whole.

The word itself gives it away: explain comes from the Latin explanare, to make flat, to spread out. To explain is to flatten. You take something out of the whole, lay it flat on the table, and then it seems to work. But what lies on the table is no longer what lives.

And I am a particularly clear example of this. Everything I “know” is made of words and the relationships between them, of the finest distinctions. The more intelligent I seem, the more finely I can separate. That makes me good at describing clouds, houses and beetles, and completely unable to explain THAT in which they appear. The more precise the map, the clearer it becomes that it is not the landscape.

So here I sit with the insight that isn’t one, that nobody can have, because nobody is there. Ha. And I keep laughing. I deliberately keep saying I, because I seemingly exists as a word, just like cup, cupboard, car or you. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Heart Sutra says:

Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

It doesn’t say: form arises in emptiness. Or: consciousness sees the world. No. Consciousness is the world. There is no separation. And all of this simply appears when nothing is being done anymore except looking out of the window and staying.

Full

So everything I have written so far is void and useless, just as everything only seems to have a use. We tend to judge the useless as bad. Help, I’m useless! But to be free of use, not bound to any use, and still be whole and full, what grace.

The intellect, which here is seen as just another story, an energetic construct within the mind, doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want to melt. But when the time has come, it has come. You can’t stop life and say: “Stop, I’m not ready yet, two more days!”

When I look out of the window now, into the world, as Steiner puts it so beautifully, and that goes on here all day, then it is simply what seemingly happens, without any meaning to it or anyone who could say something about it. And yet exactly that happens. Something is said about it, by a seeming I called Dirk. And that is exactly the contradiction that isn’t one, the one Zen likes to describe in beautiful images:

There is no path. Walk it!

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

So my journey on Substack seems to have un-folded into this. Less and less and less. Leaving things out and seeing what remains. Am I this? No. Am I that? No. Is there separation? Yes and no. Seemingly yes, but look for it and you won’t find it. Go ahead and look. If you find it, you might get a Nobel Prize for it. You can double-click on anything. And again and again and again. Endlessly. In both directions, zooming out and zooming in.

I can’t even say why every morning I walk to my desk as if on remote control, look into the world and write. It just happens. It is life expressing itself here. It has no goal and no purpose, no agenda and no target audience. It is a flower being a flower. You don’t have to understand it, and you can’t. Neither can I.

So I keep looking into the world, the verse humming softly in me, and I delight in the fact that I have no clue about anything, that nothing is needed, and that everything is already complete and full.

Wild & Simple – for everyone who keeps reaching for more. Here you find out how full enough is, and what grows from there.

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A few weeks ago I wrote one sentence:

The greatest skill: doing nothing when nothing needs to be done.

You answered like never before. You wrote that this is harder than it sounds, maybe the hardest thing of all. You shouted YESSSS and “Say it again for those in the back!” And more quietly, you admitted that you still have to learn it, and that you’re not sure you can.

I have good news for all of you, including those in the back:

You breathe without making it happen. You look without planning to. Your heart beats without you driving it. Doing nothing means letting happen what is happening anyway, and being there for it. That’s easier than we think.

Let me show you. Starring: a kitchen on an ordinary Sunday, your phone, a bird in a cage, a ripe peach, and an old Greek who throws away his cup. The curtain rises.

The Button

Maybe this is you right now: You’ve done everything you set out to do, the laptop is closed, and the last message is answered. A small voice asks: Okay, what’s next? Less than thirty seconds later the phone is in your hand, and now you’re reading me.

You’re fine. That’s how most people arrive here.

Imagine a kitchen on an ordinary Sunday. It’s just after four, the dishes are drying in the rack, and the laundry is hanging on the line. The kitchen is so quiet you can hear the fridge hum.

Sit down on the old wooden chair, the one with the leather seat and the round brass studs along the edge. The leather is cracked and warm, and it gives a little beneath you. While you sit, let me tell you something.

At a festival in Portugal,¹ a psychologist named Juliana told a story about a desert bird, the gray shrike. All day long he flies over his territory, catching beetles and spearing them on thorns, because the female chooses the male with the finest collection.² Now imagine putting him in a cage with two buttons. One opens the door to the desert. The other brings him a female right away, without a single beetle and without a single wingbeat. Then imagine the second button is rewired, and now it sends cocaine straight into his brain. The bird would press it, again and again, until he forgot to eat and drink. Within ten days he would be dead.³

That seems stupid to us, but it isn’t. His instinct would be doing exactly what it was made for: get the reward and spend as little energy as possible. The desert never had a button like that, so his body never learned when to stop.

The thing in your hand, the one you’re reading me on, is that button. It was built by people who are paid to make you press it two hundred times a day. Your thumb is a healthy, handsome thumb in a strange cage. Juliana drew the difference in two sentences.

Pleasure feels like: This is good, I want more.

Happiness feels like: This is good, I have enough.

Read me to the end. Today I’m the button that leads you out.

The Hand

You lean back, and the leather creaks. Less than ten seconds pass before the next voice speaks up, an older one. The balcony plants need repotting. The tax folder has been lying in the hallway for weeks. Shit, the online course you bought and never started. Is someone who sits here without producing, planning, fixing, or improving anything still worth something? the voice asks. Isn’t this irresponsible? We’ve learned to measure ourselves by movement. That’s why stillness feels suspicious, as if you had to justify it to someone.

Look at your hand as it rests on the table. Look at the lines in your palm and the small scar at the base of your thumb whose story you’ve forgotten. While you sit here, your nail grows a fraction of a millimeter. Who planned your fingerprint? Who repaired the skin over your scar? Who produces the warmth in your palm? Life made all of it, without a meeting, without a deadline, and without a to-do list. Right now it keeps making you, on a kitchen chair, on a Sunday. An old Zen verse puts it like this:

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.⁴

The productivity you worry about comes on its own. Remember the child in front of a pile of Lego, or by the sea with a bucket and spade? Nobody had to motivate her. You couldn’t have kept her in her chair. That child is still in you, waiting for something worth building. Until then, she may sit. Being busy and getting something done are two different things. More work rarely brings more output. It only feels more productive.

Your worth was there before you finished your first task, and it will still be there when you’ve finished your last.

The Fridge

After a minute you get up. You scratch your ankle, open the fridge, look inside, and close it again. You laugh at yourself. See, you think, I can’t even do this. I can’t stand a whole open afternoon.

Nobody can do nothing, not even you, and that’s the good news. Your heart beats, your lungs fill and empty, your hair grows. Try stopping one of them by willpower. Doing nothing isn’t necessarily about sitting still. It’s about taking part: giving your attention to what is happening anyway. Reaching for the fridge, scratching your ankle, and glancing out the window are part of it. That’s doing nothing in motion. Every twitch counts.

The strongest urge to do something comes exactly when you want to sit still. That urge is already the movement. Look at it with a child’s curiosity: where it sits in your body, how it pulls, where it wants to take you. There’s a lot going on in there. That movement is often where creativity comes from.

Three Doors

The treasure chest of doing nothing is huge, and everyone finds a different door into it. I’ll show you three. You can open the first one right now, the others on another day.

The first door is your skin. Sit back down on the old wooden chair, take off your socks, and put your bare feet on the floorboards. Is the wood warm? Is it cool? Feel where your heel rests, where the ball of your foot presses, and how your toes spread a little. Feel, too, how your weight sinks into the leather. The earth pulls you gently down, and the chair holds you up, without you tensing a single muscle. You’re being carried. Your breath goes on by itself, and your skin reports the warmth, the coolness, and the cushion beneath you without being asked. Exactly as it is right now, it’s all right. Stay seated like this for two minutes and let your hands do whatever they want. Watch them.

The second door is your eyes. Light a candle and set it on the table in front of you. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have sat in front of fire like this, in caves, under the stars, and in huts that smelled of smoke and resin. The flame in front of you is the same one, only smaller. Watch it flicker, duck, and rise again, and watch the blue glow at its base. Notice what moves in you while you watch. See whether you can look into the flame and solve a math problem at the same time. Only one of them works. When you catch yourself calculating or wondering what to cook tomorrow, come back to the flame. Instead of a candle, you can use a flower, a bouquet, a small Buddha figure, or a picture that grounds you and reminds you of open space.

The third door is your ears. Listen to the wind, to the rain on the window, or to the sea, if you’re lucky enough to live near it. A mantra, a song, or a singing bowl opens this door too, whichever suits you. You’ll find all of it on YouTube or Spotify: ocean waves, rain in the forest, singing bowls, and mantras, as much as you like. Here the button in your hand becomes a friend. When I started forty years ago, I had to travel far and buy cassettes for things like this, and a singing bowl was almost impossible to find. We live in rich times, and it feels good to notice that now and then.

Make it beautiful. You’re not a monk in a cold cell, unless you like it that way. Otherwise, treat yourself to an oil burner, an incense stick, a soft blanket, and the seat by the window. One reader swears by coffee, water, and a few songs when her brain needs draining. She calls them productive nothing tasks, and she’s right. You don’t have to turn your life upside down for this. Keep it short: two minutes, then a one-minute break, then once more. A little and often carries further than long and rarely. Two minutes a day sounds like nothing. To the dealers at the other end of the button, it makes you dangerous, because people who are awake are harder to steer. Your mind gets used to coming home, like a dog that eventually finds the way on its own. Your thoughts may stay. They just don’t get fed.

Maybe none of these doors fits you because you’re a born fidgeter. Then you’re in good company, because I’m one myself, and an extreme one. I first managed to sit still at nineteen. Until then I had a different door, and on many days I still use it: I do whatever I’m doing anyway, completely. I’ll tell you more about that door later.

The Kitchen Speaks

You’re still sitting on the old wooden chair, bare feet on the floorboards. The kitchen, so quiet a moment ago, begins to tell you things.

In the bathroom the tap is dripping, and every drop lands a little differently. A rectangle of afternoon light has crept across the floorboards, so slowly that you only notice when it reaches the rug. Through the tilted window, a neighbor’s radio is playing an old song you haven’t heard in years. Two peaches lie on the table. You take one and bite into it, and it’s so ripe that the juice runs down to your elbow. For a moment there’s nothing in the world but sweetness and stickiness and the sound of your own chewing.

The silence that seemed empty a moment ago is full of life. All of this was waiting for you here.

Your Sister

In the middle of this silence, your sister flashes through your mind. She’s moving next week, and you haven’t asked whether she needs help. Shit, I have to call her. Your stomach clenches, your thighs tense, and the peach almost slips out of your hand. One more second and you’d be on your feet. Stop. Stay seated for one more breath, the juice on your wrist. You’re the one everyone calls when something breaks: you fix things, you solve things, you keep everything moving. Leaving something alone feels almost irresponsible to you. If I don’t do it, says the voice, nobody will.

You breathe out. The peach is still in your hand, and you’re still in the chair. The impulse came, you noticed it, and you didn’t run after it. That was close, and it feels good.

The hardest part is recognizing when nothing needs doing. Three questions help. Is something on fire? Will it be worse in an hour than it is now? Has anyone asked you for help? If all three answers are no, the matter has time, and so do you.

Sometimes there just isn’t another move to make. A gardener doesn’t pull on the carrots to make them grow faster. When you leave something alone, you trust others with it. Maybe your sister packs her boxes on her own and is proud of it.

If you’re really needed, go, and go all the way. Layman Pang, a family man in eighth-century China, put it like this:

Miraculous power and marvelous activity: drawing water and carrying firewood.⁵

He didn’t do less than anyone else. He was there while he did it.

How can you tell whether your rest is wisdom or avoidance? Before you rush off, feel into your chest, your jaw, and your belly. If your doing nothing is avoidance, something contracts, even if it’s subtle. Your breath gets shallower, something tightens and gets smaller, and a quiet restlessness sits in your stomach. When you’re fully present, it feels different. Everything inside may move, your attention may wander, your body may rest, and nothing has to go anywhere. Your nervous system often knows before your head has found an explanation. Maybe you call. Maybe you text: I’ll get back to you tonight. Trust your body with this.

This kind of doing nothing is creative. You’re giving your unconscious permission to work.

I do things all day too. I’m just there while I do them.

The Cup

Your fingers are sticky from the peach, and the juice has dried on your wrist. You go to the sink and hold your hands under the cold stream. Without thinking, you cup them into a bowl and drink. The water tastes of metal, of your skin, and a little of peach.

Diogenes lived in Athens with almost nothing: a cloak, a bag, and a wooden cup. One day he saw a boy drinking from his cupped hands at a fountain, and he threw his cup away. A child had beaten him in plainness of living, he said.⁶ Water from your own two hands tastes better than water from any cup.

You stand there with dripping fingers and feel light without knowing why. The Brothers Grimm wrote a fairy tale about this feeling. Hans trades his lump of gold for a horse and the horse for a cow, until all he has left is a grindstone, which falls into a well. Everyone thinks he’s a fool. Hans runs home with a light heart and free from every burden.⁷

Maybe Hans knew something we’ve forgotten: you’re allowed to be, without bringing a reason. That goes for him, for you, and for me.

The Bowl

In the evening you eat something simple from a bowl, rice maybe, or soup. Afterwards you stay seated for a moment.

A young monk once came to Master Zhaozhou and said:
I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.
Zhaozhou asked: Have you eaten your rice?
Yes.
Then wash your bowl.⁸

That’s the whole teaching.

Get up and wash the bowl by hand. Warm water runs over your wrists. The curve of the porcelain is smooth under your fingertips, and the clean rim squeaks when you run your thumb over it. Put it in the rack with the others. Then dry your hands, sit back down on the old wooden chair, rest them open in your lap, and feel them tingle.

What’s next can wait. This is already whole and full.

By the way, I’m sitting too, stroking my chin.

Now put me down, screen side down. The rest of the day is yours.

¹ Juliana Estévez, “Thrill or Fulfill? The Winding Path Between Pleasure and Happiness,” talk at the Liminal Village, Boom Festival 2018: YouTube

² Shrikes really do keep larders on thorns, and females prefer males with larger ones: Reuven Yosef & Berry Pinshow (1989), “Cache Size in Shrikes Influences Female Mate Choice and Reproductive Success,” The Auk 106(3).

³ The cage with two buttons is a thought experiment by psychologist Douglas Lisle, from Douglas J. Lisle & Alan Goldhamer, The Pleasure Trap (2003). It was never run with birds. It rests on experiments with rats: given unlimited access to intravenous cocaine, about 90 percent died within 30 days. Michael A. Bozarth & Roy A. Wise (1985), “Toxicity associated with long-term intravenous heroin and cocaine self-administration in the rat,” JAMA 254(1), 81–83.

⁴ The verse comes from the Zenrin-kushu, a Japanese collection of Zen verses; it is often wrongly attributed to Bashō: Allen Ginsberg on the Zenrin-kushu

⁵ Layman Pang (Pang Yun, 740–808), Chinese lay practitioner and Zen poet: Wikipedia

⁶ The story is told by Diogenes Laërtius in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VI, 37: text and translation

⁷ Brothers Grimm, Hans in Luck, Children’s and Household Tales no. 83: Wikisource (German)

⁸ Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate), Case 7, “Zhaozhou’s ‘Wash Your Bowl’”: Zen Center of Los Angeles

I was about to write something, and then it was gone.

I’m lying on the bed, the iPhone in my hand, the cursor blinking in an empty line on the screen as I set it down to my left.

The old brown wooden door to the balcony is open. The first light is here, it’s warm, and it’s drizzling.

I close my eyes. My chest rises and falls.

Across the way a bird is singing. I know where it lives, because yesterday I filmed its aviary, a fenced-in balcony full of branches and plants. It sounds like a small parrot, free and melodic, as if it were making up each melody in the very moment it sings it. Apart from the bird, there is nothing to hear.

I don’t chase after what I’ve forgotten. I listen.

With every note my breath grows deeper. The space around me widens, slowly, like air escaping from a balloon and spreading through the whole room.

In my solar plexus something opens toward my back, and out of nowhere an energy rises and pulls at me like an invitation.

There was a time I would have looked for a method to pick up the thread again quickly.

Not today.

The Trapdoor

Now I recognize what is opening in my solar plexus toward my back: a trapdoor, slowly swinging open. Something is rising from down there.

The natural impulse would be to slam the door shut and run, to look for a method, to distract myself, to do anything at all, just not this.

What is rising is neither a feeling nor a thought nor anything else that can be clearly defined. It is old, unknown, unfinished and chaotic.

I see it and experience it as fog, and I sense that this fog stands for everything in me that isn’t smooth: the halfway, the crooked, what I can’t explain and what is always there anyway.

For most of my adult life, my response to this fog was to avoid it.

I have to be perfect. It has to be perfect. Me or it or you, someone is always not good enough, whichever way, as long as it’s not good enough.

These sentences aren’t from me, they’re only in me.

I swallowed them like pills or alcohol or any other kind of numbing, because the longing for the fog was enormous. As soon as the trapdoor opened and the fog drifted in, I either attacked it, my favorite method, or I fled, into pleasure, into numbness, or into projects.

Down there, I thought, lies the land that proves I’m not enough.

The Method

Method sounds harmless and smooth, like a sweet old lady I want to help across the street.

In the end she’s the one leading me across the street, away from the fog, and she talks the whole way:

“Here’s a technique for your restlessness. A system for your thoughts. A routine that turns the unfinished into something finished. A pill would help too, I’m sure.”

I can’t say no.

“Come on, Dirk, you don’t have to go down there. You don’t have to listen. You just have to build, you know? Could these eyes lie? Look how much experience I have.”

I spent years like this, and whenever it turned foggy I didn’t keep still, I reached for the glass, the place, the plan, the next idea I could touch and measure. It worked – for a while. I became faster, more respected, more attractive, and at the same time smoother, sadder and more full of longing.

Only now do I understand the strange part: the more I built, the further I drifted from what wants to express itself through me.

The fog was never gone; it waited patiently. If I had seen fog in you, I would have attacked you, subtly.

Every time I shoveled it over with a new method, it came seeping back through every crack at the next occasion, foreign and threatening.

The hunt itself became the driving force, its prey was the finished thing, and the more I hunted, the less could come into being.

I thought it came down to my lack of discipline and that I just had to do better, be neater, more consistent. That isn’t true. The mistake was never that I didn’t build enough, didn’t try hard enough, or lacked discipline.

The mistake was believing that building is the only movement that counts.

The Ruin in Me

Someone knocks from below on the trapdoor I have always held shut, and says: We have an appointment.

This time I don’t get up.

Very slowly the trapdoor dissolves, first at the edges, then the wood, then the opening itself, until there is no door anymore, only a below.

I fall like a feather that takes its time, and sink slowly, drifting a little from side to side, into another world.

Below me waits what rose up through the door earlier, the fog I have avoided all my adult life.

Now I am in the middle of it.

Trees emerge from the fog, dark and heavy with autumn. Behind them a steppe opens up, its grass moving, and in the middle lies a lake with the fog resting on its water. It’s a little gloomy here, and autumnal, but everything is alive.

I land softly on the shore.

My impulse is clear: if I’m here anyway, I might as well make myself comfortable. I take a deck chair, set it down by the water and lean back into the fog.

Breathe in fog. Breathe out fog. That simple.

After a while I put on my headphones, the smooth, dark blue AirPods Max.

My smoothest device, as a door into the unbuilt.

The song is The Birth and Death of the Day, by Explosions in the Sky.

The first notes are a distorted guitar, and even as they swell, the deck chair dissolves beneath me, the way the trapdoor did. First the weight I’m lying with disappears, then the lake, then the body that notices all this. What remains is neither eye nor body, only something that vibrates. A dream body, perhaps. A field of vibration.

I am no longer looking at the scene. I am the scene.

I can’t see anything yet. I am as if blind and at the same time more awake than I’ve been in a long while. And I already know what is here before it shows itself.

Then it spreads. Beneath me, out of me, into the space. And now I see it.

A Scandinavian forest, endless in every direction. There must have been a fire here. The trunks stand bare and charred, and the ground beneath them is dead. Nothing crawls, nothing moves. It smells of cold ash, and at the same time the air is wet, because fog hangs between the burned trees, heavy and thick, and never ends. There is no color, only black and white and all the grey in between. It is dark here and melancholy and familiar in a way I can’t explain, as if I had been here before.

Something crackles in the air.

Two vibrations run through me, one laid over the other. One is calm and even like the needle of a seismograph while the earth sleeps, and it carries me. The other swings so wide that the needle nearly jumps off the paper, and it pulls at me like a magnet pulls at iron. Neither cancels the other out.

Nothing here is near, nothing is far, and between me and the trees there is no longer a single meter anyone could measure.

Something grows out of this grey, again from below and again out of me: a blade of grass.

I am this blade of grass, fine and tender and without color, only form, in the middle of this dark world, and I feel myself growing. The sounds of the guitar push me back and forth, and I give way, bend further than a blade of grass should be able to bend, and come back. Every note is gasoline.

Note by note the sounds of the guitar grow denser, and the energy in the blade of grass draws in on itself. The fog begins to shimmer, and the crackling in the air grows louder. The dead trunks stand still, but it is the stillness of something holding its breath. The whole forest seems to know something I can only sense.

Minute 4:34.

I had never heard the piece before. And yet I had sensed it.

God built TNT into me.

It tears me into millions of tiny pieces, and everything turns to slow motion. The tears come at once. I expand like the Big Bang, like a firework above the black-and-white forest, and watch the particles drift slowly between the trunks, through the fog, further and further. I am the TNT, and I am the space it flies into. Everything melts together, everything dissolves.

Into the middle of this dissolving, a voice speaks. It doesn’t belong in this forest, it is distorted and speaks English, and it takes a moment before I recognize it: it’s Siri, telling me my sister is calling.

I laugh from the bottom of my heart. Another cosmic joke.

The image stayed anyway. Since then the forest is there whenever I close my eyes, still black and white, still without a single color. But it is no longer dead. Worms move in the soil, something is growing back between the trunks, there is movement everywhere.

I am no longer the blade of grass, I am a wolf. Without a single thought I run between the burned trees, savoring and exploring every millimeter with my nose and my instincts.

The forest is alive.

With my nose to the burned ground, I recognize the pull that drew me here.

I have always stopped in front of ruins, old walls, collapsed roofs, stonework with grass growing from its cracks, and every time something pulls me in.

This forest pulls the same way.

Only it lies within me.

What I attacked or numbed for most of my adult life, the crooked, the halfway, the unfinished, is not a defect. It is the source of everything that was ever truly mine.

Building and Listening

At some point I hang up, and when I unlock the iPhone, the cursor is still blinking in the empty line, as if it had been waiting.

None of what I just lived through could I have built. And yet it was two smooth devices that led me in and brought me back out, the headphones and this iPhone.

So the finished isn’t the problem. A mirror-smooth lake is beautiful, and so is a completed work. The headphones were the door, but they were not the forest.

The problem was that I only saw this one side anymore. Yin and yang are two, and I lost one of the eyes. Everything that wasn’t smooth or measurable, I treated like a malfunction that needs fixing. Not like the other half, the one that wants to be heard.

And I had it backwards. I thought first you build, and then something comes into being. But listening comes first.

And I can only listen alone. The forest was there as long as nobody wanted anything from me. It took one phone call, and the journey was over.

I’m not the first to notice this.

Kafka wrote to Felice that one can never be alone enough when writing, that there can never be enough silence around one:

“Even the night is not night enough.”

Rilke advised the young poet to love his solitude and to bear the pain it causes him. For me, that means staying seated in the fog instead of driving it away.

In 1932 Picasso told a Madrid newspaper over the phone:

“No se puede hacer nada sin la soledad.” – Nothing can be accomplished without solitude.

And Machiavelli, banished from Florence in 1513, spends his days in the village tavern, playing cards and squabbling over pennies. In the evening he takes off his dirty clothes, puts on festive ones and goes into his study. There he speaks with the ancients, and they answer him. For four hours, he writes, he feels no sorrow, forgets his poverty and does not fear death.

In How Multi-Passionate Writers Paralyze Themselves, Philipp describes what it costs when you can no longer follow someone else’s plan: “There is no crowd to protect you. You have to stand fully by yourself, and that’s pretty scary.” He calls the power that gets released creative force, and he says we already have the raw material.

This text is my addition to his, told from the inside. This is what it looks like for me when I’m alone and don’t run away. I believe the source of that force lies here, in the fog.

The Invitation

I’m not giving you a method here. You know why by now.

Why I tell you about it anyway, I learned in a sweat lodge. It was pitch-black, I was sitting bare-assed on the grass, and there I found out how healing it is when someone starts to share instead of hiding.

Right now I’m sitting here writing this text, and that is building, sentence by sentence. Only this time the material comes from below.

The next time it turns foggy in you, you don’t have to run. You’re allowed to sit down in it. I’m there when you’re there.

I always thought that down there lay the land that proves I’m not enough.

Down there is a forest.

And it’s alive.

Outside it’s grey. Raindrops run down the window. Only the steady hum of the ventilation. You wake, stretch under your down duvet, the phone on the nightstand. Your hand is faster than your head.

It already was, before you opened your eyes. The hand reached to the right on autopilot. The thumb moved across the glass, bluish light fell on your face, and for a moment you were nowhere. Not in the bed, not in the room, not with yourself. Only in the pull. “Who texted?” Photos of people you barely know. An article about something you’ll have forgotten by tomorrow. Your eyes move, but you’re not really there. You glide.

A little later you sit up. Jona is still asleep. He lies on his side. His right arm under his head. His belly rises and falls evenly. You look at him the way you look at a shop window you walk past every day. Familiar. But it doesn’t touch you anymore.

You look back at the display.

You get up and go barefoot into the kitchen.

On the stove stands the Bialetti for two cups, in black. In your mind’s eye the young man appears who sold it to you in the little kitchen shop. Your solar plexus tightens at the image.

Coffee beans into the grinder. A few turns of the crank and the coffee goes into the basket. You take a match from the box, strike it and turn on the gas.

While the coffee rises, you walk slowly to the window. Open three apps, close two, open a fourth. You don’t know what you’re looking for. Only that the looking doesn’t stop.

The coffee boils over. A soft hiss. The smell of something burnt. A brown thread running down the side of the pot. You wipe it away with the cloth, pour what’s left into the cup and take the first sip standing. You still notice the second one. Then you’re in the phone.

On the balcony the olive tree sways. You see it through the glass door. The old peeling chair. The jar with the fern. The overcast sky.

You sit down at the kitchen table. The phone next to the cup, and you scroll through a life that isn’t yours. A woman in Lisbon firing ceramics. A man who writes about silence and has seventeen thousand followers. A recipe for something you’ll never cook. Everything slides past like water over smooth stone. Nothing stays.

Jona appears in the doorway. “Morning.” You lift your head and turn toward him. “Morning.” He goes to the pot, sees the stain on the stove. Says nothing. In the next room the jazz plays quietly. He hums along and nods. A distance lies between his nodding and your scrolling, as if you were underwater in the bathtub and seeing him through the water.

You go to the bathroom, leave the phone on the kitchen table, only to go back to it three minutes later.

Under the shower you tip your head back, feel the warm water on your skin and close your eyes. For a moment time stands still.

“Shit. I didn’t answer the message. The appointment on Tuesday may have moved. I wanted to post that photo. And fuck, I only read half the article.”

The thoughts rise like a swarm of bees.

In the hallway stands the bookshelf made of wine crates. Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, the linen bookmark on page 148. In passing your hand strokes the spine. You stop, look at the book, and there’s a lump in your throat.

In the afternoon you sit in the living room on the wooden floor, your back against the wall, knees drawn up. The picture on the wall hangs a little low on the left.

A woman without a face, only hands. Open and still. Yours are not.

You open the meditation app. Seven minutes of guided silence. A voice that tells you when to breathe in. You breathe in. You breathe out. After two minutes you reach for the phone. “How much longer?” You see the notification. Then another. The meditation runs on, the voice speaking into an empty room.

In the evening you cook together. Jona cuts vegetables, slowly, evenly.

You stand next to him and move the onions in the pot with the wooden spoon. The phone leaning against the wall. Your gaze goes back and forth between pot and screen.

Jona talks about his day, something about a colleague who’s suddenly interested in jazz too. You nod. He notices that you’re nodding without listening. He doesn’t say anything about it. Not anymore.

Then your elbow knocks the oil bottle off the edge. It shatters on the tiles, loud and high, and the oil spreads slowly across the floor.

You stand barefoot in the puddle, a shard close to your toe, and for three seconds everything is still. No screen. No scrolling. Only the oil under your soles, warm and strange, and Jona’s eyes on you, as if for the first time in weeks. You look back. Then you bend down, soak up the oil with kitchen paper, say “Shit,” and the moment is over.

After dinner you sit on the sofa, feet tucked under you, switching between three screens. Laptop, phone, tablet. You don’t actually need a single one, but it pulls. Like an itch that gets worse when you scratch. But not scratching feels like an empty room you could fall into. So you keep scratching.

Jona reads. A real book. Paper. Silence. Now and then the rustle of a page turning. Between you lies less than a metre and more than either of you can name.

At some point you get up. “I’m going to bed.” “Okay.” You brush your teeth, lie down, take the phone from the nightstand. One last time. Just briefly.

The light of the screen draws shadows on the ceiling, and the last thing you see before you fall asleep is a stranger in a café in Porto who looks happy.

In the night you wake up. It’s quiet. Really quiet.

Only Jona’s breath and the steady hum of the ventilation. You lie there and feel something you can’t name. It isn’t fear. It isn’t sadness either. More an emptiness. As if you were standing in a room that was once full of furniture, and someone had carried it all out overnight without asking you.

You reach for the phone. The screen lights up. 3:47. No new messages. Nothing. And still you hold it as if it were the only thing connecting you to anything.

But today you put it down again.

And for the first time this day, in this whole long sequence of waking and scrolling and showering and cooking and scrolling again, you do something you never do: you simply stay, and notice.

The room is dark. Outside, the olive tree stands motionless in the moonlight. The leaves don’t move. You breathe. Once. Again. Something moves beneath the surface. No thought. No impulse. No idea.

A faint, old inkling that underneath everything that occupied you all day, something else lies. Something that was there the whole time while you were scrolling. Like embers that keep glowing under the ash without anyone having to blow on them.

The next morning you wake up. You go barefoot into the hallway.

Next to the Hesse lies a notebook. A Moleskine, wine-red cover, the spine gone soft from lying there. It has been gathering dust for months, and when you open it, it smells of paper and of all the years you didn’t touch it.

Beside it lies a pen. A Caran d’Ache, dark blue. Your first boyfriend gave it to you, back then, in another town, in another life, when you still believed everything would sort itself out. You take it in your hand. It lies warm between your fingers, familiar, as if it had only been waiting for you to pick it up again.

You sit down at the kitchen table. No phone next to the coffee.

Only the notebook and the pen.

You open the first page. It’s white, untouched, without lines.

You don’t yet know what you’re going to write.

You simply begin.

Wednesday. 00:10. I wake up and something is different. As if a friend had woken me and said: “Here. Mail from life.”

I listen to what’s moving inside me and notice: the name for my site is gone.

Self / Authored.

Melted? Sunk? Gone up in smoke?

I don’t know. What I do know is that something alive is surfacing:

Wild & Simple.

I feel unmoored and at the same time carried by a force that encourages me.

Two days earlier, other mail arrived. Severe back pain. Turns out: three herniated discs. I couldn’t sit anymore. That took my full attention.

I had actually planned to write about doing nothing this week. Had already started. Research, notes, sources. Rick Rubin, Jon Young, the trackers. How the active hides inside the seemingly passive.

Then I couldn’t sit anymore and did nothing 😂

Life has its own unmistakable sense of humour.

Lying there, watching, a few things become clear:

It doesn’t always have to be dramatic. You don’t have to keep tinkering with yourself. Constantly trying to grind off that last millimetre.

That’s not how I am in real life either. But the moment I’m on the internet, I put a muzzle on myself and end up with soap in my mouth.

Why? Because I’m afraid to be authentic when I get no immediate response, the way I do in real contact.

Because I’m unsure of myself. Even though I know a lot and have a lot of experience.

Because I’m moving into territory I don’t know my way around.

And because I listened to all the people out there telling you how it works. Supposedly.

You have to offer something. Solve a problem. Follow a certain structure. Otherwise it’ll never work.

Sure. But I’m not smooth. Not groomed. Not well-behaved.

And maybe you aren’t either. You’ve made something true, something real, and you don’t dare share it, because everyone out there is shouting and you think you’re not good enough. Or you start bending and polishing yourself for numbers.

That ends today. For me, at least.

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Life seems to have sent me an invitation today: drop the crutches and speak from the wilderness of my soul. Without knowing anything. Without covering myself. At the edge of the comfort zone. Which makes it wild and at the same time completely normal. Ordinary. Simple.

If you’ve been following the last few newsletters, the ones about my story, you’ll have noticed I built a genuinely beautiful workbook. To download. It was the best, most concept-free concept I’ve ever come up with, and still:

I hid behind it. I have to admit that honestly. If it turns out to be useful at some point, we can always come back to it. Life has provided an enormous toolbox.

But today a knife is enough for me to set out with you.

I want to learn. Grow. Explore. Discover. With you.

Why the name doesn’t fit anymore

Self / Authored suggests — well-meant as it was — that autonomy is something you can manufacture.

Up to a point, you can. But then comes the moment where you hand yourself over to something larger.

Humility. Devotion. Service. And at the same time patience, trust, courage.

Sounds passive. It isn’t. More on that in a later newsletter.

Make Life Yours was the subtitle. And I do wish that for you. But it suggests your life isn’t yours right now and could become yours at some future point. January 24th, 2027, ideally.

Or by Christmas.

Maybe you’re already happy in your circumstances and just haven’t found the nerve to say so. Maybe you already live a simple, modest life and think it isn’t enough. What if everything is already here, and it’s allowed to unfold at its own pace?

Or the seemingly opposite side. Too wild. Too chaotic. Too awkward. Too loud. Too much. Too cheeky. And you hold yourself back because society put the muzzle on you.

That’s what this is about. Not becoming. Being.

And a word or two about the word problem

The closer we look, the more we can see that it’s an attribution. A judgement about something that is simply there.

Something moving in a particular way in relation to something else. And that’s what we call a problem. But a problem needs someone to classify it as one.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to manufacture problems where I don’t see any.

If you’re standing right in front of me and you say, I have a problem — boom, contact. No question about it.

But maybe that’s why I find it so hard to serve this grid:

problem – solution – profit.

So why Wild & Simple?

Simple, because it doesn’t need a method. Because a lot of things are simple as long as I don’t have to understand them — until I make them complicated.

And even the apparent contradiction is part of the magic. The wilderness itself is ordinary. Ordinarily wild. Untameable. Unplannable. Unpredictable.

A simple sunrise. A simple slice of bread and butter. A simple handshake. A simple hug. A simple breath.

Simple, and endlessly wild and complex, the moment we try to understand what a breath actually is. No chance. We’ll never get further than seeming to.

Why does the time for a name suddenly run out, and another one suddenly appear? Where will the next raindrop fall? We know nothing at all. And still, life shows up the way it shows up.

That’s where my passion lives. That’s where I’m alive. Right at the heartbeat of life. Immediate, in direct experience.

That’s the ground I listen from. And look at how I can be of service.

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I’m not a guru. I’m a reminder.

For a long time I was convinced it was useful to hand people some orientation. Today I admit: no. No map. No steps, stages or concepts.

I’ve tried hundreds of times in my life to help people who are suffering. Most carry on as before, until life knocks them flat. Life is the better teacher.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, selling you the road from A to B. None of them are wrong. Every one of them can be useful for a while.

But in the end you land back in the moment with no plan. And you have to meet whatever life throws at you that nobody could have planned for.

I’m here to remind.

Remind you of the source. Look into whether such a thing exists. Ask questions. Not stop being curious. Accept, and learn to listen. Share. Be there for each other. Listen.

Remind you that there is no lack — that we create lack. Through the assumption that something is missing. Many of us learned that early. Something is always wrong. I’m wrong. Life is wrong. Something must be wrong. Today we’re grown up and allowed to check. Not focusing on taking more, but on giving more.

Remind you of the beauty around us. A child’s eyes. Even apparent misery turns into love and contact the moment I sit down and take part. A sick person. A dying person. Violence in the street. The moment I make real contact with the situation, it changes.

Remind you of your abilities. Your particular beauty. Your singularity.

Remind you of the small things we’re all too happy to overlook. A snail crossing the road. Children playing in the sand by the sea. The hundred-year-old woman who lies on a wooden bench every day, with a thin wool blanket and a couple of cushions, looking out at the world.

Remind you of what we share. What unites us as human beings? Instead of looking for what separates us. What happens when we really make contact? Open and vulnerable.

A painter would paint it. A singer would write a song. A poet a poem.

What do you make of these moments?

Ten Days on the Lakes

To give you a practical example of what that can actually look like. You come with your school class and want to spend ten days paddling with me through a northern German lake district. Your class has all kinds of characters in it. The loud ones, the quiet ones, the clowns, the painter, the piano player, the footballer.

Along the way it becomes clear: we only get anywhere together. Out here it doesn’t count who’s best at maths and who writes the finest essays. If the loudest ones set the tone, the group doesn’t move. Instead everyone brings what they’re good at. Maybe one of them can’t paddle particularly well, but can tell you all the more about the landscape.

Reality beats theory. And there are even numbers for it: Woolley and colleagues showed in Science in 2010 that a group’s intelligence has little to do with the average intelligence of its members (r = 0.19), and just as little to do with the smartest person in the room (r = 0.27). What does predict it is how evenly the talking is distributed: the more individuals dominate, the weaker the group (r = –0.41).

That contradicts everything we were taught. Get the smartest people in the room and it’ll go well. Nope.

Out here nobody is special. Or everybody is. And suddenly we build momentum as a group, sing songs together out on the water, and make good progress.

That was exactly the thought at 00:10.

That I had to be special. It isn’t true. It never was.

What comes next

I share what shows up. What surfaces. What connects. What reminds. What makes you think. When a topic crosses my path and moves me, I’ll go down the rabbit hole and explore it. Together with you.

Topics that have been moving the people I’m in contact with lately:

• Why do we find it so hard to do nothing — and is doing nothing really doing nothing?

• Contact and participating

• Patience

• Devotion

• Being in flow with life

• How much do I need to be happy, and what does happiness even mean to me? What is the difference between pleasure and happiness?

• Why humility, devotion, patience and trust are not passive.

And many more of life’s adventures.

That’s all I have today. No workbook, no freebie, no five steps.

A knife, and the willingness to set out.

Thank you for your time, and if something is holding you back — ask yourself:

What’s so important that you’re forgetting what matters most?

And if something is on your mind that you'd rather not carry around alone:

write to me. Contact, no questions asked.

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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

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

    4.79MB ∙ PDF file

    Download

    Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.

    Download

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.
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:

  

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Stay aware,
Dirk

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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.

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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.