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.
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.
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.
Dirk Ottenheym, nice to meet you—I’m Ema.
Thank you so much for giving me a ♥.
I, too, developed lumbar spinal stenosis due to an acute herniated disc
in the middle of last month, forcing me to take time off to recover.
Fortunately, after about a week, I was able to open Substack for short periods while wearing a back brace.
Almost everything else came to a halt, and I had no choice
but to let myself go with the flow of life.
In the midst of it all, I encountered people and experiences I wouldn’t normally come across, and I had all sorts of extraordinary moments that stirred a wide range of emotions.
These weren’t just feelings that can be neatly expressed in words, like gratitude; they also included more fundamental human emotions.
The insights I gained from these extraordinary experiences were profound.
Moreover, I feel that the new insights I gained while my body was unable to move freely will lead me to true happiness in the future.
No matter how many years one lives, life remains deeply fascinating.