The day I stayed

... when younger self would just have given up

For a quite long while, I’ve been posting every Friday. No, I’m not as weird as to change that, far from it — I’m already weird enough as to keep on! 😁 However, close to my first “substackiversary”, it’s time to look back and this is what I found: There were topics and weeks when it felt quite easy, almost like a breeze, to type pages full of what I wanted to explore, then again I sat there alone and clueless about what to put on the page next time.

Often, it starts with a glimpse of an idea, which reaches out to me on a winter breakfast, a lunch break on the balcony, or when I’m riding my bicycle home uphill, stopping a few minutes to eat the sandwich I just bought. Sometimes, I have planned a certain thing, but life surprises me and I find myself writing something else first.

Looking back over my shoulder, my substack has been following my feet on snowy ground, helping myself helping others, with the radio turned off, sometimes questioning life itself, which sometimes came haunting my dreams, too. Dreams of loops I was almost sure I could never break out, but slowly understood to trust the process life already had begun on me.

Defrosting thought patterns

Life going on above and beyond

Surprisingly enough for a few here, I guess, most of life happens on different places than Substack. On some of those places, I had a phone call, then plugged out some ramson leaves, cut them with my new spice scissors which I convinced myself of buying after having convinced myself of still going cycling to that DIY store, which I had been procrastinating for months or something, and painted the picture I added to my latest post.

That joy ride of Saturday continued into an easy Sunday, then: wake up to a hard Monday when I “just” wanted to finish my next app version, which got me kind of walking barefoot around some mental legacy-code potholes which only existed in my brain but inevitably stopped any “normal” thinking. (Nota bene: We’re almost in medias res, as that’s just what I learned on Tuesday evening: Fear is [one of the feelings which are, by design] not to be “fixed” just like that by logical thinking.)

Monday was fine. Socializing, good and funny, but also taxing.

Then, however…

Sleep found me late after TV, Tuesday morning alarm clock hit me like a little hammer, but time goes by, on and on, so there you are… tzooom… (the songtext itself is worth listening to!)

Let’s stay there for a moment: What does he sing: “strange and so familiar”… or in different words, exciting and relaxing at the same time. Does that sound strange or rather familiar? Anyway. Life can turn out to be that mix of things, in one week, one day, even one moment itself.

Breakfast, fresh air, vacuuming, rushing out to return some deposit and get some beer. Afternoon, I tuned into myself as I got some jitters about what was going to happen in the evening. (Yes, this is a human writing.)

I don’t know if anyone of you had had such an experience: learning something during the evening of a taxing day. I have had such an experience at university. It was only half bad in the end, even worth a post (link below this paragraph). This time: neurosensitivity webinar. Planned: one hour. It was: two hours.

Torn between time passages

The day I stayed

The sun set down across the hill,
The minutes passed, did not stay still,
With curiosity on mind,
I sat there, knocked a door to find,
a virtual one I rarely saw,
a form field red, some UI flaw,
an error message not quite clear,
no human hand to help out here.
To join a new community,
or take a train, quite naturally,
a few first steps we do alone,
and, when distressed, we’re error-prone.

To nerds who cannot estimate
Nor fix a bug at layer eight,¹
It may seem awkward what we try
or run away or shout and cry
as younger version would have done,
me-now stepped in and had some fun.

In case you didn’t know: April is neurodivergence awareness month. In biology, there are all sorts of variations on everything imaginable, including brains, one of these happening to be mine (fortunately, or even magically, connected with a few who have “it” as well), and from my point of view, I can say, creativity is clearly a tool which can cross borders inside fear-bruised brains and break fences that seemed to be higher than we are.

So I got myself an idea, jumped in and only then did I join a group, saw a text message with a seemingly unrelated idea at first glance, which my quick grasp — honed by my work in the natural sciences amidst people chattering a flurry of small remarks — allowed me to get the meaning in a matter of milliseconds, so that, instead of adding any visible weight, I replied with a chuckle saying I got you, slow enough to decide but fast enough to connect.

Mid-week poetry:
My brain, facing a full timetable last night,
then turning on a fancy light,
lost itself in a mess
of nothingness
I must confess…
it’s late at night while writing this,
some typos which I can have missed,
for which I wasn’t ever dissed.

Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

One last word today:
Sometimes, all we need is a safe place, where we feel seen, and be reassured to not come back home thirsty. So if you feel the same, then you can leave a coin here:

1. Funny reference to Layer 8, the user, which is above application layer in the OSI model, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_error#Acronyms_and_other_names.