In Summary: * Pretty steady rain falling outside and 700WLW Cincinnati Radio playing here in my room, bringing me their pregame show ahead of tonight's MLB Game between the Reds and the Rays. Plans are to stay with this station for the call of the game, then wrap up the night prayers and head to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 232.81 lbs. * bp= 151/91 (65)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:10 – 1 banana * 07:20 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 08:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 12:00 – tuna and cooked vegetables * 17:15 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:40- read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 09:30 – start my weekly laundry * 13:00 – watching a JMC Broadcasting interview: Delta Force Vet on Aliens, Demons & The War Nobody Talks About | Chuck Sellers while folding laundry * 16:45 – listening to 700WLW, Cincinnati's News Radio now broadcasting the “Inside Pitch” pregame show ahead of tonight's MLB Game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Tampa Bay Rays. Plan is to stay with this station for the radio call of tonight's game.

Chess: * 15:50 – moved in all pending CC games

Before the city had fully decided to wake up, while the gray over Elliott Bay was still soft and unfinished, Jesus stood alone at Pier 62 with His hands loosely folded and His head bowed. The water moved below Him in slow dark folds. A gull cried once and then went quiet. Far off, a ferry made a low sound that seemed to come through the mist more than through the air. The city behind Him held its lights like a tired person keeping their eyes open by force. He prayed there without hurry. He did not pray like someone trying to get through a task before the day began. He prayed as if the day itself was resting inside the Father’s hands before any person took one anxious breath, before any bus door folded open, before any phone lit up with bad news, before any heart started bracing itself for one more ordinary hurt.

The wind came in cool from the water and pressed gently against His coat. He did not move away from it. He prayed for people in apartments above coffee shops who had slept badly and would still smile before work. He prayed for the man already tying his apron in a bakery kitchen because debt never lets the clock stay still. He prayed for the woman walking out of a hospital after twelve hours on her feet, with her back hurting and her face arranged in that practiced calm people wear when they no longer expect anyone to ask how they are. He prayed for the son who had promised himself he would call his mother back and still had not. He prayed for the mother who had been forgiven by God but had not yet found a way to believe that meant anything in the rooms where her own failure still lived. He prayed for the city with the quiet patience of someone who loved it without needing it to impress Him.

When He lifted His head, the morning had brightened just enough to separate the water from the sky. He stayed a moment longer, looking over the bay and then back toward the buildings, as if listening for something beneath the traffic that had not started yet. Then He turned from the railing and began walking inland, leaving the water behind with the same unforced steadiness He had brought to it. By the time He reached the long rise toward First Hill, the streets had begun to fill with delivery trucks, early commuters, and people holding paper cups like small sources of courage.

At Harborview, the shift was changing. The place always seemed to carry more than one kind of exhaustion. Some people came into it afraid. Some left it stunned. Some wore badges and scrubs and moved with the clipped focus of people who had learned how to keep going even when the inside of them felt scraped thin. Marisol Vega came out through a side entrance near the loading area with her coat half on and her work shoes still squeaking slightly from the floors she had mopped before dawn. She had been up all night. The skin beneath her eyes had gone that bruised color tiredness gives when it stops asking permission to show itself. She stood under the awning because it looked like rain and pulled her phone from her pocket with the kind of reluctance people have when they already know a screen can wound them before it speaks.

There was a message from Sofia.

I’ll be at King Street at 6:40 tonight. I can give you ten minutes before I head back. Please don’t make it a whole thing.

Marisol read it once, then again, then a third time, as if the words might settle into something less sharp if she kept staring at them. Ten minutes. Please don’t make it a whole thing. Her daughter had not called her Mom in a message for almost a year. Sometimes Sofia used her name. Sometimes she used nothing at all. Marisol had learned not to correct that. You did not get to demand tenderness from someone you had once frightened in her own home.

She typed back, erased it, typed again, erased it again. Too eager looked desperate. Too calm looked fake. Too long would feel like pressure. Too short would feel cold. The old panic rose in her throat, the one that used to send her reaching for the wrong thing years ago when she had still been losing days at a time and telling lies with such speed she almost believed them herself. She had been clean for six years now. Six years, three months, and eleven days. The number lived in her body like something carved there. It mattered. It did not matter enough to erase what came before.

She finally sent, Okay. I’ll be there.

The message sat there after it went, small and exposed. She slipped the phone back into her pocket and pressed both hands around her paper cup even though the coffee had already gone lukewarm. She told herself to breathe. She told herself there were twelve hours between now and then. She told herself not to cry under the awning outside the hospital where people carried worse things than a text message every day. None of it helped. Her chest felt tight and hollow at the same time.

“You look like you’re trying not to fall apart in public,” a voice said gently beside her.

She turned fast. Jesus was standing a few feet away, close enough to speak quietly, far enough not to crowd her. There was nothing dramatic in the way He appeared there. No one around them stopped. No sound dropped out of the world. He simply stood in the morning like someone who belonged in it. His face held that calm attention some people spend their whole lives searching for without knowing what they are hungry for. He was not staring at her. He was seeing her. That was different, and Marisol felt the difference at once.

She gave a tired little laugh that was more air than sound. “I’m not trying not to. I’m doing a pretty average job.”

He nodded as if she had told the truth and that mattered. “That’s still trying.”

She looked away toward the street. A bus rolled past, spraying a fine line of water from the curb. “You ever get one message and the whole day changes shape?”

“Yes,” He said.

There was something in the way He answered that made the word feel larger than agreement. Marisol rubbed her thumb against the seam of the cup. “My daughter wants to see me tonight. For ten minutes.” She tried to smile, but the smile broke before it formed. “That should be good news, right?”

“It is.”

She turned back to Him, almost irritated by how quickly He had said it. “It doesn’t feel good.”

“It can still be good.”

The sentence landed inside her without forcing anything open. She stared at Him for a moment. “You don’t know me.”

“I know enough to see that you are afraid of making the wrong move before the day has even started.”

Marisol let out a slow breath. A man in navy scrubs brushed past them on his phone. Somewhere behind the doors, a metal cart rattled. She wanted to ask this stranger how he had read her that quickly. She wanted to ask why his voice made her feel less alone and more exposed at the same time. Instead she said, “I haven’t slept. I did a double shift because rent is rent, and now I have twelve hours to ruin ten minutes that haven’t even happened yet.”

He looked at her with a quiet warmth that did not pity her. “Then let the twelve hours be what they are. You do not have to live all ten minutes before they arrive.”

Marisol almost said that easy for you to say, but the words died before she spoke them because something in Him made cheap resistance feel childish. Not wrong. Just thin. She looked down at her work shoes. One lace had come loose. “I don’t want to go home yet.”

“Then don’t.”

She frowned. “What am I supposed to do all day? Wander downtown like a crazy person?”

“You could walk.”

She gave Him a sideways look. “That sounds like something someone says when they don’t have bills.”

A smile touched His mouth, small and real. “It is still a good answer.”

She should have walked away. She knew that. She was tired enough to make poor judgments, and Seattle was not a city where you followed calm strangers because they spoke like they already knew the part of you that stayed hidden. But He was not asking her to trust Him with something theatrical. He was standing beside a hospital on a gray morning and speaking with the steadiness of someone who had nowhere to prove Himself. It unsettled her in a way that made room inside her instead of shrinking it.

So she started walking.

They went downhill first, away from the hospital and toward the still-building movement of downtown. The city smelled faintly of wet pavement and roasted coffee and the cold breath of the bay coming between blocks. Marisol kept telling herself this was temporary, that she would peel away after the next corner, but every time she thought it, Jesus would say something small that felt like it belonged exactly where the hurt was.

She told Him Sofia was twenty-one now and living south of the city with a friend while finishing school. She told Him there had been months when Sofia was younger when Marisol had said she was going to work and had instead disappeared into places she never wanted to describe in full. She told Him about the night she had pawned a bracelet that had belonged to Sofia’s grandmother and then spent three days pretending she had misplaced it. She told Him about rehab, meetings, relapse, rehab again, the way shame could make even honest people start speaking like liars because they were always trying to get ahead of what others might say. She did not spill it all at once. It came in pieces between intersections, between the hiss of buses pulling up and the small silence after crosswalk signals chirped.

Jesus did not rush to answer every confession. Sometimes He let a thing be said without stepping on it. Sometimes He asked one question that opened more than advice could. “When did you decide your daughter would only ever see who you were at your worst?” He asked as they passed a man unlocking a café door.

Marisol kept walking, then slowed. “I didn’t decide it. I just know how memory works.”

“That is not the same thing.”

She shoved her hands into her coat pockets. “You break trust with a kid badly enough, memory gets final.”

“Not always.”

“You keep saying things like that.”

“Because you keep speaking as if the wound is the only thing alive.”

She looked at Him sharply. The words stung because they were too close to true. She had done so much work to stay sober, to keep jobs, to pay what she could, to stop lying, to answer calls, to show up. Yet somewhere underneath all of it she still believed that the truest thing about her had already happened, and everything good since then was just delayed evidence that she was no longer at her worst. That belief had become so familiar she rarely noticed it was there.

By the time they reached the Seattle Central Library, the morning had thickened into full day. People moved in and out through the entrance with backpacks, umbrellas, tote bags, children, laptops, tired eyes, half-finished breakfasts. Marisol stopped outside and looked up at the glass and steel above them. “I used to come here when Sofia was little,” she said. “She loved it. Said it felt like a spaceship built for books.”

“And you?”

“I liked that nobody asked questions if you stayed quiet.”

Jesus glanced toward the doors. “Do you want to go in?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what I want.”

“That is honest too.”

Inside, the air held that library mix of paper, fabric, old dust, and heat from too many people sheltering from weather or life or both. Marisol had not realized how tired she was until the warmth hit her. They moved through the first floor slowly. A man slept bent over a table with his head on folded arms. A teenager in a rain jacket was whispering angrily into an earbud. Two little boys argued over a graphic novel with the raw seriousness only children can bring to something small. Near the information desk, a woman in a library badge was trying to help an older man reset a password while also watching a toddler who had wandered six feet from his grandmother and was delighted with his own brief freedom.

Jesus noticed everything without seeming pulled thin by any of it.

Marisol noticed that.

A younger staff member emerged from a side area carrying a stack of books and wearing the expression of someone trying to remain polite while her insides were already used up for the day. She set the stack down too hard, muttered an apology under her breath, and closed her eyes for one second like she regretted even that much visible strain. Jesus walked over to the desk. Marisol stayed back, not wanting to intrude, but she watched.

“Long morning?” He asked the woman.

She gave the kind of laugh service workers give when they are trying to avoid telling the truth and telling it anyway. “You could say that.”

“What happened?”

The woman hesitated. She looked maybe twenty-eight, maybe younger because of the way worry and youth can sit beside each other without blending. “Nothing dramatic. A man passed out in one of the chairs upstairs. We called someone to check on him. He’s okay, I think. I just…” She stopped and looked down at the books. “My brother used to disappear like that. You’d find him sleeping in places he should not have been sleeping. Everybody would act annoyed first and human second. I hated that. Then today I heard my own voice sounding annoyed before anything else. I’m just tired of being around need all the time.”

Jesus did not flinch from her honesty. “Need is hard to stand near when you have your own.”

Her mouth tightened. Something in her face softened after that, not because the day had improved, but because someone had named the truth without accusing her. She nodded once. “Yeah.”

He thanked her for being there anyway. Not in the grand way people sometimes praise strangers because they are uncomfortable with pain. He thanked her like her staying mattered. When He stepped back, the woman was blinking quickly and straightening the books again with more care.

Marisol looked at Him. “You do that a lot?”

“What?”

“Talk to people like you can hear the thing under the thing.”

He met her gaze. “People speak it more than they know.”

They moved farther in. Marisol stopped near a window and watched rain begin to bead against the glass. It had started lightly, not enough to change the city, just enough to place a thin veil over the streets below. She thought about Sofia at eight years old, curled into her side on a library beanbag chair, mispronouncing dinosaur names with complete confidence. She thought about the years after that, the years when the girl had stopped leaning and started watching. Kids who live around instability learn to read rooms before adults do. Sofia had learned Marisol’s moods, her lies, the false brightness in her voice, the delay before an answer that meant her mother was deciding which version of the truth to give. Children should not have to become interpreters that young.

“I used to think if I got sober and stayed sober, eventually the past would look smaller,” Marisol said quietly.

Jesus stood beside her without speaking.

“It didn’t,” she went on. “It got clearer. That’s the part nobody tells you. You get clean and suddenly you can see what you did with both eyes open.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

She turned to Him, almost angry again because He had agreed too easily. “That’s not encouraging.”

“No,” He said. “It is not. But clarity is not punishment. It is the beginning of truth.”

Marisol swallowed. The rain on the glass had started running in crooked lines. “What if truth just proves I ruined the best part of my life?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then He said, “The best part of your life is not behind God but in front of Him.”

She looked away immediately because tears had come too fast, and she hated crying where strangers could see. A little girl ran past them carrying three books to her chest, and her grandmother called softly for her to slow down. The ordinary tenderness of that nearly undid Marisol. She pressed two fingers hard against the bridge of her nose.

They left before noon. The rain had eased to mist. Jesus led nothing. He suggested nothing like a command. He simply kept walking at a pace that allowed the day to unfold without feeling chased. They drifted toward Pike Place Market because the city naturally drew that way, and by the time they crossed into the press of people and flowers and produce and storefront windows, Seattle had become fully itself. Tourists were already angling phones toward signs. Workers moved faster than the crowd. Fish smell mixed with coffee and fried food and damp pavement. Somewhere someone laughed too loudly, and somewhere else a child cried because the day had become too much too early.

Marisol almost said she wanted to leave. Crowds made her feel visible in the wrong way. But then she saw a flower stand bursting with color against the gray day and remembered that Sofia used to stop dead in front of flowers as a child, no matter where they were going. Not because she was especially sentimental. She just liked bright things with no apology in them.

“I should bring something,” Marisol murmured.

“For your daughter?” Jesus asked.

“She’ll probably hate that.”

“Do you want to bring something?”

Marisol stared at the buckets of tulips and ranunculus and small white blooms she could not name. “I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore which things are loving and which things are me trying to manage how I’m seen.”

Jesus looked at the flowers too. “Then do not buy something to manage her. Buy something because love is still allowed to have hands.”

That sentence sat in her chest. She stepped closer to the stall. The woman working there was older, maybe in her sixties, wrapped in a dark sweater with a pencil tucked into her hair. She had the alert, practical face of someone who had spent years reading customers in seconds. She watched Marisol study the flowers and waited without pushing.

“My daughter’s meeting me tonight,” Marisol said finally, embarrassed by how raw her own voice sounded. “We haven’t been good in a while.”

The vendor nodded as if that was a language she knew. “Then don’t get the perfect arrangement. Perfect is suspicious. Get something that feels like you mean it.”

Marisol laughed in spite of herself. “That is strangely helpful.”

The woman handed her three stems of pale yellow tulips and tucked in one deep red ranunculus. “These. Enough to say I came with something in my hand. Not enough to say I rehearsed the moment.”

Marisol looked up. “You’re good at this.”

“No,” the woman said, glancing toward another customer reaching for change. “I’m old. That’s different.”

Marisol paid, then stepped aside. She stood holding the small wrapped bouquet like it was more fragile than flowers had any right to be. Jesus watched her with a softness that made her think He cared about this tiny choice, not because flowers were important, but because frightened people often reveal themselves through small acts first.

They continued through the market. Near a produce stand, a young man in an apron dropped a crate hard enough to bruise the fruit inside, then swore under his breath. An older man beside him snapped, “Maybe wake up before you come to work tomorrow.” The younger man muttered back something sharp, and the older man’s jaw set in that familiar adult way that says I have no room left for your pain because mine is already eating me alive.

Jesus stopped.

He did not step in like someone seizing a scene. He simply bent, picked up an apple that had rolled beneath the edge of the stand, and handed it to the younger man first. Then He looked at the older one and said, “You are both more tired than this argument.”

The older man blinked as if he had been interrupted by his own conscience. The younger one stared at the apple in his hand. Neither answered. Jesus went on, “You do not have to use each other as the place where the morning breaks.”

No lecture followed. No crowd gathered. The two men stood there with the sudden silence that comes when anger gets named as grief wearing work clothes. By the time Marisol and Jesus moved on, the older man was quietly telling the younger one to go wash up and take five minutes.

Marisol shook her head. “How do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Making people stop pretending.”

He glanced at her bouquet. “You stopped pretending hours ago.”

“That’s different.”

“Only because it feels like your own.”

They found a place to sit where the sound of the market softened but never disappeared. Marisol had not eaten since sometime around three in the morning, so Jesus bought bread from a counter nearby and split it with her as if the gesture needed no explanation. She was too hungry to resist out of pride. The bread was warm enough in the middle to make her unexpectedly emotional again, which annoyed her. There should have been a limit to how vulnerable exhaustion could make a person.

She told Him then about the worst night with Sofia. Not the broad version she gave in meetings. The real one. Sofia had been thirteen. Marisol had promised to pick her up from a school music event. She had meant to. She had even written it on the back of an envelope and put the envelope in her bag. Then she had vanished into a binge so fast and stupid it barely deserved the word choice. Sofia had waited outside the school nearly an hour before a teacher finally called Marisol’s sister. When Marisol came home the next day, ashamed and sick and defensive, Sofia was sitting at the table with her backpack still on like she had forgotten to take it off. The girl had not yelled. That was the part that stayed with Marisol. She had only looked at her mother with a face too old for thirteen and said, “I know when you’re gone even if you’re standing here.”

Marisol had never gotten fully past that sentence. Sometimes she heard it while washing dishes. Sometimes while making up a bed. Sometimes while walking to work before sunrise. It lived in her like a nail.

When she finished, Jesus did not rush to cover the story with comfort. He let the grief of it stand between them. At last He said, “And yet your daughter texted you.”

Marisol stared at Him. “That’s what you take from all that?”

“It is what is still living in the story.”

She looked down at her hands. Her knuckles were rough from cleaning chemicals and winter air. “You really think a text message means something that big?”

“I think ten minutes can hold more mercy than fear expects.”

The afternoon wore on. The sky never cleared, but the city gained that silver brightness rainy places sometimes hold without becoming cheerful. By late day they were walking south again, toward King Street Station. The closer they got, the quieter Marisol became. The bouquet had started to feel too warm in her hand from being held so long. She kept checking the time and then hating herself for checking. At one light she almost turned around and said she could not do it. At another she thought about texting Sofia that something had come up. Cowardice was always most persuasive right before the moment that could expose it.

Jesus never grabbed her arm. He never cornered her with holy language. He simply stayed near.

At the station, the evening rush had begun its slow gathering. People rolled suitcases over the floor. Announcements echoed overhead. The building held that strange mix of motion and waiting that train stations always keep, as if departures and delays are only different words for the same ache. Marisol stood just off to one side of the main flow, clutching the flowers and trying not to scan every face too hard.

“She may not come,” she said, not looking at Him.

“She may.”

“She may look at me like I’m a problem she promised herself she would handle quickly.”

“She may.”

Marisol let out a brittle laugh. “You’re not helping.”

He turned toward her then, and His voice dropped into that simple weight she had not been able to shake all day. “I am not here to help you control the moment. I am here to help you stand inside it without leaving.”

Something in her broke open at that. Not publicly. Not in a dramatic way. But enough that she stopped trying to arrange herself into a woman who deserved to be seen. She just stood there breathing through the fear, tired to the bone, carrying flowers that suddenly looked painfully hopeful in her hand.

A train announcement sounded above them.

People shifted.

A family passed with backpacks and an exhausted child half asleep on her father’s shoulder.

Then, through the movement near the entrance, Marisol saw her.

Sofia was taller than she had been the last time they met, though that was not really true. It was only that distance had a way of changing how a mother saw her own child. Her hair was pulled back. Her face looked older in the serious ways young faces sometimes do when life has asked them to become careful too soon. She wore a dark jacket and held her phone in one hand as if it were both shield and habit. She stopped just inside the station and looked around once. Her expression was guarded, not hard. That hurt more.

Marisol’s first impulse was to wave too quickly, smile too brightly, start talking before the distance had even closed.

Jesus did not touch her, but she felt His presence beside her like a hand laid over panic.

So Marisol stayed still.

Sofia’s eyes found her.

And for one suspended second, with the station noise carrying on around them and the whole city still moving outside, mother and daughter looked at each other across the space that all the missed years had made.

Sofia started walking toward her without hurrying. Marisol had imagined this moment in too many wrong ways all day. In some versions her daughter came in angry and sharp. In others she came in soft and ready. The real thing was harder because it was simpler. Sofia just looked careful. That care had cost her something. Marisol felt it before a word was spoken.

“Hi,” Sofia said when she reached her.

Her voice was level. Not warm. Not cruel. Just level.

“Hi,” Marisol said back.

She did not step forward. She did not reach for her. Every instinct in her wanted to repair the distance with motion, but something steadier held her still. The flowers suddenly felt foolish in her hand. “I brought these,” she said, and then immediately hated how awkward it sounded. “You don’t have to take them. I just…”

Sofia glanced at the tulips and the single deep red flower wrapped in paper. A faint change came over her face, almost too small to read. “They’re nice.”

Marisol held them out. Sofia took them, more out of politeness than affection, but she took them. That mattered enough to make Marisol’s throat tighten.

There was a pause after that, the kind that can either become another failure or become the narrow doorway people finally choose to walk through. Jesus stood just behind and to the side, not withdrawing, not inserting Himself. Marisol felt the quiet strength of His nearness and understood that this was the moment He had meant. Not the moment she controlled. The moment she stayed in.

“You said ten minutes,” Marisol managed.

Sofia nodded. “Yeah. My train boards later than I thought. I’ve got maybe twenty now.”

The sentence should not have felt like grace, but it did. Marisol looked at her daughter’s face and saw the child still faintly living inside the woman, saw the old hurt still doing its careful work there too, and for one dangerous second she almost rushed into apology before listening. Old guilt loves monologues because monologues let us manage what others get to say. Jesus had been cutting that instinct down all day.

So Marisol asked, “Do you want to sit somewhere?”

Sofia looked around the station. “Not in here.”

They crossed the street and found a bench near the edge of the plaza where the evening air smelled faintly of rain and train brakes and the city cooling into night. Cars moved past without tenderness. People came and went carrying bags, headphones, plans, fatigue. Seattle did what cities do. It kept going while something fragile tried to live inside it.

For a few seconds neither of them spoke.

Then Sofia said, “I almost didn’t come.”

Marisol nodded once. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I would’ve almost not come too.”

That surprised Sofia enough to make her look over. “Why?”

Marisol gave a tired breath of a laugh. “Because I’ve spent most of the day afraid I’d ruin it before it started.”

Sofia looked back down at the flowers resting across her lap. She turned the stems once in her hand. “That sounds about right.”

The old shame rose again, but this time Marisol did not let it grab the whole conversation. “I’m not going to fight you tonight,” she said. “I’m not going to explain away anything. I’m not going to act like time by itself fixed something I broke.”

Sofia kept her eyes on the flowers. “Then why are we here?”

Marisol opened her mouth and found that the prepared words she had been building all day were suddenly gone. That was terrifying. It was also cleaner. “Because you reached out,” she said finally. “And because I wanted to see you. Not to convince you of anything. I just wanted to see you.”

Sofia let that sit between them. “I’m thinking about moving.”

Marisol felt her whole body go alert. A year ago she would have responded badly. She would have made the moment about herself and called that honesty. She would have said things like Why didn’t you tell me or I’m your mother or You can’t just disappear, as if her title had not once been the very thing Sofia had needed distance from.

Instead she asked, “Where?”

“Portland maybe. Or farther.” Sofia rubbed her thumb against the paper around the bouquet. “A friend of mine has an aunt in Eugene with a place opening up this summer. Nothing’s decided. I just… I wanted to tell you before I did something. Not after.”

Marisol swallowed. The sentence cut in two directions. Sofia was giving her a kind of respect. Sofia was also naming how little certainty existed between them. “Thank you for telling me.”

Sofia gave her a quick look, like she had expected more resistance than that. “That’s it?”

“I don’t know what else I have the right to say first.”

Sofia’s expression changed again, more noticeably this time. It was not softness yet. It was the beginning of her guard having to reconsider what it was guarding against.

“You always say weirdly decent things now,” Sofia said. “It’s confusing.”

Marisol almost smiled. “I say a lot less now. That helps.”

A faint breath of humor moved between them and disappeared, but it left something lighter in its wake.

Sofia leaned back against the bench and stared toward the station windows. “I didn’t call you here just to tell you I might move.”

Marisol waited.

“I’ve been mad at you,” Sofia said. “You know that.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been more than mad.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t even know if mad is the right word anymore. Sometimes it just feels like there’s this wall in me where you’re concerned. Like I don’t have to think about everything if I keep the wall there.” She paused, jaw tightening. “And then something stupid happens. Somebody at school forgets to show up for a group project, or some guy says he’ll call and doesn’t, or I hear someone slurring words in the grocery store, and all of a sudden I’m thirteen again. I’m waiting outside in the dark. Or I’m at the apartment listening for the way your key hit the lock because I could tell from that sound whether I needed to be invisible.”

Marisol closed her eyes for one second. The air felt cold in her lungs. She did not defend herself. She did not say I know because nobody knows another person’s memory by saying they know. She just listened while her daughter laid down the truth she had carried for years.

Sofia kept going now that she had started. “I hate that you still affect me. I hate that I can be doing fine and then something tiny happens and it all comes back. I hate that people talk about forgiveness like it’s clean. Like you decide one day and then your nervous system magically joins in.”

Marisol turned toward her fully. “It isn’t clean.”

Sofia looked at her hard. “No. It isn’t.”

Rain began again, so light at first it barely registered. People passing by lifted hoods or walked faster. The city around them went on conducting its small transactions of movement and obligation. Jesus was near enough for Marisol to feel but far enough to leave the bench to them. She had the strange sense that He was guarding the moment not by controlling it, but by refusing to let fear own it.

“I don’t need you to forgive me tonight,” Marisol said quietly. “I don’t need you to promise me anything. I’m not asking for that.”

Sofia’s shoulders dropped a little, and Marisol realized how braced her daughter had been against exactly that demand. “Then what are you asking?”

Marisol looked down at her hands. They trembled slightly from fatigue and the effort of not reaching for control. “I’m asking you to hear one thing. Just one. And then you can leave with it or not.”

Sofia gave a small nod.

“When I was in that life,” Marisol said, “I told myself lies that helped me survive being who I was. Not because they were true. Because they kept me from seeing the whole truth at once. I told myself I loved you even when I wasn’t acting like it, and I used that sentence to excuse things love never excuses. I told myself you were resilient, like that made it fine for you to absorb what should have crushed me instead. I told myself I had time. More than anything, I told myself I had time. I was wrong about all of it.” Her voice shook, but she kept going. “The clearest thing I can tell you is this. You were never hard to love. You were not too much. You were not the reason I was broken. You were a child, Sofia. You were a beautiful child, and I failed you while you were loving me the best way you knew how.”

Sofia did not move for several seconds. Her face had gone still in that dangerous way stillness sometimes precedes tears or anger. Marisol forced herself not to fill the silence. Her chest hurt. The rain tapped softly against the bench and darkened the concrete beneath their shoes.

Finally Sofia said, very quietly, “Nobody says it like that.”

“Then they should.”

Sofia laughed once, but it cracked in the middle. She pressed her lips together and looked away. “You don’t get to suddenly be good at this.”

“I know.”

“That’s frustrating.”

“I imagine so.”

Sofia shook her head, and when she looked back there was water in her eyes she had not agreed to. “Do you know what the worst part was?”

Marisol almost answered yes and stopped herself. “No.”

“That I kept hoping anyway.” Sofia stared down at the tulips now, blinking hard. “Every time. Every school thing. Every promise. Every night you said you’d be back. I hated myself for hoping after a while, because it made me feel stupid. But I kept doing it. Kids do that, I guess. They keep handing their hearts back to people who drop them.”

Marisol bent forward and pressed both hands against her knees just to keep herself from breaking into pieces on the bench. The sentence did not accuse more than it revealed. That made it worse. “You were not stupid.”

“I know that now.” Sofia’s voice softened. “I didn’t then.”

Marisol turned and looked at her daughter with the helpless love of someone who knew too late what she had not protected. “I’m so sorry.”

Sofia did not answer right away. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost some of its edge. “I believe you are.”

They sat with that. It was not absolution. It was not a repaired history. It was one true sentence laid carefully between them, and it changed the air enough for both of them to breathe.

After a while Sofia asked, “How long have you been sober now?”

“Six years, three months, and eleven days.”

Sofia looked at her. “You still count every day?”

“Not because I’m proud,” Marisol said. “Because I remember what it costs to stop.”

Sofia nodded slowly, like that answer made more sense to her than a celebratory one would have. “Aunt Elena says you never miss meetings.”

“I try not to.”

“She said you clean at the hospital now.”

“I do.”

“She said people there like you.”

Marisol gave the smallest shrug. “I show up. It turns out that matters more than I used to think.”

Sofia looked past her toward the station again. “It does.”

The rain thickened just enough that they had to move. They crossed under an overhang and stood there with strangers who were sheltering for a minute before continuing wherever they had planned to go. One of those strangers was an older man with two grocery bags and a limp that forced him to set one bag down every few feet. He was trying to keep the paper from splitting in the damp. Jesus stepped forward before Marisol even noticed Him move, took one of the bags without fanfare, and asked where the man was headed.

“Just over to the bus stop,” the man said, defensive in the way people get when help finds them before they ask for it.

Jesus nodded as if the answer were enough. “Then I’ll walk with you.”

The man squinted at Him, looked at the bag in His hand, and then at the bus stop across the street. “Suit yourself.”

It was such an ordinary exchange that Sofia stared. Marisol did too. There was something about seeing Jesus in the smallness of that moment, carrying a damp grocery bag beneath a station overhang while traffic hissed past, that struck both of them deeper than grandeur would have.

“He’s with you?” Sofia asked quietly.

Marisol looked at Jesus, then back at her daughter. She could have said I met Him today and meant one thing. She could have said yes and meant another. Instead she answered with the truth that felt truest. “Yes.”

Sofia frowned, but not because she was mocking her. It was the look of someone sensing that something strange and beautiful might be standing nearby and not yet knowing what to call it. “Who is he?”

Marisol felt a tremor go through her, not from fear now, but from recognition that had been building all day beneath every step and word and silence. She had known it before she could say it. She had felt it before she could bear to name it. The calm authority. The way nothing hidden stayed fully hidden near Him. The way He moved toward shame without flinching and toward pain without feeding on it. The way His sentences seemed simple until they opened like doors inside the heart.

“He’s Jesus,” she said.

Sofia looked at her for a long second, ready perhaps to dismiss that, yet unable to do it because Jesus was at that moment reaching into His own pocket to hand the older man bus fare he pretended not to need. Nothing about Him looked interested in spectacle. He simply looked more real than the rest of the evening.

“That’s not funny,” Sofia said softly.

“I’m not joking.”

Sofia turned back toward Him. “Why would He be here?”

Marisol felt the answer before she formed it. “Because He doesn’t miss quiet things.”

The sentence hung there between them. Sofia’s face shifted again, and Marisol saw the child in her for just a second, the child who had once believed that God saw everything and had then struggled to know what to do with all the things He seemed not to stop.

Jesus came back after seeing the man to the bus stop. He stood under the overhang with them as if the rain had never been an interruption. Sofia met His eyes directly this time, wary and drawn at once. “If you’re really Him,” she said, “then you know I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Yes,” He said.

That was all. No insistence. No demand for immediate belief properly arranged. Just yes.

Sofia folded her arms, more to hold herself than to close herself off. “My mom says weirdly true things around you.”

Jesus smiled faintly. “She has done that without Me too. She only believes she has not.”

Sofia looked down to hide a sudden emotion that nearly became a laugh. Marisol had not heard anyone speak of her with that kind of mercy in years. Not indulgence. Mercy. A telling of the truth that did not pin her forever to the worst of it.

“My train leaves in thirty minutes,” Sofia said after a while.

Jesus nodded.

Sofia looked at her mother again. “There’s a tea place near Uwajimaya I like. I was going to stop there before heading back. You can come if you want.”

The invitation was so modest that it would have looked small to anyone else. To Marisol it felt like the sky opening one careful inch. “I’d like that.”

So the three of them walked south and then west into the Chinatown–International District, where the evening lights were coming on in windows and signs and the rain had polished the sidewalks dark. The neighborhood held that dense, layered life some parts of a city keep better than others. People were closing shop, opening shop, carrying boxes, locking gates, greeting friends, ignoring strangers, arguing softly near doorways, checking watches, smoking under awnings, hurrying home. Nothing in it announced itself as sacred. That was why the sacredness of it mattered.

Inside the tea shop the windows fogged at the corners from warmth. There were only a few tables open. Sofia chose one near the back. Jesus sat with them as naturally as if He had been expected there from the start. They ordered drinks, and while they waited, Sofia turned the paper-wrapped bouquet slowly between her hands.

“I still don’t know if I forgive you,” she said to Marisol.

Marisol nodded. “You don’t have to know tonight.”

“I’m not saying that to punish you.”

“I know.”

“I’m saying it because I’m tired of pretending I’m further along than I am.”

Marisol looked at her daughter and saw not harshness but integrity. “That’s more honest than most people ever get.”

Sofia’s eyes flicked to Jesus, as if checking whether He approved of that answer. He did not give approval like a teacher at a desk. He gave something better. Presence.

“What if I don’t ever get all the way there?” Sofia asked, and though she was looking at Marisol, the question bent toward Him.

Jesus answered. “Forgiveness is not the lie that the wound was small. It is the refusal to let the wound become your only future.”

Sofia was quiet after that. The drinks arrived. Steam rose between them. Outside, headlights passed in blurred bands through the wet window. Inside, cups touched saucers, milk hissed somewhere behind the counter, and someone near the front laughed at a story that had nothing to do with any of them.

“My counselor says something kind of like that,” Sofia said eventually. “Not like that. Less… whatever that was.”

Jesus took no offense at being translated into counseling language. “Then she is helping you.”

Sofia wrapped both hands around her cup. “I’ve been afraid that if I let the wall down, even a little, everything from before gets to rush back in.”

Marisol waited again instead of pleading.

Jesus said, “Walls keep pain out until they keep life out too.”

Sofia stared into her tea. “That sounds true enough to be annoying.”

This time she did laugh, properly, and Marisol felt the sound like sunlight breaking through cloud after days of gray. Not because it solved anything. Because it existed.

They talked after that in a way they had not in years. Not without difficulty, but without the old performance. Sofia asked practical questions first, the kind people reach for when the deeper ones still feel too exposed. What was Marisol’s schedule like now. Did she still live in the same apartment. Was Aunt Elena still helping her with taxes because numbers made her panic. Marisol answered plainly. She did not embellish stability. She did not hide struggle. She did not angle every answer toward proving herself changed. Slowly the conversation widened.

Sofia admitted school was harder than she let on. She said she was tired all the time. She said everyone her age seemed either wildly certain or expertly pretending. She confessed that sometimes she feared becoming her mother and sometimes feared becoming so guarded against that possibility that she would never let anyone close enough to damage her at all. Marisol listened with a tenderness that had ripened through grief. She did not rush to reassure away what ought to be heard fully.

“I used to think adulthood would feel more solid,” Sofia said, eyes on the cup in her hands. “But half the time it just feels like everyone’s improvising with nicer shoes.”

Jesus smiled. “That is often accurate.”

Sofia smiled back before she could stop herself. When she noticed, she looked startled, as if her own face had betrayed a loyalty she had not consciously granted. Then the surprise passed, and she let the expression stay.

At one point Marisol said, “I kept every drawing you made as a kid.”

Sofia looked up sharply. “You did not.”

“I did.”

“Even the horrible horse one?”

Marisol actually laughed then, the sound rusty from disuse in moments that mattered. “Especially the horrible horse one. It looked like a haunted dog.”

Sofia covered her mouth, half scandalized and half delighted. “You told me it was elegant.”

“I lied for art.”

It was such a small exchange, but it did what healing often does when it first becomes visible. It arrived not as a speech but as shared recognition. A real memory. A sentence not built entirely around damage. Marisol could feel how careful it still was. She could also feel that careful was no longer the same thing as closed.

Time kept moving anyway. It always does. Sofia checked her phone and exhaled. “I have to go in a few minutes.”

Marisol felt the ache of that without panicking now. A few minutes was not abandonment. A few minutes was a few minutes.

They rose from the table and stepped back outside. The rain had almost stopped. The air smelled washed and metallic and alive. They walked back toward the station more slowly than before, as if none of them wanted to force the ending into a shape it did not have to take.

Near the entrance, Sofia stopped. She still held the flowers. Some of the petals had loosened slightly from the damp, but the bouquet had survived the evening better than Marisol expected.

“I’m not promising anything huge,” Sofia said. “I don’t want to do that thing where a night feels meaningful and then tomorrow I’m expected to become a different person.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Marisol said.

Sofia nodded. “But I can text you this week.”

Marisol let out a breath that shook. “I’d like that.”

“And if I do move, I’ll tell you before I go.”

“Thank you.”

Sofia looked at her for a moment, then stepped forward and hugged her. It was not long. It was not the full, falling-into-you embrace of a child running home. It was the hug of a young woman testing whether her heart could tell the truth without lying to itself. Marisol held her carefully, like something both beloved and free. When they stepped apart, both of them had tears they were not pretending otherwise about.

Then Sofia turned to Jesus. She did not seem fully comfortable doing that, but sincerity is often uncomfortable at first. “I don’t know what I believe yet,” she said.

He met her with the same steady warmth He had carried since the morning. “I know.”

“But if you really are who she says…”

“Yes.”

Sofia looked down, then back up. “Then don’t let me become hard.”

The city noise kept moving around them. A train horn sounded somewhere farther off. People passed carrying their own burdens and evenings and names. Jesus answered her simply. “Keep bringing Me the places that want to close.”

Tears slipped down Sofia’s face then, quick and embarrassed. She brushed them away with the heel of her hand. “Okay,” she whispered, though it sounded less like an agreement and more like the first breath after one.

She boarded a few minutes later. Marisol and Jesus watched from the platform side as she found a seat by the window. Before the train pulled away, Sofia lifted one hand in a small awkward wave. Marisol lifted hers back. There were no promises in that wave, no guarantees, no rewritten history. There was something better than false certainty. There was truth still choosing not to leave.

When the train disappeared, Marisol stood very still.

The station grew ordinary again in the way places do once a moment has passed through them and left no visible sign except inside the people who lived it. She wiped her face and let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I thought if tonight mattered, it would feel bigger.”

Jesus looked at her with quiet kindness. “It was bigger.”

She glanced at Him. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” He said. “You expected thunder. Mercy often comes closer than that.”

They began walking again without urgency. The city had entered that hour when lights matter more than daylight and every person seems to be heading either toward rest or away from themselves. They moved north through Pioneer Square, where brick buildings held the damp evening and streetlamps turned the wet sidewalks amber. At Waterfall Garden Park the small cascade was still running, tucked behind its walls like a secret the city had agreed not to ruin. Jesus paused there, and Marisol paused with Him.

The water fell with a sound gentler than the day had been. She listened to it and felt the shape of the hours settling inside her. Harborview. The library. The market. The station. The tea shop. The train. None of it had fixed her life. None of it had erased the years. But something had shifted lower than emotion. She no longer felt like a woman spending every good day trying to outrun the truest thing about her. The truest thing about her was no longer only what she had done wrong. The truest thing was that Jesus had walked beside her through the city without recoiling, without flattering, without letting her hide, and without leaving.

“I kept thinking all day that if I made one wrong move, I’d lose her again,” Marisol said.

Jesus watched the falling water. “You are not holding your daughter together with perfect sentences.”

She let that settle. “Then what am I doing?”

“Learning to love without using fear as a guide.”

Marisol stood there in the damp evening and felt how long fear had been making her choices in the costume of wisdom. It had told her when to speak, when to apologize, when to stay distant, when to overdo tenderness, when to prepare for rejection before anyone had rejected her. Fear had made her life feel responsible. It had also made it cramped.

They left the park and kept walking west until the air changed again and brought the water back into the night. By the time they reached the waterfront, the city had thinned. The day’s noise had not vanished, but it no longer pressed at the edges of every thought. Ferries moved across black water lit by scattered reflections. The wind off Elliott Bay had sharpened. Marisol tucked her hands into her coat and looked out where the lights ended.

“I don’t want to forget this tomorrow,” she said.

“You will not keep it by gripping it,” Jesus answered.

She smiled faintly. “There you go again.”

He looked at her. “What do you think you must remember?”

Marisol was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “That shame is loud and mercy is not. That doesn’t make shame more true.”

His face softened. “Yes.”

She looked down at the boards beneath their feet, then back at the water. “And that my daughter isn’t the only one who kept hoping.”

“No,” He said. “She is not.”

The sentence moved through her slowly. She had thought hope belonged to the innocent. She had thought those who had done the damage were left mostly with regret and gratitude if they were lucky. But Jesus had spent the day showing her something else. Repentance was not the death of hope. It was hope learning to tell the truth. She could live from there. Not easily every day. Not cleanly at once. But truly.

They walked a little farther in silence. At last Marisol stopped. She knew with a strange certainty that the day was ending, not because there was nothing left to say, but because enough had been given for one day and anything more would begin to feel like possession. She turned to Jesus with the humility of someone who had been found more completely than she knew how to deserve.

“Will I see You tomorrow?” she asked.

He smiled, and in that smile was both nearness and something far beyond the city around them. “I will be no farther than truth.”

Tears rose again. She did not fight them. “I don’t even know how to thank You for today.”

“You already are.”

She let out a small breath, half broken, half healed. “What do I do now?”

“Go home,” He said. “Sleep. Wake. Tell the truth. Stay near Me. Let small mercies remain small when they are small. They are not less holy for it.”

Marisol nodded. The answer was so plain it almost hurt. She had spent years imagining that change would come dressed like drama because the life she had wrecked had been dramatic in all the wrong ways. Jesus was handing her something quieter and harder and better. A faithful tomorrow. Then another. Then another. Not glamorous. Not dazzling. Just real.

She looked away for a second, because the city lights on the bay had blurred through tears. When she looked back, He had moved a few steps away, not vanishing, not performing mystery. Just giving her the dignity of choosing to go on in what He had already given.

Marisol stood there for a while after that, feeling the cold, hearing the water, breathing with less panic than she had at dawn. Then she turned and started toward the bus stop that would take her home. She did not feel finished. She felt alive. There was a difference.

Jesus remained by the water as the night deepened over Seattle. The ferries moved. The wind pressed lightly at His coat. The city that had carried so many hidden burdens through the day now glowed in windows and towers and streets, each light holding someone’s fatigue, someone’s longing, someone’s private war, someone’s hope they would barely admit aloud. He looked toward the buildings, toward the hospital on the hill, toward the library glass catching the last of the evening, toward the market settling into night, toward the station where a young woman sat by a train window with flowers on her lap and thoughts she could no longer keep entirely walled off.

Then, in the quiet at the edge of the water, He bowed His head and prayed.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Dance tonight, in this burning night. Queen of the night, star of my eyes, Wake me up with your gaze. Take my soul, Take my heart, Take my mind, love is Blind.

20:29GMT Heya! A couple of days ago, I discovered an artist called 'Beklis Ayon'. There is an accent on the 'o', but my keyboard doesn't have that. Her art is very interesting to me, it struck me when I first saw it in the Tate modern because of just how creepy and unique it is, I feel like I really understand her message. There's something personal that strikes me as I research her more and more, the aura. Maybe it's the eyes. I get told all the time how creepy and awkward my eyes are, how they bulge too much and how if I focus too hard, they look scary. Maybe it's the resemblance I feel towards Princess Sikan. Or maybe, I've had too much wine. I have to go back to hell soon, wish me luck!

-TSWR (PS, don't read HONDA BABY on ao3)

Ich muss gestehen, dass ich bei diesem Text lange gezögert habe, wo ich anfangen soll.

Die Worte fehlen nicht. Sondern weil das, was ich eigentlich sagen will, so einfach ist, dass ich Angst habe, es durch zu viel Reden kaputtzumachen.

Also mache ich es kurz und stelle die These gleich an den Anfang: Die Leere, die sich bei vielen Menschen irgendwann meldet, nachdem sie materiell angekommen sind, aber innerlich die Leere. Sie ist der Nullpunkt, an dem das andere, tiefere Leben überhaupt erst anfangen kann. Der Rest dieses Textes ist eigentlich nur die lange Version dieser einen Zeile.

Ich schreibe das aus zwei Gründen.

Erstens: Ich habe diese Leere selbst erlebt. In verschiedenen Formen, über längere Zeit. Und ich habe lange gebraucht, um zu verstehen, was sie eigentlich wollte. Ich habe sie zuerst bekämpft. Dann versucht, sie wegzuoptimieren. Dann mit Projekten zugedeckt. Und irgendwann habe ich aufgehört und das war der Moment, in dem sich etwas verändert hat.

Zweitens: Ich lese seit vielen Jahren Texte, die genau über diese Sache reden. Zwei davon will ich hier einweben, weil sie mir wirklich geholfen haben. Der eine ist ein Korpus namens Das Gesetz des Einen, eine Sammlung eigenartiger Gespräche aus den frühen 1980er Jahren. Der andere ist Laozis Tao Te King, das rund 2.500 Jahre älter ist. Beide sagen im Kern dasselbe. Sie sagen es nur anders.

Ich nenne die Quellen direkt, weil ich finde, man sollte nicht um sie herumschleichen. Wenn ein Gedanke trägt, trägt er auch, wenn man weiß, wo er herkommt.

Warum überhaupt “Nullpunkt”

In der Physik ist der Nullpunkt nie wirklich Null.

Das wissen die meisten, die mal bei irgendwas mit Quantenmechanik vorbeigeschaut haben. Ein System kann theoretisch bis zum absoluten Nullpunkt heruntergekühlt werden, und trotzdem bleibt da noch Energie. Nullpunktenergie nennt man das. Es ist kein Messfehler und kein Artefakt, es ist eine Eigenschaft der Realität selbst: Auch in der absoluten Ruhe ist noch etwas, das schwingt.

Ich finde das Bild hilfreich, weil es genau beschreibt, was viele Menschen spüren, wenn sie ihre materiellen Ziele erreicht haben. Sie sind zur Ruhe gekommen. Aber anstatt das als Fülle zu erleben, erleben sie da unten etwas, das weiter schwingt. Eine Unruhe im Stillstand. Ein leises, nicht abstellbares Signal.

Das kann man als Defekt interpretieren. Oder als Hinweis darauf, dass da unten etwas ist, das die ganze Zeit schon da war und nur deshalb übersehen wurde, weil die Oberfläche so geschäftig war.

Laozi und das Rad

Laozi hat für diesen Punkt ein Bild, das er in verschiedenen Varianten wiederholt, weil er offenbar gemerkt hat, dass wir es nicht auf Anhieb verstehen.

Er sagt: Schau dir ein Rad an. Speichen, Nabe, Felge. Wir denken, das Wesentliche sei das Feste, das Material, die Substanz. Aber ein Rad dreht sich nicht wegen der Speichen. Es dreht sich wegen des leeren Raums in der Mitte, durch den die Achse läuft. Ohne diese Leere geschieht überhaupt nichts.

Derselbe Gedanke mit einem Krug: Was ihn brauchbar macht, ist nicht der Ton, der Hohlraum, den der Ton umschließt. Und mit einem Zimmer: Gelebt wird nicht in den Wänden, sondern in dem Raum, den sie einschließen.

Laozis Pointe sinngemäß: Das Vorhandene macht nützlich. Das Nicht-Vorhandene macht wirksam.

Wenn du das ernst nimmst, dann ist die Leere, die du an einem sonnigen Sonntagnachmittag irgendwo zwischen zwei Projekten spürst, vielleicht gar nicht das Gegenteil deines Lebens. Vielleicht ist sie die Nabe. Der Nullpunkt. Der Ort, um den sich alles andere überhaupt erst organisieren kann.

Warum die Leere dich eventuelle eingeholt hat

Jetzt wird es konkreter.

Menschen, die irgendwann an diesen Punkt kommen, haben fast immer eine ähnliche Biografie. Sie haben gelernt, dass Disziplin trägt. Dass Fokus Ergebnisse bringt. Dass Wille Wirklichkeit formt. Das ist keine Einbildung, das stimmt tatsächlich. Genau mit diesen Eigenschaften haben sie erreicht, was sie erreicht haben.

Nur haben diese Eigenschaften einen Wirkungsbereich. Und der hat eine Grenze.

Im Gesetz des Einen gibt es einen kurzen Dialog, der mich seit Jahren begleitet. Jemand zählt vor seinem Gesprächspartner alles auf, was er an spirituellen Werkzeugen kennt. Disziplin, Selbsterkenntnis, Willensstärkung und fragt, ob das eigentlich alles sei. Die Antwort kommt fast unterbrechend:

Das ist Methode. Das ist nicht das Herz.

Sechs Worte. Aber sie sitzen.

Die Aussage ist nicht, dass Methode schlecht sei. Methode ist großartig. Methode baut Brücken, heilt Körper, führt Firmen, schreibt Bücher, zieht Kinder groß. Alles, was wir in der äußeren Welt hinkriegen, kriegen wir mit Methode hin.

Die Aussage ist: Es gibt einen Bereich im Menschen, den Methode nicht erreicht. Nicht weil die Methode zu schwach wäre, sondern weil sie dort nichts zu tun hat. Du kannst dich tracken, optimieren, verfeinern und dabei an dem Ort vorbeilaufen, um den es eigentlich geht.

Das Herz ist so ein Ort. Die Stille ist einer. Und auch die Leere, von der wir hier reden.

Einatmen und Ausatmen

Hier wird Laozi nochmal wichtig.

Die westliche Ratgeberliteratur liebt Gegensätze. Alt gegen neu. Falsch gegen richtig. Das war früher, das ist jetzt, du musst umschalten. So funktioniert Buchmarketing, aber so funktionieren Menschen nicht.

Laozi denkt anders. Bei ihm gibt es keine Gegensätze, die einander abschaffen. Es gibt Pole, die einander bedingen. Tag und Nacht. Yang und Yin. Einatmen und Ausatmen. Keiner davon ist der Bessere. Keiner kann ohne den anderen.

Dein bisheriges Leben war vielleicht ein langes, konsequentes Einatmen. Ziele setzen, erreichen, wachsen, bauen. Das war richtig. Das bleibt richtig. Das wird auch wiederkommen.

Aber irgendwann braucht jedes Einatmen das Ausatmen, sonst platzt der Mensch.

Was sich jetzt als Leere meldet, ist vielleicht einfach das Ausatmen, das du dein ganzes Leben lang aufgeschoben hast.

Und das Eigenartige am Ausatmen ist, dass du es mit den Mitteln des Einatmens nicht erreichst. Du kannst nicht intensiver einatmen, um besser auszuatmen. Du kannst nur aufhören, weiter einzuatmen. Dann passiert das Ausatmen von selbst.

Was passiert, wenn du aufhörst?

Ich meine das ernst. Was passiert wirklich, wenn du einen Nachmittag lang aufhörst? Nicht bewusst entschleunigst. Nicht produktiv ruhst. Nicht auf einer Yogamatte liegst und innerlich an morgen denkst. Sondern wirklich: aufhörst.

Bei den meisten, die ich kenne, kommt als Erstes Panik. Dann Unruhe. Dann der Impuls, doch wieder etwas zu tun. Und erst nach dieser ganzen Welle, wenn man sie einfach ziehen lässt, kommt etwas anderes zum Vorschein. Etwas Leises. Etwas, das wir unser Leben lang übertönt haben, weil wir beschäftigt waren.

Wu wei

Es gibt im Tao ein Wort, das sich schwer übersetzen lässt: wu wei. Wörtlich: Nicht-Handeln. Gemeint ist aber nicht Faulheit und nicht Resignation.

Wu wei ist das Handeln, das nicht gegen den Strom drückt. Ein Segler, der den Wind nicht bekämpft, sondern mit ihm fährt. Eine Wunde, die heilt, weil der Körper in Ruhe gelassen wird. Ein Gespräch, das sich ergibt, weil man aufhört, es zu steuern.

Wu wei ist das Gegenmittel gegen eine Erschöpfung, die viele erreichte Menschen kennen, ohne sie benennen zu können. Diese Erschöpfung kommt nicht vom vielen Tun. Sie kommt vom ständigen Tun gegen. Gegen den Widerstand. Gegen die Zeit. Gegen die innere Unruhe. Gegen die Leere.

Wenn du aufhörst, gegen deine Leere anzukämpfen, passiert etwas Seltsames: Sie wird weicher. Sie wird weniger bedrohlich, als sie aus der Entfernung war. Und manchmal, das ist meine eigene Erfahrung, merkst du irgendwann, dass sie dir die ganze Zeit etwas mitteilen wollte, das du nur deshalb nicht hören konntest, weil du zu laut warst.

Das, was unter allem liegt

Im Gesetz des Einen steht ein Satz, der mich beim ersten Lesen geärgert hat, weil er zu einfach klang. In meiner Übertragung:

In jedem noch so kleinen Teil von dir wohnt das Ganze. Mit all seiner Kraft.

Das ist Poesie, dachte ich damals. Hübsch, aber unpraktisch.

Inzwischen denke ich anders darüber. Der Satz sagt nämlich etwas sehr Konkretes: Was dir in der Leere fehlt – die Fülle, der Sinn, das Ganze – ist keine Substanz, die dir zugefügt werden müsste. Es ist etwas, das unter Schichten liegt. Du hast es nicht verloren. Du hast es nur, irgendwann im Lauf deines sehr bemühten Lebens, mit anderem zugedeckt.

Wenn das stimmt und ich sage bewusst wenn, du musst das nicht glauben, um etwas davon zu haben, dann verändert sich die Richtung. Wenn das Ganze bereits in dir wohnt, ist die naheliegende Bewegung nicht, weiter zu suchen. Sondern still zu werden. Lange genug, dass sich das, was unten liegt, langsam hochtasten kann.

Und die Leere ist genau der Raum, in dem das möglich wird. Sie ist kein Feind dieser Bewegung. Sie ist ihre Voraussetzung.

Was deine Sehnsucht wirklich will

Noch ein Satz aus denselben Texten, den ich mag, weil er so unpathetisch ist:

Sehnsucht ist der Schlüssel zu dem, was du empfängst. Vielleicht verstehst du deine Sehnsucht nicht.

Der zweite Teil ist der wichtige.

Vielleicht hast du lange gedacht, du wolltest Erfolg. Freiheit. Sicherheit. Anerkennung. Ruhe. Und dann hast du genau das bekommen und etwas in dir sagt leise: Das war es nicht.

Das heißt nicht, dass du dich geirrt hast. Es heißt, dass die Oberflächenschicht deiner Sehnsucht die war, die du benennen konntest. Darunter lag eine tiefere Schicht, die keinen Namen hatte. Die konnte sich nur als diffuses mehr bemerkbar machen, und dieses mehr wurde in deiner Sprache zu mehr erreichen. Was du aber wirklich wolltest, war etwas anderes. Etwas, das sich mit Erreichen nicht kriegen lässt.

Die Leere ist der Moment, in dem diese tiefere Schicht zu Wort kommt. Sie ist nicht wütend auf das, was du bekommen hast. Sie sagt nur: Jetzt bin ich dran.

Was wäre, wenn du sie einmal fragen würdest, was sie will? Nicht taktisch, nicht weil du es hinterher in ein Journal eintragen willst. Sondern aus echter Neugier. Und was wäre, wenn die Antwort nicht sofort käme und du das aushieltst?

Drei Bewegungen, keine Lösungen

Ich schreibe das hier nicht, weil ich dir einen Weg verkaufen möchte. Ich weiß nicht, was für dich richtig ist. Ich kenne deine Leere nicht. Ich kenne nur meine eigene, und ich schreibe aus dem, was sie mich gelehrt hat, langsam, widerwillig, selten in geraden Linien.

Wenn du an dem Punkt bist, den dieser Text beschreibt, biete ich dir am Ende drei kleine Bewegungen an. Keine Lösungen. Eher Haltungen, die du ausprobieren kannst, ohne dass etwas davon abhängt.

Die Erste: Lass die Leere einmal neben dir sitzen, ohne sie in etwas verwandeln zu wollen. Sitz mit ihr wie mit einem stillen Gast, der noch nicht entschieden hat, ob er reden will. Frag sie nichts. Arbeite nichts auf. Lies keinen Ratgeber. Beobachte einfach, was nach zehn Minuten passiert. Nach einer Stunde. Nach einem Abend.

Die Zweite: Hör auf, dein bisheriges Leben gegen dein zukünftiges auszuspielen. Dein Wille, deine Disziplin, deine Systeme, die bleiben ein Teil von dir. Sie werden wiederkommen, wenn sie gebraucht werden. Im Moment dürfen sie ausruhen. Einatmen und Ausatmen gehören zum gleichen Atem, und du bist weder zur Hälfte das eine noch zur Hälfte das andere. Du bist beides.

Die Dritte und wichtigste: An dir ist nichts zu reparieren. Ich weiß, das ist schwer zu glauben, wenn man jahrzehntelang gelernt hat, sich selbst als Optimierungsprojekt zu betrachten. Aber es stimmt. Du bist nicht kaputt. Du bist am Ende einer Phase. Die nächste beginnt, sobald du das, was ist, eine Weile unbearbeitet neben dir sitzen lässt.

Und irgendwann, wenn du wirklich still geworden bist, merkst du vielleicht, dass diese Leere, die du so lange für deinen Feind gehalten hast, einfach ein Raum war. Ein Raum, in dem jemand auf dich gewartet hat, der sich in dem ganzen Lärm deines erfolgreichen Lebens nie hat zeigen können.

Vielleicht bist das du selbst. Vielleicht ist es etwas, für das du noch keinen Namen hast.

So oder so: Dieser Nullpunkt ist kein Ende. Er ist ein Anfang. Und das Einzige, was man tun muss, um ihn als solchen zu erleben, ist, aufzuhören, ihn für einen Fehler zu halten.

---

Zu den Quellen, die ich oben schon erwähnt habe: Die kursiv gesetzten Sätze sind meine freie Übertragung aus dem Gesetz des Einen, einer Gesprächssammlung aus den Jahren 1981 bis 1984. Laozis Tao Te King ist rund zweieinhalbtausend Jahre älter und sagt in wesentlichen Punkten erstaunlich Ähnliches. Wer neugierig geworden ist, findet den Weg zu den Originalen leicht selbst.

Today's MLB game of choice has the Cincinnati Reds playing the Tampa Bay Rays, and has a start time of 5:40 PM CDT.

And the adventure continues.

I hope that each of you have a supportive mentor. This should be a special time at the start of your career where you get to meet students for the first time in this role. Dress professional, bring a notebook, and I hope you get a chance to observe for a few days to feel comfortable in the room. Observe everything in the classroom from the student-teacher interactions, the student behavior, the teacher’s rapport with the student, classroom management style, lesson delivery and pacing, forms of assessment, etc. There is so much more to take in but getting comfortable and getting your confidence is the first big step. You may feel nervous and have anxiety about teaching a new group of students.

With my student teachers, I recommend walking around when students are working independently to start building comfort for both you and them. Getting to know them will make this first lesson go so much easier. Greeting the students and some small talk will go very far with them. Offering help or assistance is another great idea to help you feel more comfortable. So get on your feet and ask the cooperating teacher if it’s okay to walk the aisles and check out their work. Keep a smile on your face.

Ask your cooperating teacher to start small. Ask if you could begin with the Do Now activity. This 3-5 minute review at the beginning of class is a short way to start building your confidence. Watch your cooperating teacher perform it a few times before trying it yourself. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. It happens. Hopefully the cooperating teacher is okay with you trying their own before you start creating your own.

After a week or so, start to prepare a lesson under the guidance of your cooperating teacher. Now every cooperating teacher is different. Some will give you all the support in the world, and others will expect you to be a great teacher with new knowledge of the teaching world. For me, I was clueless and needed a lot of support. Ask the teacher what topic or content should be taught. If you can get a topic, great! If not, I recommend picking your own topic. If you don’t know what to teach, please get a copy of the state learner standards in your content and try addressing one of the standards or learner objectives. Once you understand the learner objective, start preparing your lesson.

If you are unfamiliar with the standard or have to learn the content yourself first, spend time on YouTube channels or Google researching and understanding the topic. I have been there plenty of times. This might be a reeducation for yourself, or maybe the content is entirely new.

Break your lesson down by the following structure: Do Now (anticipatory set), instructional portion (keep short 10-12 minutes), guided practice (student practice activity), and finally independent practice portion of the lesson. This is the I Do, We Do, You Do method of teaching. Your lesson should close with some kind of exit ticket. Guided Practice could be 10 minutes. Independent Practice could be 10-15 minutes. An exit ticket at the end could be another 5 minutes. Nailing your timing will take time and an eye on the clock.

Exit Tickets function to help you gain a read on your students grasping of the new content. I like to do thumbs up, down, or sideways in front of their chests or 1, 2, 3 (with their fingers) by their shoulders with a multiple choice question on the board. A simple multiple choice question with an ABC answer choice. Selecting students in different parts of the room is effective to if ending the class on a question. Work the left side, the center, and the right side of your class by maybe asking the same question. You would think asking the same question is pointless, but you’ll soon find out students sometimes don’t pay attention to other students. This will help reinforce the concept you’re teaching. You can use post-it notes or give them a small piece of paper. I have also used Google Forms to collect an exit ticket from the students. I prefer hand gestures to actual paper methods as to avoid a mess and extra paperwork. You could also count the exit ticket as a participation grade of some sort if you like or toss in the garbage. Read them quick to measure how your lesson went.

Afterwards…ask your cooperating teacher for advice and constructive criticism. Question wait times, delivery, voice, intonation, visuals, lesson pacing/time, and any general thoughts on the lesson should be considered. When receiving the advice, try to implement and work on anything suggested for your next lesson.

It’s totally okay to make mistakes and for your lesson to fall flat. This happens to everyone. After teaching your first lesson, reflect on what went great and what you need to work on. Don’t beat yourself up. Give yourself a “pat on the back” for accomplishing your first lesson.

Security is not the absence of attack, but the presence of God.

Isaiah 54

Isaiah 54

Jehovah says:

“Shout joyfully, you barren woman who has not given birth! Become cheerful and cry out for joy, you who never had birth pains, For the sons of the desolate one are more numerous Than the sons of the woman with a husband.

Make the place of your tent more spacious. Stretch out the tent cloths of your grand tabernacle. Do not hold back, lengthen your tent cords, And make your tent pins strong.

For you will spread out to the right and to the left. Your offspring will take possession of nations, And they will inhabit the desolated cities.

Do not be afraid, for you will not be put to shame; And do not feel humiliated, for you will not be disappointed. For you will forget the shame of your youth, And the disgrace of your widowhood you will remember no more.”

“For your Grand Maker is as your husband, Jehovah of armies is his name, And the Holy One of Israel is your Repurchaser. He will be called the God of the whole earth.

For Jehovah called you as if you were an abandoned wife and grief-stricken, Like a wife married in youth and then rejected,” says your God.

“For a brief moment I abandoned you, But with great mercy I will gather you back.

In a flood of indignation I hid my face from you for a moment, But with everlasting loyal love I will have mercy on you,” says your Repurchaser, Jehovah.

“This is like the days of Noah to me. Just as I have sworn that the waters of Noah will no more cover the earth, So I swear that I will no more become indignant toward you or rebuke you.

For the mountains may be removed And the hills may be shaken, But my loyal love will not be removed from you, Nor will my covenant of peace be shaken,” says Jehovah, the One having mercy on you.

“O afflicted woman, storm-tossed, uncomforted, I am laying your stones with hard mortar And your foundation with sapphires.

I will make your battlements of rubies, Your gates of sparkling stones, And all your boundaries of precious stones.

And all your sons will be taught by Jehovah, And the peace of your sons will be abundant.

You will be firmly established in righteousness. You will be far removed from oppression, You will fear nothing and have no cause for terror, For it will not come near you.

If anyone should attack you, It will not be at my orders. Whoever makes an attack on you will fall because of you.”

“Look! I myself created the craftsman, Who blows on the charcoal fire, And his work produces a weapon. I myself also created the destructive man to bring ruin.

No weapon formed against you will have any success, And you will condemn any tongue that rises up against you in the judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of Jehovah, And their righteousness is from me,” declares Jehovah.

Isaiah 55

Jehovah says:

“Come, all you thirsty ones, come to the water! You with no money, come, buy and eat! Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why do you keep paying out money for what is not bread, And why spend your earnings for what brings no satisfaction? Listen intently to me, and eat what is good, And you will find great delight in what is truly rich.

Incline your ear and come to me. Listen, and you will keep alive, And I will readily make with you an everlasting covenant In harmony with the expressions of loyal love to David, which are faithful.

Look! I made him a witness to the nations, A leader and commander to the nations.

Look! You will call a nation that you do not know, And those of a nation who have not known you will run to you For the sake of Jehovah your God, the Holy One of Israel, Because he will glorify you.

Search for Jehovah while he may be found. Call to him while he is near.

Let the wicked man leave his way And the evil man his thoughts; Let him return to Jehovah, who will have mercy on him, To our God, for he will forgive in a large way.”

Jehovah declares:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, And your ways are not my ways.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So my ways are higher than your ways And my thoughts than your thoughts.

For just as the rain and the snow pour down from heaven And do not return there until they saturate the earth, making it produce and sprout, Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

So my word that goes out of my mouth will be. It will not return to me without results, But it will certainly accomplish whatever is my delight, And it will have sure success in what I send it to do.

For you will go out with rejoicing, And in peace you will be brought back. The mountains and the hills will become cheerful before you with a joyful cry, And the trees of the field will all clap their hands.

Instead of thornbushes the juniper tree will grow, And instead of the stinging nettle the myrtle tree will grow. And it will bring fame to Jehovah, An everlasting sign that will never perish.”

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#biblereading #bible #isaiah

Pitkästä aikaa Tampereella. Istuskelen Laukontorilla kahvilla auringossa ja katselen lauantain menoa. Tänään puodeista löytyy ainakin tuohikoreja sekä kuusamolaista muikkua. Kotoisaa pöhinää ja houkuttelevia tuoksuja. Pohdiskelen kaikenlaista. Mistä ihmiset tulevat, mihin he ovat matkalla ja mitä he mahtavat maailmasta ajatella.

Pidän habituksen tutkailusta. Ihmisten olemus kertoo paljon. Ilme, kävelytahti tai se, että vilkuileeko torilla kojuja vai painaako vain menemään. Tai pukeutuminen. Siihen kiinnitän eniten huomiota. Formi vai funktio. Mitä omalla pukeutumisellaan yksilö haluaa viestiä muille.

Mennään esimerkillä. Ohi käveli äsken kaksikko. Noin kuusikymppinen ja parikymppinen. Varmaankin äiti ja tytär. Molemmilla oli tuulipukua päällä. Helly Hansenin takkia ja mustaa housua. Lisäksi valkoiset juoksukengät ja tuulihousujen lahkeiden päälle vedetyt tennissukat. Trendejä seuraavaa sakkia selkeästi.

Ensiksi tuulipuvuista, sitten trendeistä.

Eli miksi pukeudutaan urheilullisesti jos ollaan menossa vaan käyskentelemään kaupungille ja torille juomaan kahvit? Tai ainakin kaksikon flegmaattinen hengailu torilla antaa sellaisen kuvan.

Teoriahörhönä lähestyn tätä bourdieuläisittäin. Funktio vs. formi. Tässä tapauksessa on painotettu funktiota. tuulitakki menee säähän kuin säähän. Juoksukengissä on mukava tallustaa. Eikä tuulihousut oo moksiskaan vaikka sattuisi istumaan toripenkillä linnunpaskaan.

Pukeutuminen on välttämättömyys, mutta samaan aikaan myös performanssi, jolla sanotaan jotakin. Rakennetaan itsestä narratiivia muille. Tuulipuvulla ja juoksukengillä – uskoisin – halutaan viestiä, että ollaan urheilullisia. Pidetään terveellisiä elämäntapoja arvokkaina. Että ollaan kultivoituneita siten, että valitaan pitkäjänteisyys ja niin sanottu korkeampi nautinto vaikka karkkien ja sipsien sijaan. Jotain tällaista kenties.

Ja tämä itsestä rakennettava narratiivi saa erilaisia ulottuvuuksia sosiokulttuurisessa tilassa. Sitä ei tulkita tyhjiössä narratiivin rakentajan näkökulmasta, tai objektiivisesti. Narratiivi rakentuu ja se tulkitaan aina suhteessa ympäröivään maailmaan. Ja subjektit tulkitsevat sitä erilaisista lähtökohdista eri tavoin. Jokaisen oma positio vaikuttaa tulkintaan. Ja näitä positioita ja niistä muodostuvia yhtenäisiä tulkintoja voidaan luokitella sosiokulttuurisiin luokkiin sitten.

Ehkä tutkijana jokin päivä.

Enivei.

Omia keloja tuulipuvusta. Mitä torilla käyskentely tuulipuvussa herättää mussa itsessäni? Itseasiassa kun asiaan kiinnittää laajemmin huomiota, niin oikeastaan aika moni on sonnustautunut tuulipukuun tai muihin urheilullisiin vetimiin. Se kertonee jotakin suomalaisesta sielunmaisemasta. Siitä funktionalistisesta ajattelusta. Tai ehkä suomalaisittain tätä pitäisi kutsua pragmatismiksi. Sama asia, menee hiustenhalkomiseksi.

Tuulipuku kertoo myös siitä, että millaista pukeutumista pidetään kaupunkitilaan soveliaana ja tavoiteltavana. Trendikkyys ja urheilullisuus ainakin tällaisia.

Mutta miksi? Uskoisin, että tekijöitä on monta. Eletään alati individualisoituvassa maailmassa, jossa itsensä kehittäminen – hyveiden kultivointi – on nostettu jalustalle. Se näkyy kaikkialla. Mainoksissa, kuvituskuvissa, elokuvissa ja lehdissä. Oikeastaan kaikessa mediassa. Eli millaisia ihmisiä valitaan ja nostetaan esille?

Laihoja. Terveitä. Hymyileväisiä. Kilttejä. Säyseitä. Keskiluokkaisia. Sellaisia kunnon kansalaisia. Esivallalle myönteisiä ja harmittomia.

Ja tietysti tällaista ihannetta tavoitellaan. Kaikki haluavat elää hyvää elämää. Olla terveitä ja onnellisia. Kokea kuuluvansa johonkin.

Sitten trendeihin. Tai tyyliin. Molempiin. Mun mielestä käytännöllisyys ja helppous on tylsää. Yksilöllisyys ja persoonallisuus katoavat tuulitakkien mereen.

Tää onkin yksi postmodernin ajan kiehtovimmista ristiriidoista: Yksilöllistyvässä maailmassa on koko ajan tärkeämpää luoda omaa identiteettiä ja brändiä – erottua massasta. Ja kaikki tää samaan aikaan on bulkkituotannon ja konsumerismin maailmassa yhä haastavampaa.

Kaikki tasapaksuistuu. Nesteytyy (ks. Bauman ja notkea moderni). Mietitään vaikka Stockmannia, joka oli aikoinaan Suomessa muodin ja trendien suunnannäyttäjä. Kiehtovien, rohkeiden ja uusien kledjujen paikka. Mutta jokin muuttui. Stocka jäi jumiin. Rupesivat pelkäämään persoonallisuutta. Nykyään Prismasta saa samannäköistä pukimetta kuin Stockalta. Suomalaisen vaatetuksen kentän selkeät rajat hajosivat ja on sulautunut yhdeksi mötikäksi.

Tietysti tää on vibailuun perustuva anekdootti ja yksinkertaistus. Mutta Stocka on juuttunut pahasti vuoteen 2016. Pelätään erottautua. Tai sitten vaan keskitytään talouslukuihin. Pitäydytään siinä, mitä myydään eniten. Ja sitä kautta häviää kaikki poikkeava, kenties kiinnostavakin. Jää vain massoja tyydyttävä tasapaksuisuus. Normaalijakauman 95%.

Ja juuri se tasapaksuisuus pelottaa mua. Eniten sen vuoksi, mitä se edustaa mulle: Ihmisten pelkistämistä kuluttajiksi, jotka ottaa kaiken vastaan mitä vain annetaan. Paskaa kurkusta alas ja ei olla moksiskaan, jopa kiitetään. Haluan olla muutakin kuin ratas kapitalistisessa myllyssä. Haluan olla yksilö, elää merkityksellistä elämää ja tehdä merkityksellisiä juttuja.

Mietin kapitalismin roolia tässä kaikessa. Se individualismi ja tarve erottautua. Vähemmän on vanhan liiton pieniä kotimaisia firmoja. Käsintehtyjä nahkarotseja tai semmoista. Ei pienet toimijat pärjää globaaleille jäteille, joilla on halvat hinnat, verkkokaupat ja mahdollisuus mainostaa kaikkialla. Että yhä harvempi iso toimija kerää valtaa.

Se kuuluu kapitalismin mekanismeihin olennaisesti. Kilpailussa suurempi ja menestyvämpi toimija ostaa pienemmän ja heikomman pois. Näennäisesti kuluttajalla on valinnanvaraa, mutta isot konglomeraatit operoivat kymmeniä tai satoja brändejä. Illuusio vapaasta valinnasta.

Mutta se, että pukeudunko perintönahkatakkiin vai tuulipukuun ei hirveästi muuta mun asemaa kapitalismin rattaissa. Kiinnostavaa on kuitenkin, että miksi ollaan sisäistetty pukeutumisen arvottamista, vaikka kaikki ollaankin saman järjestelmän alla samassa asemassa. Ajetaan arvottamalla kiilaa ihmisten väliin.

Habitukseen perustuvaa arvotusta ja syrjimistä lienee ollut aina. Joskus 60-luvulla ei päässyt Suomessakaan ravintoloihin, jos ei miehellä ollut puvuntakki ja solmio päällä tai naisella hame ja sukkahousut. Eivätkä naiset päässeet ilman miesseuraa ravintolaan. Että pukimevaatimukset toimivat ekstensiona taloudellisten ja sosiokulttuuristen hierarkioiden ylläpitämiselle.

En pidä tuulipukumeiningistä tai tasapaksuisuudesta. Kaipaan kiinnostavaa yksilöllisyyttä. Lienen sisäistänyt kapitalistisen hierarkisen ajattelun. Toisaalta haluan oikeuttaa positioni itselleni. Että arvottaminen ikään kuin tuntuu jossain määrin luonnolliselta. Siihen on vain kasvanut. Ja oppinut tarkastelemaan itseään negatiivisten kokemusten takia. En pidä omaa tyyliäni mitenkään kovin poikkeuksellisena, uniikkina tai riikinkukkomaisena, mutta kuulemma “tollanen vitun vassari”-henki musta huokuu.

Ehkä tällasten kokemusten takia just on oppinut arvottamaan. Oppinut, että millaisen habituksen omaavia kannattaa välttää. Etenkin jos joku on humalassa. Homottelua ja turpaanvetouhkauksia on tullut pitkien hiusten takia. Että sitten on oppinut luokittelemaan todennäköisiä uhkia. Ja sit laajemmin tutkailemaan ja arvottamaan. Jokin primaali aspekti tässä lienee. Me ja muut-, lauma- ja hahmontunnistusmeinki.

Kai se on inhimillistä laatikoida. Evolutiivinen funktio on havaittavissa edelleen. Tietää kelle kannattaa kääntää selkä aamuöisellä nakkikiskalla.

Ja luokitteleehan ihmiset itsejään habituksellaan. Halutaan olla osa ryhmää. Alakulttuurit on tällaisia. On punkkaria, räppäriä, rokkaria ja niin edelleen.

Pukeutuminen ekstensoi ihmisten maailmankuvaa ja arvomaailmaa. Tuo ne esiin. Ja vaikka ei ajattelisikaan, että mitä laittaa päälleen ja mikä narratiivinen merkitys sillä on, niin siinä implisiittisesti kertoo itsestään. Että ultrapikamuotiin itsensä verhoava tulee paljastaneeksi oman sosiokulttuurisen positionsa: tiedostamattomuutensa ja arvoarvostelmansa. Tai mittatilauspukuun pukeutuva viestii varallisuudestaan ja tarpeesta tuoda esiin yksilöllisyyttä.

Takaisin torille ja tuulipukumereen.

Miksi suomessa ei keskimäärin pukeuduta? Kai se on historia. Täällä ollaan oltu vahvasti agraariyhteiskunta vielä 1940-luvulla. Funktio on laitettu formin edelle. Myöhäinen kaupungistuminen ja teollistuminen lienee vaikuttanut siihen, että täällä ei ole vielä muodostunut samanlaista pukeutumiskulttuuria kuin Keski-Euroopassa.

Maantieteellisellä sijainnilla lienee lusikkansa tässä sopassa. Pohjolan perukat on eristäytyneitä verrattuna Manner-Eurooppaan. Ja vaikka globalisaatio ja internet ovatkin vähentäneet sijainnin, etäisyyden ja ajan merkitystä rajojen muodostajina, niin eivät maantieteelliset kulttuuriset rajat ole kadonneet mihinkään. Vaikka sekoittuneisuutta onkin. Ei kaikkea voi redusoida maantieteeseen tai muihin materialistisiin seikkoihin.

Että kulttuuriset ja historialliset konventiot vaikuttavat myös. Niihin pitäisi pureutua paremmin. Paremman puutteessa tulee takerruttua historialliseen materialismiin ja strukturalismiin.

Loppuun vielä pukeutumisen arvottamisesta. En pysty tätä ilmiötä täysin neutraalisti tarkastelemaan, vaan oma kaupunkilainen, leppoisa keskiluokkaisuus kyllä näkyy ja kuuluu. Toisaalta kaikki tulkitaan omien taustojen perusteella maailmaa. Sitä sisäistää tällaisia konventioita ja hierarkioita. Muiden arvottamista. En pidä siitä. Miksi teen niin? Se häiritsee. Ihmisiä, tuntevia ja arvokkaita olentoja kaikki ollaan. Eikä pukeutuminen loppupeleissä kerro ihmisestä tai hänen hyvyydestää. Turkista tai ultrapikamuotia pitäisi pyrkiä ymmärtämään. Ei tuomitsemaan.

Last weekend was a bit stressful as both my kids threw up all over the couch cushions, bathroom floor, and on me. They’re okay, thank God. While they got it out of their system they had to eat again so they don’t go hungry. Always be super careful of what ingredients are in your food before feeding your children.

#children #food #ingredients #sick #stayathomedad #vomit

#shuacantikharem

Joshua gelisah seharian. Sedari tadi dia muterin pulpen di tangan, sesekali gigitin kuku jempol tangan satunya. Semua yang lagi diomongin dosen di depan nggak ada yang nyangkut sama sekali di kepala cantiknya. Gimana mau konsen coba, kalo dia baru aja nerima chat berbau anceman begitu? Itu siapa? Kapan dia ngambil video itu? Mau diapain tuh video anjir?? Joshua nggak bisa berhenti mikirin semua kemungkinan yang jelek-jelek.

“Bang.”

Sikut ketemu sikut. Pulpen terpelanting dari gerak monotonnya, terjatuh ke lantai dengan bunyi yang membuat satu kelas nengok ke arah Joshua. “Maaf,” buru-buru Joshua bangun dan berjongkok mengambil pulpen, mematikan pertanyaan dosen yang baru aja mau buka mulut. Ketika fokus kelas kembali ke pelajaran, Seungkwan menunduk dengan ekspresi minta maaf.

“Bang, sori ya, tapi lo kenapa sih?” bisiknya pelan. “Kayak lagi banyak pikiran.” Yang mana hal itu sendiri udah aneh di mata Seungkwan. Saking nempelnya mereka berdua dari kecil, Seungkwan hafal tiap perubahan kecil dari diri Joshua. Mode overthinking Joshua bisa diitung dengan jari selama dia hidup dan biasanya gegara hal yang bener-bener serius.

Karena masih dalam kelas, Joshua cuma menggeleng sambil tersenyum sebagai jawaban. Disenyumin gitu, makin dalam lah kernyitan alis Boo Seungkwan. Bang Shua aneh banget. Pokoknya dia harus tau ada apa sama Bang Shua sampe jadi aneh begini.

Pas bubaran kelas, Seungkwan tadinya mau nyeret Joshua ke kantin buat interogasi keanehan dia sepagian ini, tapi Joshua malah bilang kalo dia ada urusan penting jadi skip maksi dulu. Nggak cuma itu, dia juga wanti-wanti Seungkwan supaya nggak ngikutin dia. “Awas ya kalo nguntit,” ancamnya. “Aku kasihin foto malu-maluin kamu ke om aku.”

“Ih anjing, kok lo gitu sih maennya?” decak Seungkwan.

“Ya abisan kalo nggak digituin, kamu pasti nguntit! Kepoan banget, kenapa sih?”

“Iya, iya, enggak! Nggak asik lo, Bang!”

Biarin Joshua nggak asik. Daripada ketahuan dia diblack mail orang asing pake video dia lagi cipokan sama Wonwoo di perpus.

....

Lagi-lagi disentuhnya bibir. Masih tertinggal jejak bibir cowok berkacamata itu di bibir Joshua. Agak kering dan sedikit pecah-pecah—Joshua pengen kasih bibir Wonwoo lip balm tiap hari rasanya deh—tapi panas dan melumat bibir Joshua bagai kudapan favoritnya. Pipi si manis bersemu kala mengingat bagaimana bernafsunya ciuman mereka. Kalo Joshua ketemu Wonwoo lagi di tempat sepi, apa...bakal maju ke base berikutnya? Pengen, tapi takut. Biarpun Joshua berkarir di modelling dan punya fans seabreg di kampus, dia belom pernah pacaran.

Ciuman pun...pertama kalinya diambil sama Wonwoo...

Terlalu lebur dalam memori, Joshua nggak sadar kalo dia udah jalan ke taman yang dimaksud. Kakinya pun udah melangkah mendekati bangku yang dimaksud. Pas sampe, si anak melongo. Ada orang yang nggak asing sedang duduk di bangku itu.

”...Jeonghan?”

“Yo, Joshuji,” cengiran, yang sukses bikin suara Joshua seketika meninggi.

“Joshua! Bukan Joshuji!” sumpah, dia benci banget dipanggil Joshuji Joshuji begitu, apalagi sama orang kayak Jeonghan. Ngejek banget, nyebelin! “Kamu ngapain di sini?”

“Ketemu sama lo,” ditunjuknya Joshua tanpa ragu.

Sedetik, Joshua bingung. Detik berikutnya, dia langsung nangkep maksudnya. “....Kamu yang ngirim chat itu?” gumamnya.

Oh God, please don't...

“Hehe, yoi,” Jeonghan mengedipkan sebelah mata. Ngeliat muka cantik Joshua pucat pasi bikin Jeonghan nggak nyesel udah iseng ke perpus buat numpang tidur kemaren sore. Siapa sangka, kan, primadona satu kampus sekaligus objek kejailan utama Yoon Jeonghan yang bisa buat hari-harinya less ngebosenin, malah sibuk tukeran liur sama cowok nerdus nggak tau siapa di salah satu sudutnya?

Pathetic.

“Nggak nyangka selera lo yang cupu-cupu gitu,” ejek Jeonghan. Ternyata, selain keliatan super cantik pas lagi ngamuk, Joshua juga super cantik pas lagi ngeliat dia horor begini. “Sayang banget cantik-cantik bibirnya abis dikokopin cowok selevel gitu doang.”

Cowok yang pantes buat Joshua tuh standar Jeonghan gitu lah minimal—ganteng, jago olahraga, semua orang kenal dia, party animal, plus keluarganya turun temurun bergerak di bidang hukum. Nggak tau berapa digit di rekening dia sendiri hasil transferan bokap nyokapnya, padahal Jeonghan juga nggak minta. Apaan tuh, modelan cowok kacamataan kemaren? Baunya aja udah orang miskin.

“Terus k-kamu mau apa?” masih syok, Joshua memaksakan mulutnya bergerak. Sebenernya dia mau ngamuk, tersinggung sama omongan Jeonghan. Bukan, bukan ejekan soal selera dia, tapi Joshua mau ngamuk gegara Jeonghan ngejelekin Wonwoo. Tangannya di sisi badan nggak ayal terkepal. “Mana video yang kamu bilang kemaren? Apa itu cuma boongan??”

Jeonghan mengangkat kedua bahu. Lalu, diambilnya ip17 buat ditontonkannya ke Joshua. Dalam kualitas 4k, bola mata Joshua melebar menyaksikan gimana dia ngalungin lengan ke sekeliling leher Wonwoo, bercumbu bak dua remaja sangean. Refleks, Joshua mengulurkan tangan berniat ngerebut hp Jeonghan. Sayangnya, refleks Jeonghan juga nggak kalah sensitif. Dengan lihai, atlet informal sepak bola dan basket itu menarik lagi hp nya agar jauh dari jangkauan Joshua.

“Eits, nggak boleh bandel, Shuji,” digoyangkannya telunjuk, seolah mendecak 'no, no, no' ke anak kecil. “Gue nggak sejahat itu kok. Lo mau gue apus videonya ato kasih ke lo, boleh-boleh aja. Asal ada syaratnya.”

Of course. An eye for an eye.

“Apa syaratnya?”

And we all go blind.

Jeonghan menyeringai lagi sambil menepuk-nepuk santai pangkuannya, “Duduk sini, cium gue.”

I was sitting on a curb having the kind of revelation that only hits when you're at the exact intersection of self-pity and dehydration.

The context is that nobody wants to date me. I've tried the apps. I've cold-approached strangers on the street like some guy handing out flyers for a restaurant nobody's going to. I've asked friends to set me up, which is the romantic equivalent of having your mom call the teacher. Nothing has worked. People tell me I’m a fashion terrorista — okay, fair, but you don't have to volunteer that information unprompted. I'm also short, which means I’m automatically ugly to most women. So there's that.

I'm mid-20s. This doesn't mean anything about how life turns out. I know that intellectually. But I was in the pit — the real pit, the one where your brain starts looping I'm gonna kill myself like it's a Hatsune Miku song stuck on repeat — and somewhere in the middle of that loop my brain just went: wait. Why do you even need to get married?

Like actually why. Life is short. People try to convince you it's some great thing, and I mean yeah, feeling loved and loving someone is probably wonderful. That's why so many people do it. But there are a lot of different things that can bring you fulfillment and happiness and satisfaction, and it's not like the point of life is to sustain those feelings forever, so why is this one particular arrangement elevated above everything else? I don't get it. I've never gotten it. I'm sitting on this curb and I genuinely cannot produce a reason.

And look, even the people who do get married — even the happy ones — it's not like it's this smooth, pleasant experience. My parents are happily married. They're also in the same argument they were in ten years ago. You can't fix people. You really can't. Whatever the issue is, it's going to be the same issue at year one and year twenty and year forty, and you're just going to have to live with it. Men have their specific faults. Women have their specific faults. And because they're so different from each other, sometimes one side genuinely cannot understand or sympathize with what the other side needs. It's not malice. It's just that you're wired differently and some gaps don't close no matter how much goodwill there is. Maybe if you're gay or lesbian it's easier. Same wavelength, at least. I don't know. But the point is that marriage is not this effortless beautiful thing people make it out to be. It's a grind. It's a daily grind that you're signing up for permanently.

And the divorce rate is insane. People will stand at an altar, say “till death do us part” with their whole chest, and then three years later they're splitting a Vitamix in mediation. I think of marriage as something you don't break. Period. That's what the commitment means. Unless someone is under genuine imminent threat, you stay. Personality difference? You stay. You're annoyed? You stay. That's the deal. That's what “till death” means. And yet people treat it as the most important decision of their life and then bail when it gets hard. So either the commitment doesn't mean what they said it meant, or they didn't think about it seriously enough before they made it. Either way, I'm not seeing a great advertisement here.

So I'm doing the math. Let's say I die at 65. I have 40 years left. 40 years is not a lot of time. If I get married I spend those years on kids, family, all of that, and I guess it can be very fulfilling. I'm not denying that. But you shouldn't have a kid to give your life meaning. You shouldn't need a family to feel like your existence has a point. There are things that fundamentally have meaning apart from all of that. If you're a Christian, the essence of life is to love God, love your neighbor. Being single doesn't subtract from that. It's not even in the equation.

I spent a good 30 minutes on this curb — which is a long time to sit on concrete, for the record, my ass was completely numb by the end — and I could not produce a single reason why you need to get married. Not one. I tried. I sat there and I tried to argue the other side and I kept coming up empty.

Thought experiment time!

I ran this thought experiment on myself. Let's say I wake up tomorrow and I'm inexplicably attractive. Just overnight, something changed, and now there's a horde of people who want to date me. They're knocking on my door, telling me I'm handsome, the whole thing. Do I want them?

No. I'd hate every single one of them. Because I know what happened. Yesterday they wouldn't have looked at me if I was on fire, and today some switch flipped and now they're interested. That's not real. They don't like me. They like the version of me that crossed whatever arbitrary threshold they have for attractiveness, and that version didn't exist 24 hours ago. Everything I actually am — all of it, the good and the bad and the boring and the weird — none of that changed. The only thing that changed is my face or my height or whatever, and that was enough. That tells me everything I need to know about what they actually value.

Or let's say I got rich. A billion dollars, just appeared in my account. Suddenly everyone thinks I'm interesting and attractive and worth their time. That doesn't draw me towards them. That makes me want to walk into the ocean. You didn't want me when I was broke and invisible, and now I'm supposed to believe this is genuine? We both know what this is. Get out of my house.

I realize I'm getting increasingly worked up about hypothetical people who don't exist. I'm developing resentments towards women I have never met over scenarios that have not occurred. This is probably not a sign of great mental health. But the point underneath all of that is real, I think. What I actually want — what anyone actually wants, if they're honest about it — is someone who likes them when they're not impressive. When they're sick, broke, annoying, ugly, boring. Not just when everything's going great and you're easy to love. The love people actually crave is the kind that doesn't have conditions.

And that kind of love is almost impossible to find between two people. Parental love comes close, but even that has limits. If your kid is a three-time serial killer, even Mom is going to have a hard time. Really the only place you find truly unconditional love is God. That's it. That yearning you have — that deep, bottomless thing that makes you feel like you'll die if nobody ever really knows you and loves you anyway — that's pointed at God whether you realize it or not. Romantic love is great. I'm not trashing it. But it's not the answer to that particular ache, and it never was, and treating it like the answer is how people end up devastated when it doesn't fix them.

So where does that leave me.

I think the issue was never that nobody wants me. I think the issue is that I was staring at the wrong scoreboard. I've been depressed about something that doesn't actually matter as much as I thought it did. My priorities were misaligned. I was pouring all this energy and anguish into the fact that I'm not valuable in the dating market, and the whole time the answer was just: so what? It doesn't take away from the things that actually matter. It doesn't diminish my life. It's fine. It is genuinely fine.

And I mean that. I'm not just repeating “it's fine” to myself like a mantra, trying to brainwash myself into believing it. I actually sat with this for a while and I cannot find a hole in it. There's no reason this should be ruining my life the way it has been.

I think I can own it. I'm a chud. Possibly an extreme chud. I have zero aura. I get nervous in big open rooms and feel safe in capsule hotels where everything is tight and enclosed and nobody can see me. I am most at peace in a basement in front of a computer. Complete self-deception can fix a lot of things, but there are some objective truths that no amount of gaslight-yourself energy is going to override. I am who I am. The dating market has weighed me and found me wanting, and I have decided that the dating market's opinion is not one I need to care about.

Do I talk to anyone about this? About any of it? No. Should I? I don't know. Will I? Absolutely not. I keep everything buried all the time. Everything is embarrassing. Everything is shameful. I don't know where that comes from — this feeling that any interior thought, once spoken aloud, becomes humiliating — but it's been there as long as I can remember. Sometimes I think I would rather die than describe what's going on inside my head to another person. That's probably its own problem. A big one, actually. But I'm choosing not to engage with it right now because I can only have one crisis at a time and this curb is not comfortable enough for two.

I do all my thinking alone, which means my thoughts are becoming increasingly feral. I'm drifting further from what normal people think. I'm aware of this. Every week I spend processing things in complete isolation is another week my worldview gets a little more strange, a little less compatible with polite conversation. I'm developing opinions and frameworks that I could never say out loud because they'd sound insane, but they make perfect sense inside my head, which is either a sign that I'm onto something or a sign that I've lost the plot entirely. I honestly don't know which one it is and I'm not sure it matters.

I wanted to write all of this down before I forgot it. That's the only reason this exists. I thought about something for 30 minutes on a curb and I want to be able to come back to it later and remember what I was thinking, because usually these things just evaporate and then I'm back in the pit again with no recollection of ever having climbed out. So here it is. My ass hurts. I'm going inside. I don't know if I'm convinced or if I'm just tired, but either way I'm done sitting on concrete.

A friend sent me a Facebook marketplace listing for the minions movie fart gun, And I really wanted to rebuild a taser and so I bought the guns for $22. I went to the lady right after the gym and she said I can clearly tell you work out, and I realized that it doesn’t shock me at all that someone says that. Like very clearly I work out I was in my tank top and I am very muscular, and it kind of nice even though it feels scary and like I’m being vain, but it feels really nice too have that positive self image about myself for once. I don’t know why it feels like it’s such an evil thing to have a positive self image.

Contentment feels right for me. Not necessarily happy or sad. Not good or bad. I’m good with what is. I still know how to make myself happy if I want to, but I don’t have to do that all the time. I enjoy it, though. Like, the other day, I went out to a restaurant. It was such a pleasant experience that after ordering an appetizer and an entrée, I ordered another entrée. The server was laughing. I don’t think she was expecting an order of medium bison steak when she came back to my table with a dessert menu. I still had dessert after the bison, rhubarb panna cotta to be precise. My appetite surprises me sometimes. Good food makes me happy. I know how to have a good time.

I stopped consuming stimulants a few years ago. Coffee, alcohol, cannabis, and some other things. I quit because I wanted happiness to come from within. They say these substances aren’t addictive. I think they are. They were for me, and I didn’t want to admit that. There were individuals in my life whom I could only connect deeply with by sharing substances. When the effect wore off, the connection was lost. I wanted something more. Deeper, more meaningful, and something worth sustaining. People’s energy levels vary, but I am a high-energy beast. I realized I am a stimulant myself. When someone like me consumes external stimulants, it’s a complete overkill. Many people need stimulants to feel confident. I feel more relaxed and more like myself without stimulants.

I stopped wearing makeup daily because I didn’t want to anymore. I like my face the way it is. I stopped wearing a traditional bra. I always hated wearing a bra. It was so uncomfortable. Then one day, I realized I didn’t have to wear it, so I stopped. I quit social media because I didn’t want to wake up to a load of information I didn’t ask for. To this day, a few friends have asked me to come back to Instagram, which I find somewhat gratifying. But I feel really, really peaceful without it. And honestly, I don’t care about what’s trending. I used to think I should care, but I don’t. I’m very happy to be missing out.

I recently spent hours reducing my over 2000 contacts down to less than 200. Why keep them if I don’t even remember who they are? I still delete call and text history every day. I find it unnatural to keep a record of conversations. I believe in actively eliminating irrelevant digital content regularly. It’s the same as intentionally letting go of our outdated beliefs. It has to be done on purpose. However, when I meet friends or new people, I am very present. If they share stories and resources, I take them to heart because they came from the people I choose to keep and cultivate. I appreciate them sharing with me in person. This is how I learn in life.

There’s some Yorkshire racing every day of the week this week, so lets see if I can’t find a winner or two.

3.12 Redcar Perfidia looks to have a good chance here but would want bigger odds than 10/3 to get involved. So I’m going to take a chance on Fahey’s FAR AHEAD who despite form figures of 9066000 could have a say here. I’m happy to put a line through the 6000 figures as they were all on the AW this winter and he was beaten so far out of sight he sight I’m suggesting he hated the surface. I’m also willing to scratch his 906 finishes as although they were on the turf, they were also in much better races. So today, he’s contesting a class 6 handicap for the first time off a career low mark (21lbs lower than his best bit of form – 3L 6th at Thirsk) and from box 1 – which if he can get a lead like LTO, could be a big advantage. When I started writing this 15 minutes ago he was 16/1 but has since shortened to 10/1 so that’s what I’ll go with here. I wouldn’t take any shorter, personally. Obviously a big chance he’s just crap, but I’ll take it! FAR AHEAD // 0.5pt E/W @ 10/1 4 places (Paddy Power)

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Resilienz ist eine wichtige Ressource – gerade in Zeiten wie diesen. Dr. Hones drei Strategien können uns helfen, Resilienz aufzubauen.

Die neuseeländische Resilienzforscherin Dr. Lucy Hone weiss, wovon sie spricht. Nach dem Verlust ihrer zwölfjährigen Tochter entwickelte sie auf Basis persönlicher Erfahrung und wissenschaftlicher Forschung drei Prinzipien, die besonders in belastenden Lebensphasen Orientierung bieten – etwa bei Trennung, Trauer oder anderen Umbrüchen.

Erstens: Resiliente Menschen erkennen an, dass Leiden zum Leben gehört. Sie fragen nicht „Warum ich?“, sondern „Warum nicht ich?“. Diese Haltung schützt davor, sich als hilfloses Opfer zu erleben, und schafft Raum für Selbstwirksamkeit – auch in der Krise. Zweitens: Sie richten ihren Blick gezielt auf das, was bleibt. Dankbarkeit ist hier kein Zweckoptimismus, sondern eine bewusste Entscheidung, das Gute im Schlechten nicht zu übersehen. Dr. Hone empfiehlt, abends drei positive Dinge des Tages zu notieren – eine kleine Übung mit messbar positiven Effekten auf das emotionale Wohlbefinden. Drittens: Resiliente Menschen stellen sich die Frage „Hilft mir das oder schadet es mir?“ – etwa beim Umgang mit Erinnerungen, Selbstgesprächen oder Verhaltensmustern. Diese simple Reflexion verschiebt den Fokus weg vom Schmerz hin zur Selbststeuerung. Wer so denkt, gewinnt Handlungsspielraum zurück – und findet Schritt für Schritt zurück in die eigene Kraft.

Diese drei Prinzipien – Leid annehmen, Positives wahrnehmen, bewusst steuern – bilden ein tragfähiges Gerüst für mehr innere Stärke. Resilienz entsteht nicht über Nacht, aber sie lässt sich Schritt für Schritt kultivieren. Gerade in Zeiten von Umbruch oder Verlust kann sie zu einem Kompass werden, der hilft, neue Orientierung und Hoffnung zu finden.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Wissen nennen wir jenen kleinen Teil der Unwissenheit, den wir geordnet und klassifiziert haben.“ – Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Weniger Nachrichten konsumieren

Ständiges Nachrichtenlesen lenkt ab und kann deine Stimmung negativ beeinflussen. Begrenze deinen Nachrichtenkonsum auf feste Zeiten oder Tage, um deinen Fokus auf deine eigenen Aufgaben zu behalten.

Aus dem Archiv: Wie der Fokus auf Zahlen uns vom Wesentlichen ablenkt

In unserer digitalisierten Welt werden wir zunehmend von Metriken begleitet. Egal ob es die Anzahl gelesener Seiten, die Schritte auf dem Fitness-Tracker oder die Schlafstatistik sind – Zahlen und Daten sind allgegenwärtig. Metriken können uns helfen, Fortschritte zu sehen und Orientierung zu schaffen. Doch sie bergen auch Risiken, die häufig übersehen werden. Sobald eine Kennzahl selbst zum Ziel wird, entfaltet sie oft nicht mehr die ursprünglich beabsichtigte Wirkung.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter