Drowning in the City 🏙️

I‘m breathing everyday life again. It's a breath of fresh air, considering that I have only recently returned from a trip that lasted four and a half months. After weeks of travelling—of packing, of unpacking, of arriving in new places, of getting used to new environments—I was grateful to have some stability again. Routines made a comeback!

There's exercise for instance. I've reached a point, where not doing exercise is seemingly tearing my body apart (yes, yes, the forties are approaching). The regular morning workout does help, a routine that was difficult to keep up during the trip.

Then there's writing. Before returning home, I was looking forward to spending more time on it. In actuality, writing stopped working for me almost to the day that I came back. I've been at this point before, and I thought I can handle it. But when my mind is so clogged up, there's absolutely nothing I can do to get my thoughts back in motion.

Then there's AI. Sigh. I'm currently on a job hunt and I considered this time to be perfect to get a better grip on vibe-coding, vibe-designing, vibe-everything—the things that my future job will expect me to be good at. But at the mere thought of the "new way of doing things", I recoil. I've been having my objections with big tech for years—that's just who I am: looking for software alternatives, swimming against the stream, thinking maybe a little too much about how we use software in general. I haven't found a way to fit AI into my way of being a user.

Slowly, I understand that this breath of everyday life has a way of suffocating me. Drowning me even. My thoughts are going in circles and I can't escape. At night, I rack my brain. Why can't I write? What's keeping me from putting my mind in order? I think about AI and why I haven't picked it up yet as the world apparently expects me to. Sigh.

A breath of fresh air

A month into this state of mind, my dimension of thinking stretched a mere circumference of three kilometres. What to do with myself? Where to go? How to bring new perspectives in? One weekend, my friend Chris had an idea to leave the city. To grab our bikes, cycle for half a day, camp in the green and cycle back the day after. With a mind this wasted, never in my wildest dreams could I have thought of that. Never!

But then, something happened that I wasn't expecting. One morning, I was able to think straight again. I was able to gather ideas for a future hiking trip. Suddenly, it was all so easy! Even more surprising, after weeks of yet another writer's block, I regained the ability to write. The ability to articulate my thoughts, put them down to paper (or into an editor) and be happy with the result. The prospect of leaving the city appeared.

Two days later and I had left. The outskirts of Southwestern Berlin are made up of calm forests and cool lakes. Foxes bark at night (yes, they bark and finally I've figured out what the fox says). I take a deep breath—the air is pretty fresh around here. It's not everyday life I'm breathing. This change of scenery is what I so desperately needed.

It's strange that the sense of drowning that I felt while being in Vienna was remediated by being in Berlin, a city two times larger. City or not, being in a different place was what had my mind function again. Being out of the environment I know inside out. Thinking different thoughts, having ideas again, having a perspective! And so, the Blissful Travel Mind returned, a state of mind that has dragged me out of despair on several occasions in the past.