I have a tendency to overthink. Outside I am calm, and on the inside I am an optimist, happy and in harmony with the world most of the time, but whenever change, the unexpected or the uncertain occur, my inner voice starts talking frantically until either it comes to a believable solution or exhausts me for the day. More often than not it is actually pleasant to listen to it, it's a smart, funny and goodhearted fellow who just wants to make sure things turn out okay. It might be my greatest asset, because when I have to explain things, ask questions, like, love and be passionate and write, I just have to remember what it has come up with long before any of these situation occur for real. I noticed quite recently, that what I love about reading and writing for example, research, figuring stuff out, is that conversation I can have with my inner self, a peaceful and beautiful experience that I tried to subdue once, disappointed with my intellectual performance, only to find myself in a state of boredom, a disheartening emptiness I never want to feel again. It has it's weaknesses though. Some situations are unsolvable, uncertain and unstable. Maybe most are. Here, the voice can run in circles forever and lead me into spirals of exhausting despair. I have to cut it short, focus on something else, simplify and detach. One of my revelations of 2024 was to find out that this is exactly what I have been doing for most of my life: I was detached and kind of aloof, finding comfort in a world of abstract ideas that only I inhabited and limiting unconsciously the impact of everything and everybody else. A big shift occurred when this world suddenly turned against me and instead of a happy place became a prison through whose bars I began longing for a rich and colorful world passing by. It took me a while to adjust, taking time for myself, opening myself up to strong emotions and embracing the concept of friendship as a way of life and I am feeling happier and probably will end up having a bigger impact on the world, that is an important part of me considering my life a fulfilling experience. But it comes with a new difficulty: added complexity. Emotions, more people, more curiosity and independence means nothing is foreseeable anymore and my inner voice is like a hamster in a wheel, exhausting itself running nowhere. I needed ways to calm my mind without numbing it, meditation one could call it, although I do not much care for sitting still in some forest and humming religious line in some language I do not understand. Instead I tried to understand most regular activity as different forms of first, calming down aimless inner monologues, and second get more productive in the process. It turns out physical training, a simple repetitive tasks that nonetheless can set you on a path of satisfying progress for years, is one such way. After a while, you can focus on any part of your body and even how you perceive yourself from the outside, meaningfully, while getting stronger and healthier. You can even determine your state of excitement just by breathing or choosing the degree of difficulty of your exercises. It is meditation because you can direct your mind and body to do exactly what you want, with practice. Other tasks are like this, language learning, writing, entering numbers in a spreadsheet. Simple, easy to understand, though by repetition and over long periods of time you reach surprising goals and once you make sure that you can, without any effort, always put yourself in a situation where doing a series of simple things will lead you in a short amount of time to a thing that is just slightly out of your reach, this too becomes meditative because your mind is focused and directed, you learn to recognize direction! Jokingly I often say that I open up a spreadsheet when I am melancholic or a bit hopeless, because it makes me happy. But it really does. It is the simplest thing in the world, again, but tracking a bunch of numbers and putting them into very straightforward mathematical correspondence can have a huge effect. Clarity of mind, ease of use, simplified decision-making, changing habits, progressing in a game, in sports, financially. The touch of objectivity is like touching a large marble plate in the middle of summer, refreshing and elegant. But all of these activities can also be managed badly and become an unconscious slog, a current dragging you to exhaustion and be almost disorienting. I used to write this way and I stopped because it was excruciating and I couldn't concentrate on larger outcomes, like writing a whole book. Programming, making music and thinking without any way to control the flow of thoughts. All the same. This happened yesterday. I was doing some spreadsheet work to calm myself down. I have a lot of feelings to process lately. It happens anyway but I do not want to focus on it, hearing my heart beat, that narrow feeling pressing down on my chest. I did some interesting things but the clarity soon washed out and became a smudged pandaemonium of what ifs and could insteads that at some point my girlfriend sad enough is enough, let's go out. We grabbed some bubble tea, walked around town. There was apparently a concerned citizen asking people for donations or signatures because war, disaster and destruction or somesuch. I didn't notice. A bit further we heard a "buh!". Nothing. "buh!" Maybe a crazy person doing their shenanigans, but no it was in fact a friend of ours, complaining now that I just went on without greeting her. I didn't see, my bad, what are you up to?, buying a bag for her daughter because she always takes her mom's, she's like 8 and looks like a smaller version of her mom, like those Russian dolls. On we go, past that preaching lady again, didn't notice her even the second time, up to the cathedral where we set down on the stairs, the last bright yellow sunrays descending on a very empty town, clouds in the background rushing from left to right like throwing knives at a medieval fair. A woman in a red coat appears way down where the fountain is, approaching, accompanied by a man and a little brown curly dog running around like crazy. Must be very young! The couple reaches the bottom of the stairs that lead to the church in 3 blocks interspersed with 3 little terraces. They throw a blue bouncing ball up one set of stairs, the dog runs up, catches it jumping and makes himself very small, very flat on the terrace. Then it let's the ball run down to the men, wiggling it's tail. On the terrace, the same game: dog runs up, ball is thrown, this time it doesn't catch it on the first try: "raté!" he has a low sonorous voice, then he throws again. And again. Dog jumps, dog catches, or not ("raté!") a ball of joy. What's his name? Madelaine, it's a girl, one and a half years old, "she really takes a liking to you!", the man says as Madelaine jumps all over us, so small and light, "She found that ball behind some bush and now it's her favorite toy", the lady in red adds "Madelaine likes playing with us, racing with this old man", he says, "winning of course!" "That's what she likes I bet", A makes everyone chuckle and then they move on. Once they walked a way off, A catches some pictures of them. "For a poem", she says. For years I have been the one just observing, feeling good seeing without judging, and now she explains to me that she does it to. It makes her happy to see little scenes like this in the world. What happened? I sent the picture to my friends, sharing a little bit of existence, at peace. My new friend S immediately replied "eg elska hunda!". A couple of days ago, I had a nice chat with her, she likes movies and architecture, has lots of thoughts about everything and seems like a little bit of a nerd. She's also hurt. In recent years, she had been cheated by 2 men, during Covid her father and 15 year old dog had died, lifted up by her best friend who also had become her boyfriend, "we wanted to go to Paris", she told me, "and I challenged him to take an original picture of the Eiffel tower", "Like what?", "He wanted to do a handstand in front of it, his hands forming the same silhouette." At some point I invite her to come explore Japan with me, of course I really can't because she's looking for her significant other, but I have the feeling we're becoming friends, exchange WhatsApp. On her profile picture it's her doing the handstand on the Trocadero and I'm joking around: "So you won, he couldn't do it?" "During Covid he had to go home to his parents, couldn't get out in time. He was Ukrainian."