Everywhere you look in our world there is a manifestation of a mind. Human for now. This becomes especially evident once you go out to places that are not run by the people who dominate the current state of things. In an important center of attention, change happens very fast. Buildings and streets change, people come and go, everything is in constant flux. By the time a thing gets built it is already obsolete and dragging behind the rush of ideas, freely combined. Some things remain, nothing get's completely replaced and the patient observer can see the alternative, obsolete, unsuccessful and faded anyway. Outside of these centers, you have more time to confront these other types of realizations. Living in Le Puy was such an experience for me. A small town, running a long with it's own speed. There is still ample change but it is not of the robot-making kind. People open businesses, sometimes several, settle down, start families. One friend get's the chance to transform a roman church into a home, another is baking bread at the origin of a pilgrimage route that had helped him get his life in order. Medieval houses light up in winter, when you feel the coziness and warmth of the yellow lighting inside through the haze of your condensing breath. They revive like grandpa's eyes during the yearly renaissance enactment. You look at an art nouveau distillery in bad shape and understand better than on the streets of Paris that a whole life aesthetic has long been put to rest, old shop fronts tell you about a time where this was the center of life for someone, where they would dress, drink, shop for radio receivers, repair watches, bicycles, sewing machines. And the homeless tell relatable stories. Some are poor, others disappointed by life, one woman took the wrong kind of mushroom and another could never overcome his inner anger. In one street a man will slowly patter by, Indiana Jones' hat, a cigarette defying the banality of life firmly lodged between thumb, index and middle finger. He never speaks a word, always smiles, his face always sad. He will lean against a trash bin, as my gf observes, what is he thinking about? Sunbathing in front of the bakery, carrying a round of cheese somewhere into the lower city. While I am sipping a V60 and chatting about Japanese watches and Pokemon cards. I wrote somewhere that minds are like bubbles that touch but never intersect. But they do touch. Bubbles form facets, perfectly flat walls. I don't know the physics behind it but minds have a similar mechanism. We're not just some blob but rather shape facets like gem-stones on our surface. They allow us to fit better together, to reflect more, to deflect even. We are all multifaceted beings, a quality that is steadily increasing. Nowadays you can, if you wish, in one life be man and woman, office employee, investor artist and goat herd, you can be king in one realm and a nomadic hero tasked with helping anyone in need in another. This freedom depends on how serious we take imagination, how much time we can spend outside of the primary value system of society and how fast information flows. We're rapidly progressing on all these fronts. Now with the recent technology I can check a mathematical proof, sketch a game and improve my business in one week. The more simultaneously valid ways of living we have, the less consequences matter. These are already steps on the way to that fabled, science-fiction immortality where death is overcome. Something always changes, so even if I conserve my body and experience for 1000 years, I will not even be the same tomorrow. But what is so appealing about that vision is freedom from consequence - body, time, opportunity, choice does not matter if you can just try again. And more possible actions in less time accomplishes the same effect. Maybe we will one day be able to reconcile the human condition with the animal mind: act moment by moment and still accumulate coherent work over time. Or rather, let accumulation over arbitrary stretches of time be equivalent to the immediate power of a moment of life. Things and bodies, are just extensions of mind. That shop front or cigarette tell me something about the presence of another, that face and smell, that building. The pale winter light enrobes that girl's clavicle like the velvet cloth I would like to lay her on for no other reason than the concordance of light, shoulder and mood. Something has been and something still is. It is recognizable for me because it is a facet of some unknown mind that allows some of me to see my own reflection and another part to get refracted inside. In that moment of recognition, I can not float above time. I am very much confined to a small moment, as long as it takes to process my thoughts, maximum reality, me, almost me, not me at all. Being a floating bubble without a clear path elsewhere, morphing in and out of the world to establish understanding, is a lonely endeavor. Maybe you'll morph into a good place or you'll fade right into death. But shaping a side to slide right next to some other is a wonderfully concrete act of two. I don't know what's behind that face or facade but I know there is something. I am also undoubtedly connected. What I'm being sent is real but I will shape it with my own inner state. And the other will do the same. Even though we never know what's inside, we are for a brief moment both shaping the world of mind, bending, twisting and scaling together a shared distortion and when we leave, a trace of our encounter will linger. A memory of our meeting is a monument of ideas, but maybe we etch our names on the underside of the table or conceive a child at that very spot to send into the future?