“I can’t do this …” I heard myself saying to a friend 7 years ago, when my relationship broke. “For so long you said you wanted to go traveling. But there were all your ‘responsibilities’. They’re all gone. So…?”

Since I was a kid, I have been open and sensitive to my surroundings – when going into a conversation or an experience. Open to connect with the other one, the place, the culture. Feeling all the beings and also all the needs.

That’s when I started to take care of things I would see and feel. Of my family, my relationships or the mood in the room.

It is a skill, something valuable, I guess. “To be there” a friend told me recently when I questioned what I was doing, “maybe this is your role. To be there – for a person, a team, a farm, a landscape – for them in that moment of change, of growth.”

But did it become too much of “me”? Of the definition of myself?

It is hard to let go of roles, titles, and job descriptions we have given ourselves or which were given to us. It is hard to let go of tools we used to built our world with, even if we learn that they actually harm us. 

Why do we often need a Force Majeur to stop and think? Why do we so often still continue?

Patterns. Neural patterns can’t be overwritten, I learned recently. We need to write a new program and practice it in parallel until it becomes the new pattern. The new habit. 

That explains also why it is so freaking easy to fall back. The program is still there.

Over the last years, I repeated the pattern not just offline but also digitally when everything went remote. 

“Reading the room” becomes multiple times harder and absolutely exhausting.

I sensed so much for the outside that I forgot the inside. I didn’t take time to walk and be with me. Until my body said no where I couldn’t, Gabor Maté would tell me. 

6 years ago to the day I came back from traveling. I found quite a bit of myself back then. 

I guess it’s time to undefine myself yet again. Where my work will adapt to this sense of self. Where I won’t say ‘yes’ to many online meetings anymore.

Working less than before. Walking way more than before.

In conversation with people, places, community, and landscapes. 🌱