intro-Info
1. This text has been translated with AI, I did not bother to check it, so please reach out if something simply does not make sense.
2. Photos are all from same day, from Prauge 8, Karlin, and Žižkov
The offline project is unfolding. Even though I use computers and phones very little, ever since we arrived in Prague there has been an underlying theme in my life about using technology even less. Not all technology (it’s wild to even try to define what that would include), just this internet-related computer technology.
I bought a pocket-sized notebook in a supermarket the day we arrived in Prague, and I’ve been incredibly happy writing in it instead of reaching for my phone. It has also changed my entire journaling habit and is quietly helping me untangle the threads. I’ve started carrying my phone down in my bag. Just much more consciously being without and outside of these three: my laptop, my tablet, and my phone. At the same time, it becomes clear what these machines can do and when they play a healthy and uplifting role.
One of those is writing. Writing is a high form of thinking, and when I write long reflective and narrative texts, I’m not using pen and notebook—here, the keyboard, editing tools, and broadcasting on a blog work fantastically and are a game changer. I remember when I learned to type on a typewriter in school, back before the wall fell. A truly boring course in a basement room at a private school in Frederiksberg, modern machines with correction tape, and the whole challenge of typing asdfjklæ until it stuck, and then expanding one or two letters at a time, typing typing typing to teach the body how the fingers should move: copying texts—just see the letter and then the finger flies, without prior thought. A cover built for the keyboard on the machine so the keys became anonymous, and there was no possibility of cheating. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
Possibly the most boring elective you can imagine.
Possibly the most useful thing I learned in a school setting.
Today I’m sitting looking out the window at the trees moving in the wind and the small birds landing and taking off, the slow movements of the clouds and the line of light at the horizon, while I write to think, write to share, write because writing is a large part of what I have become.
The day before yesterday I found a print service that can help me get my electronically built texts and notes out so they become something I can hold in my hand. Yesterday I decided to read far more in physical books (I’ve read a lot on Kindle and tablet), and today I’ve moved my journaling process from an online platform that technically works really well to Apple’s own “Pages” and turned off Wi-Fi on my laptop.
Last week I turned off Grammarly on my online documents because the ongoing spellcheck and grammar check distract the thinking and creative process that writing is, and I now enjoy being able to unfold the power of thought independently of distracting elements.
All the time you have to adjust, all the time think, all the time keep your balance. As I see it, Jesus is right that “wide is the road that leads to perdition, and narrow is the path” we want to walk. In truth, there is no problem in that. The wide and the narrow path I personally experience more like a very sharp roof ridge. I think of Gaudí’s bodega, which lies by the water south of Sitges in Catalonia, a very beautiful house with a very tall and pointed roof: the balance of existence is walking along that roof ridge, lifted by something we don’t understand and in a balance that requires a certain momentum and a fair amount of trust, and what one might call the “wide road” is really the abyss that opens if you don’t just slide down the sides of the roof but actually fall all the way and lose the ability to climb back up again.
Technology keeps unfolding, and all that algorithm and AI and all the financial interests and superstimuli make it increasingly necessary to think and adjust. Fair enough. I like thinking, and I like reinventing existence both in big ways and small.
The analog versus digital attention brings many things into sharp focus. As mentioned, also when the technology is actually completely brilliant. My youngest daughter and I often laugh about my relationship with my iPad, because it is simply so boomer-like to be fond of your iPad.
I am fond of it because I can read PDFs and take notes. The liberating thing about PDFs—that I can download a text in a few minutes after spending very little time requesting it—sends me back to my student days on the edge of the new millennium, when you still had to go to libraries and sometimes all the way to microfilm technology, often “just” ordering copies of journal articles from universities in other countries and waiting weeks to receive brown envelopes with the material before you could move on. Honestly, how many hours were spent on that. I love my iPad because I can download a PDF in no time and start reading it immediately.
I can do that on a laptop too; the difference is that with the tablet model I have a pen and can underline and take notes exactly as in a physical copy. For my brain, which grew up in the eighties and nineties, it is simply part of my focus to sit with a highlighter when I read. For twenty years it has been an increasing conflict of interests to choose between the practical aspect of reading on a screen, the sustainability of not printing everything out, and the impossibility for me of understanding things I cannot write in. Write with a pen, mind you. It has to be in my hand.
This is a very long and very narrative text about what the world can look like for a thinking, reading, nomadic human being who turns 51 tomorrow. I wonder if anyone at all is still reading this far? Well. It’s beside the point.
Writing is a very high form of thinking, sometimes a bit long-winded. We are getting somewhere with the stories from Prague, the local, the travel narrative. Let me see:
The offline project, being analog, is unfolding beautifully. The presence grows. The calm spreads. The insights, the moments. And here comes the spiritual layer.
I have lost the thread, somehow, don’t feel particularly connected to the level of my soul at the moment, not well enough. Not really reading the signs, a bit overwhelmed, searching for that contact which is always there but which I forget to consciously tap into. Looking out the window in the morning recreates it, writing with my blue ballpoint pen anchors it. Tunes the brain, I am back.
The truths come drifting back like driftwood washing ashore, the things I already know appear and shine. The motto: Intention, attention, no tension stood strongly before me yesterday. Here is the story.
On a lovely day in our Prague life, I went to a hip art café with my two middle children, who are now taking formal education online, to concentrate on helping them finish some assignments. A fine exhibition about broken hearts in porcelain, leaning into the Japanese art of repairing broken porcelain in a way that makes it even more beautiful through the repair, and a really lovely coffee set the frame for a couple of hours of good focus.
But it threw me off a bit that my iPad, when I took it out of my backpack, was no longer accompanied by the pen, which is half of its technological advantage for me. I rummaged around in the bag and could establish that the pen wasn’t there, spent an hour when I got home: no Apple Pencil. Since then there have been two points promised to whoever finds mom’s Apple Pencil, we’ve taken the beds apart and the sofa, we’ve looked in the sewing machine box and in the fridge—and at the same time it makes no sense. The pen attaches and charges on the computer itself, and sits there with a not very strong magnet—so I am aware when I move the device that there is a risk I might drop this one half of the technology.
That’s why it was just as hard for me to accept that I had failed in this precision and attention as it was annoying that I couldn’t use the system. Searched and searched. For days. On Saturday I decided to buy a new one Monday morning if the pen wasn’t found.
I can work with manifestations, energies, vibrations, intentions—and you could actually say that this is the story of how I threatened the Universe into letting me find the pen. At the same time, I live by the principle of using what I have (look for what you need in what you have, as the slogan goes) and therefore spent Saturday evening watching very nerdy videos about building an Apple Pencil replacement yourself out of old ballpoint pens, bits of wire, cotton swabs, kitchen sponges, and aluminum foil.
You don’t just give up.
I built one Sunday morning. From a knitting needle, a kitchen sponge, some washi tape, and a knitting tool for putting on the end of knitting needles during transport. It worked, and I went off to a birthday party for a caricature artist in an unexplored neighborhood in Prague, right where the TV tower stands tall. Walked through an epic pedestrian tunnel through the mountain up into the higher part of the city, and took part in the festivities among the young people (the man turned 42, the answer to everything), and there was conversation, artists and academics, people from many countries, languages, small children, balloons, pizza. Very cozy.
There I was with my notebook and smiled, and lent my ballpoint pen to my daughter who was knitting and needed to make marks, and rummaged in my bag for another pen when I wanted to note something. In a strange place in the lining I found a pen, and lo and behold, my Fjällräven bag, which I’ve been carrying for two years, has an inner pocket behind another inner pocket, where the missing Apple Pencil had been hiding for well over a week. Gone but not gone.
A mentor we have says “Intention, attention, no tension” and speaks of what she sees as a universal manifestation principle: that everything plays together perfectly if you can know what you want (intention), can remember to do what you can and notice when you can do it (attention), and are not too attached to the outcome, not too busy “succeeding,” trust the process a bit, take it easy (no tension).
I say I threatened the universe into giving me my Apple Pencil back by setting a deadline of Monday morning, and I say that I removed the last bit of tension when I dropped it again and built an Ole Inventor version and solved the problem. With my knitting needle I would have been able to underline in the chapter on Kant, which I had to read for philosophy class Monday afternoon: that which was actually urgently important to me.
We left the birthday party when the number of balloon pops hit the limit for our sensitive nervous systems, and kitchen-duty time was fast approaching—but also in time to experience the Žižkov TV Tower, which was built under communism between 1985 and 1992, and later decorated and commented on by David Černý, whose eerie faceless babies crawl up and down the tower. You can see those same babies up close in a park in the center, and since we did that on a previous occasion, it was very clear to us which sculptures we were now seeing in a new context. The tower is futuristic, overwhelming, and very interesting architecturally, and naturally symbolizes for the Czechs a censored, propagandistic media stream. Today there is mini golf and a restaurant right under the tower, an art gallery and café in the box-shaped levels, and you can buy a ticket to see the view from the top. For our taste it was more than enough just to experience it.
The trip from Prague 8 where we live to Žižkov where the party and the tower were took us past the building supported by the female figure and through a very long pedestrian tunnel up to the higher-lying district without having to climb the cliffside itself, past a variation of the classic “man on a horse” and past both modern architecture and classical gems. It took an hour on foot, during which we talked, looked at blooming cherry trees, took pictures, and breathed in a densely packed life. The trip home via the TV tower gave us the experience of the historical lines and a conversation about whether today’s media stream is free of propaganda and thus the relevance of Černý’s babies, a strong (and unpleasant) experience of the principle “move away from negative energy” when we had to change direction suddenly and pick up the pace as a clearly disturbed man came out of a bar, smashed a large beer glass into the asphalt, emptied another, smashed that too while shouting and then began looking around for someone to direct the anger at. We took a tram and changed at a central station where a group of young men made me think of monks, because their large loose black clothes and the hoods pulled up in the sudden cold that cut through marrow and bone resembled the idea of a medieval habit. Got off at Palmovka, our local metro station, and caught a glimpse into a “second hand shop” that looked uncannily like a hoarder collection, then infinitely beautiful light through the newly sprouted trees and reflected in the glass facades of the modernist buildings right by the monument for the first 100 km tram line in Prague, while freezing in the spring cold we reminded ourselves and each other of the good old principle of keeping the wool undershirt on in all months that contain the letter R.
A little idea about writing about the Apple Pencil that allowed itself to be threatened into appearing and the TV tower that overwhelmed both in message and aesthetics has become more than four standard pages of stream of consciousness about both my world, the principle of offline life, the matter of both being strong in intention and letting go in energy, and all the impressions that city walks, adventure, exploration can give.
If anyone at all has read this far, then chirp. Honestly. Chirp. It would truly surprise me (and delight me).
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