Time is flying! I already left Berlin after five weeks or so – but wanted to share a couple of visual bits and pieces with you from my stay there.

In other news, I am mostly writing on two things these days:

1. Weird stuff that might become a proposal for a PhD thesis one day. I got seriously inspired after attending an international seminar on political theory here in Cologne, so these thoughts need to be processed. If nothing else, it should at least turn out to be useful for TFA in the long run!
2. My first electronic guide! It’ll be all about getting things done in a smart and gentle way, while seeing the world. If you’re wondering about how to work on the road without missing out on your destinations, this will probably be your thing! More on this project soon – if you want to be the first to know be sure to sign up for Mails Beyond Rules!

Have a happy weekend, everybody!

It was quiet on The Friendly Anarchist since my book launch. After finishing the work, it somehow came natural to be silent for a while. During the last couple of weeks, though, there was something else to it: I wasn’t feeling at ease, and I wasn’t living tempo giusto – which is why I got lost for a while.

I didn’t enjoy launching the book at that date, because of the events in Japan. I felt it wasn’t a good moment, I felt there were more important things to write about, and I wasn’t happy to see the reaction to the catastrophe in much of the blogosphere, nor in the mainstream media – but I neither had a better idea about what to do.

After Japan, the more thoughtful responses and analysis seemed to get lost in an avalanche of pearl harbor tweets, pseudo-esoteric “universal justice” bullshit, and a political response of helplessness. Many news outlets seemed to be hoping for a rapid meltdown in Fukushima just because they wanted the scoop.

And then, there was so much more going on in the world in the last few months: The revolutions and uprisings in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Lybia, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, Iraq, Bahrein, Iran. The earthquake in New Zealand. The bombing in Moscow. The floodings in Brazil and Australia. In Colombia, the worst natural disaster in the country’s history took place without most of the world even noticing it.

Considering all the stuff that happened, I was simply tired. My capacity of processing all this information, the images, opinions, thoughts and discussions somehow had reached its limits. Uneventfulness seemed to be something thoroughly desirable, and this is, somehow, the flipside to living an interesting life.

Of course, ignorance doesn’t make things better. But sometimes, I feel like it’s preferable to shut up for a while instead of engaging without having anything to contribute. As I once wrote on these pages, there is a small but significant difference between being ignorant, and simply avoiding true but useless information. From a perspective of taking action, there’s also a difference between acting precipitantly just because we feel forced to act, and taking the time to reduce the noise, create a space for reflection, and then act accordingly.

Politicians generally suffer from a desire of doing the former. As do most people in social media and the news. If I look at their overall efforts in the last couple of months, I cannot resist the urge to call for a tempo giusto approach to internet technology and journalism.

In legal terms, we not only enjoy the right to express ourselves. As any viewer of TV police series knows, we also enjoy the right to remain silent. Maybe it’s a right we should exercise more often.

In the last couple of weeks, I felt the need to be silent for a while, and stand back. At the same time, I decided to focus on the many things and persons right in front of me that needed my attention.

As during last year’s Europe trip, there can be periods when it’s hard to be a serious blogger, tweeter, and emailer. Apart from the world events, this was due to mostly pleasant things, but also due to the plain and “normal” life that was happening beyond the screen.

Dedicating time to it was just what I needed, in order to get my head at least a little bit clearer. If we don’t commit to act on what’s right in front of us, we will get hung up in theoretical exercises that lead nowhere, looking for large-scale solutions we will never find anyway. Maybe, remaining silent and just working on smaller issues for a while isn’t the best thing we could possibly do, nor does it solve all of our problems. But at least, it’s better than joining the chorus of the songs the Screaming Bullshit Band is singing, and not really doing anything at all.

With this small rant, publishing will be resumed here on TFA. On Tuesday, we will look at life aboard a vessel on the Amazon, electric blankets, and lots of chicken. Thanks for sticking around, and, if I owe you a mail, it will arrive soon!

There’s no internet in Europe! People here still drive around exclusively in horse carriages. And they speak Latin! I had to send this post by snail mail to India, where my not-so virtual assistant transcribed and posted it to my blog!

I took a vow of silence! It’s a spiritual thing. I can talk and laugh and meet nice people, but I absolutely cannot blog. Apparently, this will buy me direct access to paradise.

My dogs ate my laptop! These cute little bastards. My large list of post ideas: Gone. All my drafts: Gone. My already edited, finished, and polished posts: Gone. All that was left were some aluminium crumbles, and a couple of letters from my keyboard.

Meh.
None of these excuses work. I always was a bad liar. So here’s the truth:

I wrote “the book.”
It took longer than I thought. (Actually, as we speak, it’s “still taking.”)

In the end, “the book” needed a couple of months for gestation. It took shape after reading the answers from last year’s reader survey – and I think it was worth the effort. Hope you will like it a lot.

“The book” even has a name and a release date now, and I’m glad to announce it here today:

It’s called Beyond Rules, and it will be published on Tuesday, March 15th.

The more I experimented and the longer I wrote this blog, the more I noticed that the problem with rules is not just one of submitting to questionable authorities. Even in the context of “your life, your rules, your pace,” (see the tagline!) rules are often simply not good enough: They are restrictive rather than permissive, they are stubbornly stable rather than adapting to changing real life situations. What’s more, they take responsibility away from the people, and this is nothing I’d like to promote when it comes to living a conscious and self-determined life.

“Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware,” Arthur Koestler wrote. If we unconsciously, yet unconditionally adhere to a fixed set of rules in our lives, the same thing happens.

More on that in the book, an excerpt of which I will publish here in the upcoming days, if my next type-written letter makes it to my Indian assistant.

In other news, I just traveled to Denmark, desperately wanting to see the sea, after living in Cologne, Germany during the last couple of weeks. Here, an ice-cold wind is blowing, but the North Sea is just beautiful, and inspiring me to get the last couple of chapters of “the book” written and edited.

I will be back to Cologne for the launch, and plan to travel to Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, Austria, and probably Southern France later in April and May. Let me know if you’re somewhere near and would like to meet up.

“The path is made by walking,” is a common saying. So if you move into new directions and explore undiscovered territories, the story goes, you will have to create the path by yourself.

There is another way to look at the path, though, and it’s helpful to meditate on that one when considering what happened in 2010 and when planning for 2011. It’s a simpler look, it’s very easy to get – but maybe it’s also a little bit more radical: There is no path.

Not only is there no path where no one walked before.
There is no path at all.

Of course, all of us are moving. And maybe you’ll move together with others, and create a new path as you move along. But that’s of second order. When considering that there is no path, it means that you are not obligated to get anywhere. Because you are already alive. And I think this is a useful insight to remember at this time of the year.

There are people who will hate me for writing this. They are young and ambitious (or old, and still not wise), and they don’t want to accept it: You have to plan, they say, you have to review! You have to build your business and your relationships!

They are right in that we all change, if we like it or not, and that we are better off taking control of these changes rather than hopelessly trying to maintain the status quo.

What I am advocating, though, is not resistance to change. I am advocating embracing the simple, yet totally astonishing fact that you are already complete. That you are already alive. That you are already here.

Life is not a race, and once you step back from the minutiae, you are free to enjoy it. You won’t be more complete once you make six figures. You won’t be more complete once you finally marry that beautiful girl, once you finally date that handsome guy, once you lose 20 pounds, once you get that new car, or phone, or house. (Or once you declutter and live with only 100 things.)

All of this can be nice. All of this can have some positive impact on your life. But if you aren’t self-sufficient and happy to be yourself, don’t expect these things to make a difference. If you are looking for illumination, for contentment, for happiness, all you have to understand is that you can have it right here, right now. In this very moment, reading this very sentence, in the very place you happen to be.

I am no stranger to paths, to planning, to dreaming. I wrote about travel as the human condition some time ago, and of course there’s something to that metaphor. Yet, if you look at time, what is the only piece of it that you’ll ever have?

• Certainly not the past! The past is history, created by whoever was powerful enough to write it. This is true for both accounts of the major events in world history and for our personal lives. You cannot always control it, but there definitely is some kind of struggle going on inside you, and the winning forces decide if you rather remember the beautiful vacations you took with your parents when you were 10 or the divorce they got when you were 12.

• Certainly not the future! Make no mistake here, especially during this time of the year: You can make all the plans and resolutions, set up all the meetings and accountability systems that you like – but if you get run over by a car tomorrow, that’s as far as you get!

This leaves you with the present. And when I invite you to just live in this present moment, I am not rallying against using these days to consider what happened, look back at what you did. And it’s good to make plans, to reconnect with your dreams, to create your personal agenda of what’s next.

Just don’t get overwhelmed by it, and don’t let the turn of the year paralyze you and lock you into a world of illusions and analysis. Instead, remember to enjoy these days with your family and friends, or even with total strangers, because that’s what life really is about, as far as I can tell.

Once you detach yourself from the details, from your hopes and plans, from your worries and regrets, there is no path. There’s only this very place and time where you are right now. And you are free to embrace it.

In 2011, I’d like to focus on making TFA even more useful and playful. I want to produce high quality content, and the results from my recent survey will be very helpful for this. Thanks to everybody who took the time to answer it! There were so many beautiful and inspiring remarks, and I really appreciate them. I promised a coffee to everybody taking part in it; please call me out on it whenever we meet! (I mean it!)

Also, there were some people who wrote they never got in touch personally because they were too lazy or too timid. I’d love to exchange thoughts with you, but as the survey was anonymous, I can’t take the first step. If you read this, please feel free to send a mail at any time you feel comfortable.

I am currently planning a trip to Europe for February in order to enjoy the change of the seasons from winter to spring. Before leaving, I will enjoy the heat of Colombia for the next couple of weeks. Currently, I am at a beautiful hotel right at the beach of Cartagena, writing and enjoying the December winds and the sea with my wife, who will probably stay a little longer.

For the New Year, I wish you to find the balance between idleness and action, and the power to change whatever you want to change in your life, moment by moment. Take nothing for granted, and remember that all you have to do is being yourself. As it says in the TFA tagline: It’s your life, and you are free to live it at your own pace, by your own rules! Thank you, again, for being around!

As a former telephone pollster, I know one thing: We all love surveys! Seriously, I remember how delighted people were that my bosses considered them sufficiently stupid to not remember which car model they had bought only two weeks earlier.

As a consequence, I had to read a large list of all the models the respective car company was offering at that time to my interviewees – from subcompacts to SUVs. You can imagine that people were thrilled to spend their precious time like this, and I doubt they ever accepted doing another survey again.

Even better was the huge survey we did for a German department store chain. It was so “well” designed, that they obliged us to ask every contestant about his opinions on every single department, even if they had never visited it in the the first place. Asking 80-year old men about their thoughts on the lingery section was always great fun. A complete interview took about 45 minutes, and I would like to use this occasion to ask anybody for apologies who actually played the game until the end: You helped me pay my rent for the three months I worked with those idiots, before I managed to find a decent student job. I owe you a coffee!

Now, because of our inherent love for surveys, I decided I’d do one. It’s not a 45-minute department store marathon, mind you – and there will be no questions about your car model. It’s actually totally friendly anarchistic, and it will take you between 4 and 5 minutes (I just stopped it and it took me only 3; but then, I invented the questions).

What’s more, there’s a free bonus: If you nice people answer my questions, I will answer yours. And provide you with a bucketload of new and interesting content here on the site during the upcoming months. I have almost a hundred post ideas outlined, and those would take me about two years to write and publish. So I’d like to prioritize!

Thus, I’d really appreciate it if you took the time to answer my questions here. (I’ll owe you a coffee, too!)

(The survey is now closed. Thanks to all participants!)