Back during 2020 coronavirus lockdown I started posting short impressionist poems/stories/thoughts, because the government mandated quarantine slowed everything down and created a lot of space in my life. As someone who is always running at 110% with a lot of different projects and a rather demanding job as well, I tend to need a a large chunk of physical and mental space to be creative, otherwise my creativity ends up confined to dancing as my chosen form of exercise, problem solving at work and day dreaming during my longer walks.

At the beginning of 2026 I set myself some goals and I’ll tell you all about how well I did at the end of the year. The goals were 1 published blog post, 1 new experience and 1 non-fiction book per month. We are now halfway through the year and I can already tell you that some of these new experiences have evolved into habits. One of the rather indulgent ones is getting a myofascial massage semi-regularly and it is paying off big time, beyond the benefits on my body (I highly recommend these 2 magical massage ladies).

Getting a massage creates a lot of life space in very short time. Some of my best ideas and unexpected solutions to problems I didn’t even know I had have landed in my head like airdropped bombs during these massage sessions. Most people say they come up with their best ideas in the shower, but showers have always been too stimulating for me – while my body relaxes under the hot water, my mind doesn’t float, but a massage takes care of both. So today’s post is a stream-of-consciousness impression during my walk back home after a massage, one that begged to be written down but that I wasn’t sure if I should post at all:

The sun is burning down hard on my back through my thin black t-shirt and my mind is automatically calculating the optimal route through patches of street shade somewhere in the background – I am grateful that doesn’t require active effort. My shoulders are not slouching under a month’s worth of sitting in stiff office chairs and endless responsibilities. Every breath into my lungs expands fully and my consciousness expands with it, taking in all the details around me. There’s a large, proud sunflower growing out where the sidewalk meets the edge of a stone fence block. Someone took the time to tie it to the fence post so that it can grow and reach the sun one day. Maybe I should take a photo to share it with my people, but my feet have already taken me past, onwards to that interesting glimmer of sunlight reflected on the green river in the shape of a heart. There’s a water bowl for animals out on a rusted windowsill because we are in the middle of a brutal heatwave and a blackbird is bathing in it. It’s the little things like these, small signs of human kindness that make me absurdly happy and hopeful that we can survive the dumpster fire our world politics have lit up in the form of climate change. “Boil the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me” goes that Firefly theme song.

The world is full of everyday miracles, but we must be in the right mind to receive them. Some find their reset in prayer and meditation, but it is hard to pray to entities you don’t believe in and meditation, while useful, has always brought only clear-cut, cold insight for me. Meditation gives me access to the void where my mind can rest, while full body relaxation, when both my mind and body are aligned, brings me lightness and the space for exploration. Maybe I am doing it all wrong, but my thoughts don’t flow if my body is blocked with residual stress – they buzz a million miles per hour and while that chaos can be harnessed into focus and conventional productivity, it is much harder to force it into the softness needed for creativity, where the words flow and the images paint themselves in real time behind my eyelids.

I used to find my reset in that quiet post-exercise exhaustion, but it seems that massage presents a gentler shortcut. A peculiar side-effect occurs during reset times, when my mind is calm and my body is free: I shed the weight of other people’s gazes and expectations. After a massage I am too relaxed and after a workout I am too exhausted to care if my hair is messy, if the imperfections on my face are not perfectly covered up, if I am walking around like a happy zombie in the worst outfit known to humankind. I feel as if I am one of many, ordinary and unnoticed, and yet that is when I am most myself; temporarily free of the female burden of presenting our best selves to the world and the fear that everyone will see if we don’t.

We had a conversation at work the other day whether we humans are an embodied system, i.e. if our mind is the product of our physical bodies interacting with the environment, or if our intelligence is pure and can be separated from the substrate of our bodies. As an engineer I don’t believe that we can just upload the signals of our consciousness into a machine and remain the same. The limits of our thoughts and self-expression are defined by the words we know and the languages we speak and our bodies and minds are shaped by the type of information we can process. We are what we consume. A different substrate, no matter how superior, will inherently process different signals and define different boundaries for the world that is us. Different is not always bad, but it is different. There’s probably art and soul in binary too, but we are too limited to perceive it.

Some people are limited in human too, and it’s those people that set the limits on the rest of us. They are the ones that remind us when we are too much – too loud, too quiet; too colourful or too dark, too boring or too strange; too fat, too thin, too lost in our thoughts, too sexy or too invested in our passions. They are the external agents of the inner moderation police that patrols the undercurrents of our minds, making us question and doubt when we are trying out something new or sharing something vulnerable. Is there any worth in posting my impressions on my blog? Will people read this and find it a waste of their time; should I always deliver value with practical travel posts and unconventional experiences? What makes one experience more worthy of sharing than another? Entire books have been written as streams of consciousness and Trainspotting was the pulse of its generation. Books are art, right? I’m not Irvine Welsh, but there’s a Slovenian on Instagram that I admire very much for posting curated, unedited excerpts from her diary and when I read them I always think it’s art. Must there be value in personal art? Is there any other kind?