⁇ 15:33 The bell that no one wants to hear
It happened on a Friday afternoon at 15:33. I was busy with questions for a beer tasting with kwis and felt detached from everything. In a few minutes, lightness changed to lead. Since that afternoon I have been writing, not to pity but to get my head and heart in the same rhythm. Writing is my way of forcing the incomprehensible into words and giving my thoughts a place where they feel less sharp.
“Life does not call in advance to ask if it is convenient.”
The Unknown Continent
The biggest unknown country we all know is our own head. A strange continent without a map. I've been there a lot lately. At the end of last year, I decided I wanted to change my career. I was done with Big Tech and with twenty-five years of Microsoft data identity. Mostly I knew what I didn't want anymore. At the same time, as a family, we had a year so full of bizarre events that I don't even want to repeat them. Not because I want to forget them, but because they are too much and too unlikely to explain over and over again. It was a shitty year and we still have conversations twice a week to hold the thread.
And just when we thought the storm was going down, cancer came around the corner and kicked the bottom out of us again.
“The inner world always remains open, even when the outer world collapses.”
⁇ The hill with the crack
In my head I see a vast plain with hills, caves and mist patches. I call that plain the Henrose Es. The hills are my sureties. The caves are the places where strange thoughts arise from which I do not know the source. The mist patches are spontaneous ideas that appear for a while and then dissolve again.
But one hill is different. It is a hill that looks solid from the outside but has a deep crack inside. There is a schism that draws me in two directions every day. On the one hand, I know I'm lucky. A favorable prognosis, only radiotherapy, reasonable odds. My ratio tells me that I cannot complain, that my situation is lighter than that of many. So I push myself up every day with the same sentence: It's okay, keep your perspective.
On the other hand, I want to be honest about how I feel. And honestly, that means I'm tired. That I rest a lot. I often do nothing because I can't do anything. That I'm not always brave. That sometimes I'm somber. Sometimes I complain more than I like. I can't understand why my battery is so empty.
And then comes the tricky part. There's a little bit in me that enjoys the attention I get when I complain. The tickets. The apps. The warm words. The feeling that people see me. That's nice. And that's exactly why it sometimes feels wrong. It's like I'm being unfairly rewarded for negativity. As if complaining becomes a kind of currency that generates sympathy.
My mind says this is human. My gut says it's complicated. In that crack are the two voices that both seem to be right and yet do not make peace. Like an internal Richter scale that pops out again with every new thought.
“Doubt is not a sign of weakness but of humanity.”
⁇ The professional hill
Another hill is my professional identity. That hill is a little further but is in sight every day. I want to improve the world. That sounds tough and idealistic but for me it is mainly a practical wish. I want to do work that is in line with my values.
My mind tells me that entrepreneurship gives me the freedom to make my own choices. To work on what I think is important. Determine my own path. Follow my own moral direction. I really believe that I can make more impact as an entrepreneur than as an employee who contributes to business goals that I can't always agree with.
But this year has made it painfully clear that entrepreneurship entails risks. Risks that affect not only me but also my family. Getting sick while you depend on yourself feels different than getting sick when your employer provides income and safety. My wife wants me to go back to work, and I fully understand that. As an employee, you are protected and unburdened. You don't wear everything alone.
I am between two truths. I want to improve the world and determine my own route. But I also want to give stability to my family. Until the beginning of 2026, I'm probably mainly working on recovery. Then I have to choose again. Employee or entrepreneur. Security or freedom. Structure or autonomy. I know what I want, but I also have a family that is more important than me.
It is a hill where certainties and doubts are constantly mingling with each other, as if the patches of fog and the rocks have decided to live together.
“You can feel two truths at once without one of them becoming invalid.”
⁇ The moral mountain
And then there is the highest mountain. The moral mountain. The massif that determines all my choices, irritations, ideals and collisions. The mountain I look at the longest and understand the least about. I want to improve the world and that sometimes brings a certain halo. But I know very well that it is also a form of selfishness. Because it feels good to do good. So somewhere I do it for myself.
“The true altruist is the ultimate egoist.”
My principles regularly clash with the reality of everyday life. I drive a hundred because that would be better for the environment while I know that that one electric car that drives ten kilometers per hour does not bring about any change. I do not fly out of principle but with that I deny my family that sun holiday in the Algarve or on the Turkish Riviera. My moral mountain is high and firm but sometimes it gets in the way.
And then there is the tension between my need to be honest and outspoken and the desire of others that I sometimes keep my mouth shut for the sweet peace. I see how others speak unfiltered about fortune seekers or profiteers and I have to remain silent for social reasons. That's scouring. That's rubbing hard.
Maybe I'm getting sharper because I have less energy. Maybe out of boredom. Perhaps because the world is currently a place where nuance becomes rare and I resist that trend. But my moral mountain is clear. It's right there. High, wide and unavoidable.
‘A value only has meaning if you keep following it, even when it rubs.’
⁇ The caves of contradiction
Deeper in the landscape are the caves where conflicting thoughts come from. I want everything. Write. Doing courses. Building Digital Sovereignty. And at the same time, I love to lie in bed every day until ten o'clock. The void has something relaxing. Nothing has to be nothing.
In these caves questions arise such as: I'm lazy or I'm sick. I don't do anything or I can't do anything. I lose time or I win rest. The answers shift every day.
“A question that does not find an answer can also be a mirror.”
⁇ The mist patches
Between the hills and caves there are patches of fog. Thoughts that I often don't know where they come from. I have been dreaming of a book about this inner landscape since I was a student. About the Henrose Es. That desire does not come from nothing. During my journalism studies I wrote a lot and with pleasure. Long pieces, short pieces, stories that didn't have to go anywhere but to the paper. It felt self-evident to write, as if words flowed as smoothly as coffee in the canteen.
But a book never came out. Who reads that.
Now I get compliments on my blog and immediately a new mist patch appears: Maybe that book should come. But is that thought of me or an echo of others who say that I write beautifully. I know how susceptible I am to external confirmation. So this desire is authentic or learned. A dew drop from the inside or a whispered drop from the outside.
“Sometimes a thought is a cloud and sometimes it turns out to be the rain you needed.”
⁇ For now
Many of these thoughts have always been there. The Henrose Es is not a new place. I just walk there more often than ever. My energy is low and my movement is limited but my head spins like a badly adjusted windmill. I have never wandered about the Henrose Es more often than this difficult year, in which facets of me are confirmed and debunked. As if my own inner landscape constantly tells me who I am again, to softly contradict it a day later.
It's a strange time, and I'm a little strange to myself. Maybe that's why I keep writing. Sometimes words are the only tool that works.
‘Heaviness may have light. And light sometimes weighs surprisingly much.”
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English (UK)