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You sit in your familiar office or apartment. Outside the window the world is dull grey. Inside there is an itch. A nasty, aching emptiness, as if a raw wound were lodged inside you. It demands attention. It yells: "Something’s wrong! Do something, now!" That’s when he shows up. Our inner Foreman. The specialist who erects invisible fortresses,...
The answer doesn’t need an arsenal of external props-no money, no outside approval, no perfect setup. It’s already in you once you stop scrambling and start listening. You don’t need superpowers, piles of cash, or anyone’s permission to face what’s gnawing at you. It’s already there-just stop spiraling.
Let's be honest. Every one of us has made a promise and, three seconds later, thought, "Why on earth did I say that?" It's a universal human experience, like hunting for the second sock in the morning or craving junk food at one a.m. We like to split the world of promises into black and white: break it and you're "bad," keep it and you're "good."...
We cling to the old, to what’s familiar, even when it drives us mad, because we’re afraid of change. But you know — change is life itself.
Cashier Lena sat inside her plexiglass aquarium and watched “movies.” Eight hours a day the black river of the conveyor rolled past her, carrying other people’s lives shrink-wrapped in cardboard. The scanner’s monotonous beep was the only soundtrack. Lena was a seasoned viewer. She’d long since learned to call the genre from the opening shots....
Old Ivar sat on an upturned dinghy, mending a net with a thick needle carved from whale bone. The air smelled of salt, rotting fish, and cold water. In front of him, at the new pier, a twenty-year-old who’d come from the city for summer break fussed around his yacht-dazzling white, slick, flawless. Its name was Serenity. The kid found a tiny...
Before her, my life was a single-player game polished to a blinding sheen. I knew my map by heart: the gray subway line, the humming office open space, the three familiar bars that rotated menus every Friday. My skill tree had long been leveled to absurdity: “Sarcasm” at level 100, “Art of the impassive face” at expert, “Ability to tell good...
Listen. You wake up and the first thought is, "Something's off." Not with the world, not with the weather-it's you. Yesterday you decided to be perfect. You looked at your coworker Petya, apostle of clean eating, and thought, "There. I should be like Petya." And today you overslept, and the grated carrot salad you swore you'd eat for breakfast...
Inside each of us a civil war is underway. It is a quiet, exhausting battle we have fought since birth. On one side stands the person we want to be: polite, kind, generous, brave. The polished facade we show the world. On the other side sit the guerrilla units entrenched in the underground of our soul: Anger, Envy, Fear, Lust, Sloth. Our entire...
Fear of the unknown is only the shadow cast by our unrealized potential.
Kael hated this tree. The old elm his teacher, Elias, dragged into the workshop wasn’t a material-it was an insult. Its trunk ran crooked, twisting as if in a death spasm. Dark, almost black knots stared back like blind eyes. Deep fissures split the bark like scars. For a week Kael had tried to carve a falcon from it. In his mind it had to be the...
You've got a warm, purring bundle of happiness weighing a few kilos resting on your chest, and you think you're the one who took it in. What a grand, glorious delusion. We build starships, decode the genome, argue about postmodernism, while the leading Zen master naps at our feet and we never think to sign up for his class. And his curriculum has...
Ever happened to you? Someone throws a harsh line your way and you instantly counterattack with logic and facts, desperate to prove you’re right. Even if you win the argument, a bitter aftertaste remains. Why? Because you responded to the words, not the person. In that split second your psyche slammed shut inside a four-walled cell: “Incoming...
Perfection is a synonym for the end. It is the point after which growth is no longer possible.
You don't exist. What you call "I" is a pirated assembly of other people's ideas about success, installed on your factory hardware back in childhood. Clumsy, with broken drivers, but with a full suite of office programs: "Be convenient," "Don't stand out," "What will people say?" Your parents, out of immense, panicked love, were the first system...
At first, we are architects. We are born a wild, unmapped landscape. Somewhere lies a swamp of secret wants, somewhere cliffs of irrational fear, somewhere clearings of pure, causeless joy. Very early on, though, an inner perfectionist wakes up with a master plan for the build-out. He isn’t a tyrant. He’s a decorator. He undertakes the...
Old potter Kenji didn’t produce bowls — he carried on a conversation with clay. His workshop, smelling of dust and rain, was lined with shelves. They displayed not triumphs but scars: hundreds of cracked, lopsided, imperfect vessels. One day a young student, Ryo, arrived with a shining ideal in his head: a bowl thin as a petal and symmetric as the...
A man built the perfect cage for his canary. Every bar was measured. Every perch polished. He calculated the ideal distance to the feeder and the water cup. Everything was arranged so the bird would be comfortable. So her life would be fully predictable, safe, familiar. He loved his canary. He only wanted to protect her from the chaos outside. But...