.SOMETIMES RAW.

So far, Vienna is awesome and this city is everything I always dreamed of. Art, entertainment, peace, quiet, culture, books, readings and all for a reasonable price. Vienna has me covered. Also, as a Ph.D. student, I have a student ID. Someone asked me the other day if the area, city or place someone lives in is an indicator of the person’s success. More specifically: Does someone choose to sit in their backyard on a farm on a warm fall day in *insert rural area* doing nothing because they are in peace with themselves and feel fine just sitting with their thoughts, or does one sit in their backyard because they don’t have the capability, motivation or are afraid to live in a different place, to go places, to see other things, to explore and discover? “How did you just leave this small town and move to another country or even a bigger city,” a friend asked me.

I have to back up a tiny bit. I love peace and quiet and rural lifestyle. This is how I grew up. But I also love the thought of being able to go out and have opportunities. I moved from Coburg to Munich, from Munich to New York, from New York to Canada and from Canada to Vienna. I grew up in a place where there were porches aplenty. A few months after I turned 17, I left my hometown Coburg chasing my own version of success. At that time, success meant to me passing Police Academy to become a Police Officer. I had an awesome job and made Big City. I felt successful and fulfilled. And I lived in a big(ger) city. My dream.

The closer I get to 40, the more curious I am about the way people in my life mark their own successes. Take most of my friends, who remained in my hometown while I loved being away in my teens and eventually racing after various career milestones at the United Nations in New York. One of my friends back home has two children and lives in this awesome farm house which has a porch for sitting. It would be impossible to say which of us is more successful because it is simply not objective. We have both put tons of work into making our respective dreams come to fruition. Despite our polar-opposite journeys, we are both motivated, busy, and capable because whether you choose to live in a big city or rural areas, there is always the potential for reward. That is important to remember. Let me tell you, your life is not bad just because you chose to stay in that town to build a life for yourself and your family. If it works for you, then that is fine. It didn’t work for me, so I left. Simple as that.

In the past, I have wished some of my friends and I shared similar paths so we could have grown in the same direction and swapped advice along the way, but now I find solace in our differences. But all this ensures me that we are living our lives as intended. To look around, to realize and acknowledge that everyone can find success, regarding the size of their goals or where they live is key. Thinking this way can be incredibly reassuring because it means your motivations are yours and yours alone. Meditating on a porch and living in Midtown Vienna are two extremes of what it could mean to succeed. Ask yourself if you are happy where you are, right here, right now and what you really crave. Some of my friends back home seem like they are grappling two things right now: What it means to be successful (and work yourself to death) and where they want to live. I think it will be difficult for anyone to parse either until they reconfigure their definition of success into something more personal. Working my ass off somewhere versus slaughtering a pig in a little village are two commercial extremes of what it could mean to succeed. Until you establish your own definition, I think these will continue to feel inadequate to you. What does success mean to you? What do you really want? You are never stuck.

So, what do you want? Move to Vienna, too? Come and visit me. More specifically, what do you want right now? Look at your life; really examine it. Are you happy? Are you alone or with family? Are you stuck at work? Are you bored? Are you calm? Are you exhausted? Are you one step away from burnout or nuclear meltdown? Is the reality of this life crisp in your mind or more like a scene out of a sad movie? Do you want art, culture, artistical intercourse, Opera, entertainment, excitement? If you are finding it hard to answer these questions, I suggest you start to write or journal. It helped me immensely to list everything I want, then circle the things I desired the soonest. Then look at these words and link them together, considering the resources you will need to achieve some measure of them. Get literal: Are your goals related to a specific industry/company that operates out of a certain city? And if so, does that city conflict with any of your other goals? How do you feel? Have you felt any of these things before, and if so, how? My lists usually never go according to plan, but asking myself these questions helped me tap into my own desires, instead of looking to everyone else’s. Keep in mind that you can be successful and valid and fulfilled without ever leaving the country, state, or town you were born in.

These days, what does it mean if I woke up and craved the pace of my hometown? I would buy a train ticket and be home in four hours. Would I judge myself for returning to the place I was once so desperate to leave? No way. This is and always will be my Homebase. Where we live(d) and grew up is a large part of our identities, unpacking our thoughts about where we call home will always be a complex and deeply personal process. Am I successful? Is my life perfect? Nope. Far from it these days.

Sometimes, for some people, their most potent version of fulfillment cannot happen without a drastic life change. If you have those feelings, it is a matter of assessing how hard you want to work to make it happen, and sometimes, making peace with the fact that your other goals (porch/terrasse-sitting) might just have to wait a little. Listen to your gut and heart. Those organs will will tell you.

We all have illusions and dreams. Some are realistic, others rather not. We all have wants and needs. Some are realistic, others rather not. But first, we need to know what we want. This can go on for years and for many of us it already has and you may be past this step. So that when you finally do settle on an ambition of some sort you are so grateful to feel the desire that you want to hold on to it at all costs, and the thought of heading back to that earlier, more hopeless space is enough to drive you forward.

Be sure the ambition is lofty: why would you settle? And then strive for it. Say, for example, your goal is to be a [insert anything here] writer. Set all sorts of mini-goals along the way and celebrate each post as you pass, though use it only to propel you on to the next one. At first the posts are fairly easy to pass and you run by them with less, but before long the years are going by and the posts seem farther apart, take much longer to get to, and, in fact, there is just a random splattering of them out there, not in a line, maybe some of them hidden or not on your plane of field at all but on some other plane you cannot get to, and you are sick of trying. After all, what is the point, right!?

More years pass and you are wandering the desert alone, picking up rocks, your guide is lost or was never there, your gratitude for feeling desire is waning. What is so great about wanting when what you want is so elusive and in any case why did you want it to begin with? You forget what it was like to not know what you want, and you find yourself drifting back to that space again, although you have come so far, have passed so many posts that you don’t know where you are now, have no courage to go back and to take another direction entirely – why should you if this is what it comes to? Besides, you are so old and tired, right?!

It was nice to have once wanted, you think (though you are fooled), maybe you could just sit down in a grassy field (if you can find one out there, unlikely, maybe some gravel) and reflect on what a fine job you once did, and look up at the sky. Were they illusions? You hadn’t thought so. You could have sworn they were more rugged than that. But it turned out not to be so. A few heavy showers of rain washed them away. A few earthquakes came along and swallowed them. Or, according to my son, a volcano erupted and wiped it all away.

“Solitude,may rest from responsibilities, and peace of mind, will do you more good than the atmosphere of the studio and the conversations which, generally speaking, are a waste of time.” – Louise Bourgeois

The move to Austria is done and another big chapter in my life began. For me, after all this stress, it is important to spend time alone and to reflect on what just happened. I read an article a while ago that artists throughout time have pontificated about the benefits of spending time alone as well as the lonely patience required to make art. I believe it is important for anyone to spend some quality time alone because it simply feels good and our batteries are recharged. Yet despite the long-praised benefits of alone-time on our practice and creativity, the right sort of solitude can seem elusive to many.

Some people forgot how to be alone and spend time with themselves. Sara Maitland writes in How to be Alone, “How have we arrived, in the relatively prosperous developed world, at least, at a cultural moment which values autonomy, personal freedom, fulfilment and human rights, and above all individualism, more highly than they have ever been valued before in human history, but at the same time these autonomous, free, self-fulfilling individuals are terrified of being alone with themselves?”

What do you associate with being alone? Many times we mistake being alone with doing nothing; which is actually totally fine, too. The problem is that we allow our work, social and family schedule to zap our alone-time. Endless opportunities for distractions mean that when we are alone, we are not truly alone – we have the world at our fingertips, and opportunities to compare ourselves and our work with each scroll we take through our social media newsfeed.

“I think we live in a world where we overburden ourselves not just with work commitments but social and family commitments, and that level of duty and obligation, and we completely forget to send time on our own and ourselves.” – Jull Stark

So, how do each of us go about finding solitude in our day to day lives? I did a little bit of soul-searching to find the benefits in spending time alone, the challenges that can be faced and how things can be prioritized. I am basically musing on the importance of alone time and how to secure it.

Solitude Cycles. Loneliness is a sign that you are in desparate need of yourself. I love spending time with friends, my partner, my family but I really need to be by myself, too. Time alone basically means to me to have peace and quiet to write. I will have really productive phases where I stay up all night. It seems a bit mysterious, the coming and going of it, but in general, I tend to want to be alone a lot. I need that alone time to work, think about things, do research or read up on things that are interesting to me (Süddeutsche Zeitung in the morning, Georg).

Scheduling Alone Time. I need time to dream, relax and create. Jill Stark says it best, “Time for myself is one thing that I factor into my week as much as I can. Even though I live on my own and I could say I always have time on my own, it’s a very different thing to put it in the diary as you would if you were meeting a friend or going on a date and nothing gets in the way and you don’t cancel on yourself.”

Acknowledge Distractions. My friend(s) call(s) me to go out for Pizza/Pho in the evening? Do I really have to get X, Y, and Z done today? If yes, stay in and work! If not, go out and have fun. Life is too short. Usually, I can block the world out easily; a good pair of headphones helps in most cases. I need to be alone to allow all of my daydreaming to create new works. I do think it is essential to discuss ideas with others and that can often lead to surprising outcomes, but the intimate core of my work comes from quiet times at my desk. Sometimes just sitting and staring at what is around my living room leads to the most exciting new connections.

The importance of doing nothing. Sometimes I literally do nothing but stare at the sky. Or I lay in a hammock all afternoon, enjoying the sun, reading a book. Can you do this? How does it feel? Are you comfortable? “I know this sounds really alien to us in this world where we are constantly distracted, but actually just sitting and doing nothing can be really helpful – and literally nothing, not reading a book; just sitting and thinking and letting whatever comes into your head.” – Jill Stark

One Task at a Time. I have an almost 6-year-old son who requires quite some attention, which is fine. But at the same time, I need alone time, too to stay sane, socialize, write, work, and meet with friends. But, one thing at a time because I believe it is healthy and important for the brain not to be too distracted and overwhelmed which easily leads to stress.

Small habits can protect alone time. I love my morning routine which I try to protect. I will have a cup of black coffee and read a book or newspaper. Uninterrupted. In the evening when I stay in: having a bath, a glass of red wine, soft lighting in my office, listening to music and wearing a Kimono just because. As soon as my son is in bed, I write, read and do all my intellectual stuff. And reflect. And love because sometimes “On days like this, I need you to run your fingers through my hair and speak softly.” – Rupi Kaur

Pausing gives me the space to make decisions. Whenever my brain is overloaded and I try to solve all my life’s problems at once I pause. At that moment it may feel counter-intuitive to have a break because we may just want to push through as fast as possible. But why? Just get an ice-cream instead (I recommend Chocolate and Cookie). This is quick happiness while putting things to the side, changing the scenery and actually looking after yourself.

.Stay Happy – Stay Healthy.