One of my favorite stories comes from ancient China. It is often titled The Chinese Farmer, and despite being only a few paragraphs long, it contains beautiful and simple truth:

Share

I think about this story often because it exposes something deeply human: our desperate need to label every event immediately. Promotion? Good. Rejection? Bad. New relationship? Good. Ending relationship? Bad. We rush to conclusions as if life were a newspaper headline instead of a novel still being written.

But the truth is that we rarely know what anything means when it first happens.

The job you didn’t get may lead you somewhere better. The setback you resent today may become the turning point you are grateful for years from now. The thing that looks like a gift may later reveal itself as a burden. The thing that feels like a loss may quietly open a door you never would have noticed otherwise.

That is why I love the farmer’s response so much. Not because he is passive. Because he remains open. He refuses to imprison reality inside a premature judgment.

Perhaps this is one of the most useful attitudes we can cultivate in modern life. To remain flexible. To stop treating temporary circumstances as permanent truths. To listen less to the chorus of outside voices constantly declaring what is success and what is failure.

The story is still unfolding.

And whenever life surprises me, for better or worse, I try to remember the old farmer standing calmly beside his horse.

“We’ll see.”

I often think about the simple truth: everything is within you. We tend to believe that happiness, inspiration, or calmness must come from outside—like a perfect spring day or a lazy beach afternoon. We sit and wait for those moments, reacting, letting them arrive in us, like a gift from somewhere else. But what if we didn’t have to wait? What if we realized that we can bring that feeling inside us, at will?

Think about spring. When we step outside, the fresh air fills us, and we smile without even knowing why. Or in summer, when we lie on the beach, the warm sand presses up against us, and we relax into that simple bliss. Yes, those are outside triggers, and they are beautiful. But the deeper lesson is this: that same calm, that same wonder, can rise in us without waiting for a season.

Leave a comment

In every moment, we can be the creator—not just a reactor. We don’t have to wait for a perfect day. We don’t have to chase happiness like a prize. We simply open our eyes and say, “It’s here. It’s always been here. Everything I need is within me.” And so we create from that place—present, alive, and free.

Recently, while reading The Elephant, I came across a short piece that made me laugh, pause, and then laugh again. Like many of Mrożek’s stories, it begins somewhere ridiculous and ends somewhere uncomfortably close to reality:

How I should like to be a horse. …

If only, looking in the glass, I could see that instead of feet and hands I had hooves, a tail at the back and an authentic horse’s head, I should go straight to the housing department. …

“I want a large modern at,” I should say.

“You must ll in an application form and await your turn.”

“Ha, ha,” I would laugh. “Can’t you see, gentlemen, that I’m no ordinary man-in-the-street? I’m dierent, I’m special.”

Right away they would give me a large, modern at with a bathroom.

I should perform in a revue and nobody would dare to say that I had no talent—even if my script was no good. On the contrary, they would praise me.

“Isn’t he wonderful, for a horse,” they would say.

“What a head!” others would comment.

Then there would be all the fun of sayings and proverbs: “Horse sense”, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, “A kingdom for a horse”, “A dark horse” …

I should attract the interest of women. “You’re so dierent,” they would say.

And when the time came for me to go to Heaven I should naturally get a pair of wings. I should become a Pegasus. A winged horse! Can there be a more beautiful fate for a man?

Share

That is the beauty of absurdism. It takes one impossible premise and follows it with complete seriousness. A man wants to become a horse because, as a horse, he would finally receive recognition, admiration, opportunities, and love. The situation is absurd. The logic is absurd. And yet the feeling behind it is instantly recognizable.

Perhaps that is why I have always loved writers like Sławomir Mrożek. They understand that reality is often too strange to be described directly. Sometimes the shortest route to truth is through nonsense. Through exaggeration. Through a horse applying for an apartment.

The older I get, the more I suspect that absurd literature is not escaping reality at all. It is simply holding up a mirror that reflects parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

And occasionally, that mirror has hooves.

In ancient Greek, there are two words for time: chronos, which is the measured, sequential time we all count—minutes, hours, deadlines—and kairos, which is a different kind of time. Kairos is the opportune moment, the quality of time when something important unfolds—unpredictable, meaningful, and transformative. I think, lately, I’ve been on a journey—like Proust searching for lost time—but instead, I’m searching for lost kairos.

Share

You see, we live in a chronos world—this endless stream of clock time, always pushing us to accumulate tasks, measure productivity, and race toward goals. But what I’ve come to realize is that those who find their kairos aren’t just moving through time—they are living inside time. They know when to pause, when to savor, when a small conversation, a simple decision, or a quiet walk is quietly reshaping everything.

This doesn’t mean kairos is a magical escape from reality. It’s not about rejecting chronos but about recognizing that productivity is not a race—it is a dance with the right moment.

When you find your kairos—when you slow down, when you tune in—you realize you aren’t just more productive. You are happier, more present, and somehow, you’ve found what you were always searching for: a deeper, fuller way of living inside time.

We often look at the rise of artificial intelligence and worry about a looming future of automated mediocrity. But the truth is more uncomfortable: that mediocrity hasn’t originated in the code—it is already taking root in our own minds.

We have entered a cultural phase where the average human day is a fragmented blur. We juggle multiple tasks at once, chase endless optimization, and obsess over a manic, hyper-productive pace that leaves no room for stillness. Because we refuse to slow down, the most basic elements of creative depth escape us. We are moving too fast to actually look at what we are building.

This is exactly where the machine steps ahead of us.

It is not because AI possesses a divine creative spark, or because its simulated soul is superior to ours. The algorithm wins simply because it proceeds the exact same way every single time: with absolute, unhurried focus on the task in front of it. While we fracture our attention across a dozen open tabs and shifting anxieties, the machine executes its parameters without blinking.

The greatest advantage of artificial intelligence is our own deficit of attention. It has learned how to mimic the very state of mind humans have abandoned. It filters out the noise and stays with a single thought—a practice we claim we no longer have time for.

The real trap ahead of us isn’t that machines will suddenly learn how to feel. The trap is that we have already forgotten how to slow down and think.

Prompt for today: What would happen if you closed every background task today and gave a single idea your absolute, undivided silence?

Leave a comment

A few years ago, during my time leading the oldest literary magazine in Slovakia, my literary father died. Milan Kundera was gone. For my team and me, there was no debate: the next issue had to be a monument to him.

We went “big.” We poured our hearts and souls into our personal essays and interviewed people who worked with or were friends with him, and made a pilgrimage to his library in Brno to touch the spines of the books he once held.

Endless Eight

What does Milan Kundera Library look like?

The first news that Milan Kundera donated his archive to the library in Brno appeared in the summer of 2020 with information that the books would be transferred in the fall of the same year. According to the director of the library Tomáš Kubíček, this Kundera's "gift" was not only a message for Czech readers, but also a commentary on the writer's relati…

Read more

2 years ago · 1 like · Matej Rumanovsky

Months later, I heard a story that stopped my breath. A Slovak translator had gone to Paris to visit Kundera’s widow in their apartment. She told me that as they spoke, she noticed our magazine sitting on a shelf. But it wasn’t just any shelf; it was one of the few things left in the room. Kundera had gifted his massive, legendary library to the Brno library before he passed, leaving his Paris home hollowed out and quiet.

In that hollowed-out apartment, our tribute was keeping watch over his widow.

Share

I never sat in a Parisian café and listened to him speak. I never saw him, nor did I shake his hand. But in the end, I realized that this was the closest I could ever get to him.

We don’t always meet our heroes in the flesh; sometimes, we meet them in the “in-between,” through the things we create in their honor. My words traveled to the room where he lived, sitting on the very shelves where his own thoughts were born.

The work we do is a message in a bottle. We launch it into the dark, never knowing whose shore it will reach, or which empty shelf it will eventually call home.

Imagine two painters sitting side by side on a wide, wild hillside. They are looking at the exact same view—a sweeping mountain range under the afternoon light. They share the same air, the same coordinates, and the same physical reality.

Yet, if you look over their shoulders, their canvases are diametrically opposed.

The first canvas glows with vibrant yellows and pale blues, centering on a massive, luminous tree that is barely visible in the actual distance. The second canvas clings strictly to the shadows, dominated by somber greys and blacks, capturing the heavy, crushing mass of the distant peaks.

Which of these paintings is truer? Which is more real?

Leave a comment

The creative life is spent wrestling with this exact paradox. We often paralyze ourselves trying to paint the world “correctly.” We try to write the essay, launch the project, or speak the truth by mirroring what we think we ought to see, assuming there is a single, objective way to capture the landscape.

But true creativity is never about flawless representation; it is about the raw act of experiencing.

Your individuality as a creator isn’t a clever formula you invent. It is simply the sum of what you choose to notice when you look at the world. It is shaped by the specific joys, quiet traumas, and silent observations your life has gathered along the way. If two poets stood on that same grass, they would write entirely different stanzas. Two musicians would translate the same wind into opposing tempos—one a slow andante, the other a restless presto.

Share

We don’t need more creators acting as mechanical mirrors for the external world. We have enough copies. What we hunger for is the translation of your internal landscape. Without that deeply personal filter, every artist would reproduce the exact same hill, and the creative world would fall flat.

When you sit down to create, your only job is to surrender to the infinity of the present moment and trust the colors your life has given you.

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel,” Haruki Murakami once shared, “I get up at four A.M. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometres or swim for fifteen hundred metres... I go to bed at nine P.M.”

From the outside, we romanticize the creative life as a beautiful, unpredictable chaos. We imagine the artist drifting through the days, waiting for a sudden flash of inspiration from a fickle muse. But the opposite is true. To build something of sustainable value, you do not need chaos; you need an unbreakable daily structure. Without it, the day quickly dissolves into a frantic carousel of random digital stimuli, leaving no quiet space for deep focus.

Leave a comment

When you take your craft seriously, routine ceases to be a constraint and becomes a portal. Murakami described this endless repetition as a form of mesmerism—a way to hypnotize the mind into reaching a deeper state of consciousness. This requires immense physical and mental stamina. It is why Kurt Vonnegut constantly did pushups between pages, and why Ernest Hemingway famously stopped writing at the exact moment he knew what would happen next, leaving the reservoir full so his subconscious could work in the background.

A true routine protects the time to create, but it also dictates the exact time to stop—to step away from the desk to walk, move your body, or be fully present with your family. The secret lies in the radical act of single-tasking. If you are writing, lock out the world: no phone, no emails, no extra tabs. If you are resting, rest completely. As Henry Miller noted: “Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”

Share

There is no single “correct” creative blueprint to copy. The only rule that matters is that you design a rhythm that protects your attention, choose the tools that serve your silence, and then—regardless of how you feel—sit down and do the work.

Every year, my family and I find ourselves drawn back to a specific pocket of Verona: the Piazza dei Signori. If you walk through the bustling, vibrant market of the neighboring streets and slip through a stone archway, the city’s frantic momentum drops away entirely. You step into what feels like an open-air room, a grand courtyard physically enclosed and protected from the outside world by ancient, towering walls.

In the absolute center of this stillness stands a monumental statue of Dante Alighieri. He is captured in a permanent, pensive posture—hand to his chin, gaze turned entirely inward. There is an eerie, beautiful weight to the sculpture, as if his spirit and soul never actually left the stone.

The unique architecture of this square allows a person to think endlessly. There are no passing cars, no rushed crowds, just an intentional boundary that invites depth. It is this profound sense of peace that draws me back year after year. It is why the food tastes better at the edge of the stones, why the hours stretch out, and why I feel completely at home the moment I step inside its perimeter.

But the true power of the piazza isn’t just in its Italian marble; it is in the lesson of its geography. It serves as a physical blueprint for how we need to structure our inner lives.

Share

Most of us live our days entirely exposed to the relentless currents of digital noise, notifications, and external demands. We leave our minds wide open to every passing distraction, wondering why we feel fragmented and drained. We lack boundaries.

What we truly need is to construct our own Piazza dei Signori within ourselves. We need to build intentional, internal walls that separate our deep focus from the chaos of the surrounding world.

Imagine creating a quiet, sacred space inside your own mind—a sanctuary guarded by your own pensive Dante. Let it be a mental courtyard that reminds you to pause, remain present, and return to your own depth whenever the outside world grows too loud. You do not need to board a plane to find silence. You simply have to build the courtyard that protects it.

We often find ourselves living two lives simultaneously: the one that handles the external noise of the world, and the quiet, stubborn one that speaks to us only when we step away from the screens and look inward.

The greatest risk we face isn’t failure; it is successfully building an existence that belongs to a stranger. When your work values and your personal values are misaligned, a subtle, corrosive friction begins to wear down your creative focus and clarity. You find yourself keeping a transactional machine running while your actual calling goes completely starved.

Here is a simple, sharp diagnostic for today:

• Are your daily professional choices feeding your deeper calling, or are they quietly eroding it?

• If you look at your current commitments, do they reflect what you actually value, or are they just a map of someone else’s priorities?

Leave a comment

Alignment doesn’t require a radical, chaotic overhaul of your life tomorrow. It begins with an honest acknowledgment of the gap. It is found in the quiet, intentional choice to stop trading your depth for mere velocity.

Where is the split between your work and your values hiding right now? What is the smallest, simplest step you can take today to redirect your steps back toward your own light?

Most of us remember the simple physics of a game we all used to play when we were young. Two people standing in the grass, kicking a football back and forth. It was a rhythm of predictable weight—trap the ball, feel its tactile surface under your shoe, wait for the other’s posture to shift, and kick it back. It was a constant, comforting volley.

But what if the kicked ball never actually stops? Imagine a strike delivered with a strange, accidental, perfect momentum—a shot that escapes gravity entirely. It doesn’t just land in the neighbor's yard; it flies past the edges of the town, crosses borders, and begins to travel endlessly around the globe. You are left standing in the sudden, quiet grass, blinking at the empty sky, asking: Wait, where did it go?

The creative life operates on the exact same mysterious trajectory.

We sit at our desks every morning, desperate to engineer that one historic strike. We want to write THE book, paint THE canvas, or publish THE essay that breaks free of our immediate surroundings, crosses oceans, and finds a permanent life of its own out there in the world. We treat creativity like a mechanical problem, trying to calculate how to launch something that will never land.

But the truth of the studio, like the truth of the yard, is that you can never predict which creation will develop its own orbit. The project you labor over for years might drop quietly at your feet, while a fragile, spontaneous fragment written in the margins of a quiet afternoon might be the one that catches the wind and travels forever.

Share

How do you find the shot that keeps going? You don't. You simply refuse to stop the volley. You show up to the empty page, you take a conscious breath, and you kick the ball back into play, trusting that the only way to touch the infinite is to stay fully committed to the daily, lovely rhythm of the game.

I often think about the words we use as furniture—solid, familiar things we sit upon without ever checking the joinery. One of the heaviest pieces in the room of our mind is the word existence.

We treat it as a synonym for “life,” for a simple, forward-moving duration of time. But when we look at the Latin roots I explored in my first novel, a startling duality reveals itself.

Share

The word existere is built from the root sta (to stand or to be) and the prefix ex-. In our modern, productivity-obsessed world, we almost always interpret that ex- as “forward.” To exist is to progress, to move “outward” into the future, and to achieve. But in its older, more haunting sense, ex- means “outside” or even “without”. It is the same root found in ecstasy (orig. extasie)—the radical state of being outside oneself.

This suggests a profound choice in how we inhabit our days. Are we “progressing” in a straight line, building a “history” that is nothing more than a cold archive of tasks? Or are we brave enough to stand “outside” the relentless hum of our digital personas?

To truly exist, in the etymological sense, is not just to “be” in time; it is to stand outside the expectations, the “backups,” and the noise.

I still remember the precise texture of the days in my twenties when I first “met” Albert Camus. It wasn’t a casual reading; it was a total, ravenous immersion. I consumed everything he had ever put to paper, chasing his sentences like someone looking for a clearing in the standard anxieties of early adulthood. But nothing prepared me for the quiet shock of his earliest collection of essays, Betwixt and Between (L’Envers et l’Endroit).

Camus was only twenty-two when he wrote those pages. When I first uncovered that detail, I remember staring at the book in a state of pure disbelief. At twenty-two, I was still stumbling through the surface of things, trying on different identities like coats that didn’t quite fit. Yet here was a young man writing about the crushing isolation of poverty, the cold indifference of old age, and the blinding, beautiful light of the Mediterranean with the devastating maturity of an ancient soul.

He wrote with a terrifying groundedness. He didn’t hide behind academic jargon or performative brilliance; instead, he stripped existence down to its rawest dualities—the right side and the wrong side of being. To read him at that formative time in my life was to realize that profound depth is not a matter of accumulating decades. It is simply a willingness to look directly at the world, and at yourself, without blinking. He was already fully awake to the tragic beauty of a single, inhabited moment.

Share

Now, during these hundred days of capturing fragments, I find myself returning to that initial shock. Camus remains a reminder that you do not need a lifetime of validation to write a sentence that holds weight. You only need to be entirely present to the space you inhabit right now, even when that space feels precarious and unformed.

Subscribe now

There is a legendary story told by Steven Pressfield about a Ghurka rifleman during World War II who escaped from a Japanese prison in south Burma. Alone and unable to speak the local language, he walked six hundred miles through some of the most unforgiving jungles on earth to reach freedom in India. The journey took him five months. He never lost his way, and he never stopped to ask for directions. The story goes like this:

A Ghurka rifleman escaped from a Japanese prison in south Burma and walked six hundred miles alone through the jungles to freedom. The journey took him five months, but he never asked the way and he never lost the way. For one thing he could not speak Burmese and for another he regarded all Burmese as traitors. He used a map and when he reached India he showed it to the Intelligence officers, who wanted to know all about his odyssey. Marked in pencil were all the turns he had taken, all the roads and trail forks he has passed, all the rivers he had crossed. It had served him well, that map. The Intelligence officers did not find it so useful. It was a street map of London.

Share

There is a profound, almost staggering lesson in this for anyone trying to navigate the “in-between” of a creative life. We often spend months, or even years, paralyzed because we don’t have the “correct” map. We wait for the perfect business plan, the ideal writing prompt, or the exact coordinates of our future success before we take the first step. We assume that without the right data, we are doomed to be lost.

But the Ghurka rifleman’s journey proves that the map is not the terrain—the map is the intent.

He didn’t need the London streets to match the Burmese jungle; he needed the structure of the map to give him a sense of order. He needed a place to record his progress, a way to visualize that he was moving forward rather than in circles. The map provided the internal architecture for his survival. It was a physical anchor for his will.

In our own “100 days,” we often obsess over having the right tools. We want the “perfect” notebook or the “correct” creative habit. But perhaps the secret to reaching the light isn’t in finding the right map, but in the radical act of starting the walk with whatever map you have in your hand. The path reveals itself not to the one who analyzes the coordinates, but to the one who keeps moving.

What “wrong” map are you holding onto today—and what would happen if you trusted it enough to finally start walking?

Leave a comment

I recently remembered a story that the Irish musician Glen Hansard told at one of his concerts. It was about a deeply spiritual woman who lived in Ireland.

For a time, she found herself interacting with what she called “the in-between,” a quiet, liminal space existing just beneath the surface of our frantic daily lives.

One evening, while completely alone, she encountered entities waiting in that gray space. When she spoke to them, their reply was chillingly simple: “We come from the dark.”

Instead of retreating in fear or shutting the door, she stayed. She chose to listen. Through a long, patient dialogue, she discovered they were the lingering collective memory of young, deformed boys who had been burned at the stake in the fourteenth century. They were trapped in the ancient architecture of their own trauma. Rather than fighting the horror of it, the woman did something radical: she offered them forgiveness, acknowledged their pain, and ge…

Read more

During my time in Rishikesh, India, my afternoons often followed a coordinated wandering. One day, I found myself standing before the Maharajji Ashram—a vast, marble sanctuary dedicated to Neem Karoli Baba, the guru who famously turned Ram Dass’s world upside down. From the outside, the place felt abandoned. There was no movement, no hum of activity, just a giant statue of Hanuman towering over a silence so thick it felt like a physical weight. It was the presence in its purest form.

Subscribe now

I found a half-open gate and stepped inside, leaving my shoes under a marble bench. Almost immediately, a calm, heavy-set man approached me. He held a large mug, and without a word, he reached in, took a handful of warm, cooked chickpeas, and poured them into my palm.

In any other world, I might have hesitated. But here, in the presence of that marble silence, it was a gesture that required no interrogation. I ate them as a form of communion.

It was a reminder that the most e…

Read more

I often hear people say things like: “I read only non-fiction now.” Or: “I don’t have time for stories anymore.” Usually it is followed by a practical explanation: they want something useful, grounded, applicable. They want to learn faster, improve faster, optimize faster. So they read self-help books, business books, summaries, frameworks, ideas compressed into bullet points and actionable steps.

Leave a comment

And I understand that impulse. The modern world constantly pressures us to justify our time. Even reading slowly can begin to feel almost irresponsible, like sitting too long in a café while everybody else is running somewhere with a podcast at double speed.

But what many people forget is that literature does not merely give information.

It gives presence.

A novel asks something radically different from us. It demands attention, a deliberate, meditative slowdown. You cannot truly rush through great literature because literature…

Read more

Recently, while reading one of the collections by Anton Chekhov, I came across a tiny story that made me laugh much harder than I expected. Not because it tries to be funny, but because it feels painfully human in the most direct possible way:

“Two ladies with a philanthropic soul and a sensitive heart were walking down the street. They met a ten-year-old boy. ‘Oh,’ said one lady. ‘Look, Kata, what a poor boy! He is barefoot, poorly dressed, and it is so cold outside...’ – ‘Indeed, you are right! And what a sad face he has... Little boy, where do you live, my dear?’ The boy mumbled something under his breath. ‘Where?’ – ‘In a shithole!’ replied the sad boy and went on his way.”

Share

That’s it.

Just a few lines. And somehow it contains more life than many modern novels three hundred pages long.

I think that’s what I love so much about Chekhov. He understood that human beings are unintentionally funny almost all the time. Especially when they try very…

Read more

I often find myself returning to a specific, worn-out paperback on my shelf—George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. It is my favorite book of his, perhaps because it dwells so deeply in the raw, sensory “bitterness” of a life actually lived. It carries a scent of damp stone and stale bread that lingers long after the final page is turned.

Subscribe now

There is a passage in which Orwell captures a profound duality in how we value human effort—revealing how we have turned “money” into the ultimate judge of character, regardless of the actual physical suffering involved. This time I want to quote the whole thing, because I could hardly put it any better...

Here is how Orwell describes the curious social position of the beggar:

“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel…

Read more

Subscribe now

In 1923, just a year before his death, Franz Kafka was living in Berlin, walking daily through the quiet paths of Steglitz Park. One afternoon, the rhythm of his walk was broken by the sound of a young girl crying; she had lost her favorite doll. Instead of offering a hollow comfort, Kafka did something unexpected. He told the girl the doll wasn’t lost—it had simply gone on a trip to see the world. To prove it, he claimed to be a “volunteer postman” for dolls and promised she would soon hear from her friend.

For three weeks, Kafka applied the same meticulous focus he gave to his greatest novels to composing letters from a traveling doll. Each day in the park, he read the girl stories of the doll’s adventures and its changing perspective on the world. When it was finally time for the “postman” to depart, he presented her with a replacement doll. Though it looked nothing like the original, a note attached to its wrist expla…

Read more