I strive for empathy. I believe it is key for almost anything. I am amazed at the power it unfolds when interacting with others. And I always took for granted that balancing my reactions based on how others probably feel was the way for a better togetherness. However, the danger lies in hiding emotions behind that balance, which then comes over as being untrustworthy. This nuance struck me once again in a context I had never imagined. A computer game. A game about how we relate to each other. About how we feel. And about how we react to it. I loved the main game of Life is Strange, and the same goes now for its prequel, Before the Storm.

In so-called "moments of calm", Chloe pauses to reflect on what is going on in her life

Enraged, here Chloe stops when she sees her image in a mirror she is about to smash

Chloe supports her friend in a moment of sufferement, as her world falls apart

As in the main game, many events and references are left open for interpretation

While a game of decisions, the ending must inevitably lead to the plot in Life is Strange

It was empty. Really empty. The parking lot. The ticket offices. The overpriced restaurant with photos on the menu. The gift shop selling souvenirs of dubious taste. All of it, closed. It had the mystical aura of an abandoned place. Not a single tourist on a location designed to host armies of vacationers on all-inclusive holiday packages. It was a dream come true. The whole place entirely for a few locals and myself, a semi-local. No crowds. No strangers on the pictures. No waiting in line for the nice photo spot. And all the time in the world to take in the moment and the location. Three things made it possible: a weekday, a cold wave, and a pandemic.

I met less than ten people on this snow hike in the Murnau peatlands

The stairs to the world longest castle remain empty as it snows in Burghausen

I was entirely alone at the UNESCO world heritage site of the Wieskirche

The emptyness striked me most at Linderhof Palace, which led to this blog entry

We all distort reality. We bend it, such that it better fits our inner fairy tale. One would think that the tale is just a slight adaptation that puts things into a better light for ourselves. But ever since I first realized this, I have been shocked to which extremes it goes. From people who firmly believe that absolutely everything is their fault, to others who would never in their life even come close to the idea that anything could potentially be their mistake. And when one confronts them with the objective evidence, silence. A gaze to infinity, like an internal segfault. And this leads me to the most frightening question of all. How much am I distorting?

"Just a tiny little bend". Take care. Keep your balance.

I read a lot as a kid. Like, really a lot. One adventure book after the other. Until at some point, I came to the stupid conclusion that this was a sort of evasion of the allegedly important things I should be caring about. That was a pretentious thought, as it implied that I would ever know what was important and what not. Even worse, the list of allegedly important things is infinite, and thus there would never be a free spot for the inconsequential. Not even in times of quarantines and lockdowns. A year ago, I decided to reserve a fixed time to indulge in evasion, no matter what. And no surprise, the books and games have taught me quite a lesson so far.

The new computer has definitely contributed to this controlled indulgement :-)

As humans, we are terrible at numbers. In particular, when it comes to dimensions and orders of magnitude. Probably I am not the only one who wanted to do a "small pasta" and ended up eating spaghetti the rest of the week. And it gets worse the less used we are to what we are measuring. Last week, we had the heaviest snowfall in Madrid since decades, and many claimed flat roofs would not stand the weight. It sounds plausible. Snow is indeed heavy. But how heavy? And how much does a roof stand? It turns out we were absolutely fine. It is hard to have a feeling for numbers. Not to speak of exponential growth, as we saw last year. I prefer sticking to one, two, many.

Now trees, on the other hand, are a different story

We teared off the sunshade on the terrace before the structure collapsed

Left: How cute, a bit of snow in Madrid! Right: Two days later

As the last hours of 2020 slip away, online media seems to be full of hate against the past months. Indeed, for a large group of human beings, it has been a horrible year. Many of them are dead by now. Still, they are not the ones reading, feeling identified with, and clicking on those headlines. Sure, the bulk of us had to do some sort of sacrifice. Being alone, traveling less, facing economic challenges. But when I read the headlines stating that it was so bad that it cannot get worse in the next year, it feels like the bulk of us is a bunch of spoiled humans. Humans who forgot, or who never listened to, what they were told in history class.

The good news is that we can learn :-) And what better way of starting off a new year than finding new insights!

Happy Holidays :-)

I think I have never loved a character more than Max(ine) Caulfield. I am very late to the party, I know. The game Life is Strange was released over five years ago. It is a game of choices. And Max always has the choice of being a good and empathic person. Of helping the people around her. The game does a magnificent job at conveying the feelings of its characters to a depth I had never seen before. And it shows over and over again that rudeness and bad manners often just hide suffering and fear. As stupid as it may sound, in the end we all just want to be happy, healthy, and safe. All the rest is added drama.

The character of Max is designed in a way that one can immediately identify with her

It is a beautiful game. It has a wonderful soundtrack. The photography is amazing. And the story has captivated me to the point of having to remind me that it is just a game. Worth every minute and cent of it.

On a first date, I was once asked what I was passionate about. What do I live for? What is that thing that makes me wake up every morning? The feeling was in my mind. It was there, but it was blurry. How could I bring it to the point? In the end, I said "the beauty that is in everything, all around us". In the view that you get hiking in the mountains, in the cover song that you accidentally find on YouTube, in the elegance of a landing plane, in the few lines of that comic sketch on Instagram, in the magnificent plot twist of that computer game, in the perfection of an algorithm, in the design of a piece of furniture. Once I saw it, I could not get it off my mind.

She understood.

And in flowers, of course :) This one was at the Madeira Botanical Garden

"Instead of human beings, we are becoming human doings". This is one of my favorite quotes from the mindfulness challenge that I completed today. For a whole month, I have spent every day at least ten minutes being instead of doing. But not everything is about sitting down in the lotus pose and murmuring om. In fact, I have never done any of that. Along with guided meditation, there is often some form of insight. The kind of wisdom that makes one stop and look at essential things, which we often take for granted, from a different perspective. It is by doing so that meditation can help to free the human being from its own doing traps.

Statue of buda at Dalada Maluva, in the ancient garden-city of Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka

It felt like falling asleep. I even had a (very) short dream while I fell from the stool onto the kitchen floor. A few moments earlier I had hit my knee with a sharp edge. The shock and the pain made me faint as I took a seat to recover. I fell like a bag of potatoes. And that was the key. If I had been conscious, I would have instinctively tried to ease the fall with my hand. And I would have most likely injured it. But I barely felt any pain. It reminded me of all the things which are much more painful than they would have to, just because of the fear in our brain, for both body and mind. As the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice.

Not all falls are the same, though ;-) Tower IV on Mount Jaizkibel