I cannot decide how a plant grows. I can plant the seed, I can water it, I can give it the perfect light, temperature, and humidity conditions. I can try to influence how fast it grows. I can try to fight pests and insects. I can try to guide its shape with plant stakes. But I cannot control the growth itself. I cannot guarantee its survival. I cannot decide where and when flowers will bloom. And perhaps that is the beauty of it. I hope for a shape and admire the likely different result. Very much like human relationships. They evolve, they grow, they surprise. One can tend, nurture, and cultivate them. But their course is not under the control of any single individual participating in them. They are the result of countless intertwined branches, often beyond the reach of anyone involved. Releasing the need to determine their outcome and instead investing effort in creating conditions for growth is perhaps the way to enjoy them the most. And a flourishing garden.

I gave the plant light, soil, and water. The rest was never mine to decide.

It has been almost two months, but the grocery store in Munich is still my reference. I close my eyes and replay my usual path through the store to figure out what I am missing when grocery shopping in Madrid. I see the aisles of the store and what I would pick in each of them. Every week roughly the same products, for years and years. Habits are difficult to change. Ah, right, I forgot honey. But I am not only trying to find fruits and vegetables. Two months after returning to my hometown, I am mostly trying to find myself. In the past year, I tried the impossible and failed at it catastrophically. I tried to be in two countries at the same time and be fully committed to both—building a family in Germany while being present for my parents in Spain. I tried to convince myself that everything is possible if one just tries hard enough. And in the middle of that storm, I lost myself. And the eggs. Second aisle from the entrance.

As irony would have it, a German grocery shop lies on my daily route through Madrid

I thought my last days in Munich would be a storm of feelings. Instead, I felt numb. The past months had exhausted me completely. I was giving up almost everything. Job. Apartment. City. Country. Friends. Partner. All of it. And all of it at once. The change felt immense. In those final days, my only goal was to make it to that last flight back to Madrid. Everything else became steps to complete. Goodbye parties. Packing for the move. Donating furniture. Cleaning the apartment. By the time I handed over the keys to the landlord, I barely registered that I was seeing my home for the last time. My mind was too exhausted for emotion. When the apartment door closed behind me, it almost felt as if the last defenses of my body collapsed and illness finally rushed in. I could hear a faint inner voice insisting that this moment mattered. But it drowned beneath the exhaustion that only wanted the final stretch to end.

I had to give away the red sofa that had been through so much with me in Munich

I had never noticed how loud cars are. The human ear adapts so quickly to the noise on a busy road that it had never bothered me—until I tried to listen to an audiobook on the go. Even with great noise cancelling earphones, the voice of the narrator barely stands out against the noise of cars driving by. The earphones need to crank up the volume to what feels like an order of magnitude higher for the narrator to be clearly audible. And that noise is there all the time. We just got used to it. I realized that the same goes for visual noise. As I type out these thoughts, I am sitting in my almost empty apartment in Munich, getting ready for my relocation to Madrid. Like with the earphones, emptying the apartment made me understand how much visual noise I was used to seeing every day. Now the space is void, and a surprising calm takes over me as I sit here. No more things to be arranged, kept, cleaned, or maintained—just space and serenity.

Imagine if streets were as noiseless as an empty apartment

I stood on the bridge and looked at the rail yard below. I like watching trains being sorted and shunted along the tracks leading to Munich's central station. In my first months in the city, I took endless pictures of tracks crossing, splitting, and joining. Tracks arriving from somewhere, leading elsewhere. But over the years, I became too busy to pause and watch the trains. As I studied the maze of tracks, I realized that the rail yard mirrored the shape of my struggles over the past months. Tough decisions are like track crossings. If a crossing has switches, it is a real decision—with just a slight adjustment, a train can glide safely and almost effortlessly onto either track. Otherwise, the decision is not a real choice. Any attempt to change tracks will inevitably cause a train to derail. The only safe way forward is to stay on it. After weeks of obsessing over how to shape the next years of my life, that thought gave me peace of mind.

A crossing with switches—the choice is real

I felt lost. I tried to explain again. I tried to connect. I tried every communication tool I trusted. I was convinced that explaining more was the right thing to do—that eventually compassion and understanding would follow. Over time, I realized that this conviction was part of the problem. Some disagreements are structural and not just emotional. For years, I believed that enough empathy and goodwill would repair any hard conflict. But after endless arguments, I understood that better words cannot always change the outcome—sometimes, any communication will only add fuel to the fire. Empathy and goodwill can be well intentioned and yet reopen wounds. In such cases, continuing to explain is not kind but hurtful. Instead, silence, or even standing up and respectfully leaving the room, can be the most caring action available, even if it feels counterintuitive. Sometimes, the only way to stop a fire is to stop adding air.

Conflict is inevitable and its warmth may be fine, but burning is not

As the year comes to an end, my body has issued its bill. The listing is not short. It starts with too many sleepless nights, it continues with a chronically unpredictable work schedule, followed by all the times I forgot myself while obsessing over solving problems. Then add the tax for always wanting to do the right thing, whatever that means. And finally, an extra big tip for never considering the option of taking an actual break, but filling every gap with even more tasks or aspirations. All that sums up to quite an amount for the past year, and I do not get to choose whether to pay cash or credit, because the only form of payment is health points. This time I paid with two weeks of some sort of flu—if the brain refuses to slow down, the body certainly has means to make everything stop, in particular given that I had no real need to overstretch to this extent. I lived 2025 above my human means and the bill arrived right on time for Christmas.

Whoever built this Christmas tree maybe also lived above their means in terms of wine

I tried everything. Phone, DSLR, drone. All sorts of cameras. No matter what, the pictures were always missing something. The light just was not the same. The slight shades of the mountains in the background, the color grades in the valleys, the intensity of the green fields. It all somehow did not come across. After all these long flights, I wanted to capture that light at all cost and take it home with me, but I could not, no matter how hard I tried. In the end, I gave up. I started taking less pictures. I used the time to actually see and admire the vast, untouched landscapes of New Zealand that lay before me. I finally understood what makes this country so special and worth the long trip. The light. The scale. The harshness. Fortunately, photography remains a form of art and not a substitute for the actual experience. A picture may convey feelings that one would not feel in person, but the other way around is much more likely.

Notice the boat at the bottom of the waterfall (Stirling Falls, Milford Sound fiord)

A terrible feeling invaded me. It took me a while to understand what was happening in my mind. I had never perceived religion in this way. For all of my life, religion was a choice. I chose whether to believe in a God. And now, I confronted a scenario in which religion was a given. Of course, according to religion, there is nothing to choose. One simply is part of a religious community. And the rules that the religion defines are non-negotiable. They simply exist as well, and no amount of resistance or rebellion can change them because they are given by God. The thought scared me to death. Freedom is limited in many places on Earth, but it is theoretically possible to rebel against that oppression because it comes from other humans. But if God dictates how things should be, nothing can overturn those rules. All of this is well known, but facing it closely made it real. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to be part of such a system voluntarily.

The cathedral of Palermo. As long as religion is a choice, it provides great guidelines.

As I watched the nearby island melting with the warm colors of a perfect sunset, a strange feeling came up in me. The little Greek island was just two kilometers off the Turkish coast on which I was standing. For the past week, I had traveled and admired the Turkish Riviera in all its beauty. I had tasted its amazing food, I had swum in its turquoise waters, I had visited its ancient wonders. On earlier trips to Greece, I had done very similar things, yet something felt very different. That evening, I finally understood. As I watched across to the Greek island, a feeling of belonging came up in me. In Greece, I was a European visiting Europe. In Turkey, I was a foreigner visiting a faraway land, even if just two kilometers apart. While deeply rooted in the European identity, I believe that being a foreigner is the best way to learn and grow through curiosity and observation. One does not become a different person, but a more receptive one.

The Greek island of Καστελλόριζο and the Turkish coast at Kaş