I'm a voice message enthusiast, but answering machines freak me out. I'm repelled by the polished Linkedin world, yet I'm a part of it.I'm a passionate host who needs the house to herself. I'm a philantropist hiding from people. An introvert seeking the stage. A courageous coward. A wonderful mess. Life's intriguingly complicated, filled with contradictory force fields. Which paradoxes are you trying to make sense of in your life?Lots of love,Tanja ...
As a kid I used to read the last pages of a book before starting the first chapter. I just had to know how it all ended. As a teenager I dreamed of a magic remote control. One that would teleport me to better times. In fact, two very distinct moments in time: I immediately wanted to turn 18 ...
The other day, I found my husband reading a railway newspaper (yes, they do exist) on our couch. Surrounded by sofa cushions thrown all over the place by our lovely kids, the floor covered in bread crumbs from the last meal, dishes piling up in the sink. It was one of the rare moments the kids happened to play by themselves without killing each other. One of those precious moments...
In the past couple of months, we have digested some deep and sometimes dark topics here. So I felt like it was time for a very different story. And since the majority voted for it in the last newsletter, let's talk about FUN 🙂 13 years ago I broke up with my high-school boyfriend whom I had been living with for a couple of years. "When we'll have kids, I am going to be the fun dad and you are going to be the serious mom.", he said one day. It was meant as a joke, but at the same time it wasn't. It was the most condensed mental model of how he perceived our roles, even without being parents back then. Me doing the dishes,...
A few weeks ago, my former student Antonia reflected on Linkedin about her habit of outing herself in new groups as pet lover and nerd - even in a professional context. So she was asking herself: "Where’s your line between personal and work life? How much of yourself do you show your colleagues? Has it ever backfired? Or have you ever benefited from it?" Unconsciously, this was the starting point of today's post, but it didn't bubble up until after I had published my last "Butterflies" about FILTERS talking about highly sensitive people. Writing it brought back a recent episode where I was asked to fill out an application form for Maya's kindergarden. I reached the comment section where we were supposed to mention any additional...
Back in 2013, I stumbled across a website called Paper.li that invited you to create your personalized topic-based digital newspaper. It would then feature a couple of articles and tweets on the subjects you selected and provide a nice daily morning read. This is an example of curated content, a phenomenon that has been on the rise for more than a decade now. It can take many forms, ranging from "a single room with a single book" (a tiny bookstore in Ginza that sells only one book per week, hand-picked by its owner) to The Browser, a newsletter featuring five outstanding stories per day from thousends of articles. With individual voices trumping established brands more and more in the war for attention, even big social media players like...
This month, I set out to write about detoxing, but looking at the last couple of weeks in my life what I truly want to write about is boundaries. Boundaries that keep us from each other, some in good ways, some in unhealthy manners. So how to gently merge those two topics? It's actually not that hard when you come to think about it. Let's look at it ethymologically: detoxing means getting rid of toxines. A toxine is a harmful substance, but you know what Paracelsus said: " The dose makes the poison." So in the end, our desire to detox is nothing but the realization that we overstepped some sort of boundaries too many times. When we talk about detoxing, we typically think of freeing our bodies from waste...
A couple of weeks ago, a relative's big birthday was coming up. My family and some of our close relatives agreed to prepare a rather expensive gift in light of this celebration and as a thank you for many occasions in which we received presents and support from this person in the past. While it was meant as a sweet gesture, we ended up in a rather awkward situation where our relative publicly refused to accept the gift. Instead, she decided to give away most parts of her present in front of us and cut off all the bills I had neatly folded as butterflies and spread across her fruit basket. To paint the full picture you need to know that she comes from a different culture...
In school there were few subjects I really hated, but somehow physics ended up being one of them. Therefore when my husband (who is a railway engineer) starts talking about anything too techy, my brain instantly wants to shut off. The other night, however, we ended up talking about the "degree of freedom" which apparently is a thing in physics ;-) I even looked it up: "In physics, the degrees of freedom (DOF) of a mechanical system is the number of independent parameters that define its configuration or state." (Wikipedia) Please bear with me ;-) So in a nutshell, what I took away from the article is the question: in which directions is a body able to move? (Physicists, don't hate me for this rather naive summary...
Lately I have been falling asleep with the kids around 8 pm on a regular basis. During the day, my head is foggy and I am low on energy. I heard that some of you are experiencing the same. To me it feels like I am currently pupating in a little cocoon of mine. The other day I was talking about this with my dear friend Eva and we were joking around: At the end of this crisis, are we going to turn into beautiful butterflies or just come out as really fat and hairy caterpillars? :-)In any case, the pandemic is making me crawl back inside myself. And what I found there is my seven-year-old self, snuggled into a blanket reading everything she could get her...