The Teichfest was smaller this year. The twenty-eighth one, same pond, same bratwurst, same autoscooter, but fewer people, and the ones who came were complaining about what a ride on the autoscooter costs now. I’d have walked past that a year ago. This year I didn’t.
For most of my life I believed in the law of attraction, more or less. What you see is what you put out; look at the world kindly and it looks back. It got me through a lot. I see now that it was also a shield - a way to have an answer for the world without having to look at it too closely.
At 43 I’ve started checking the assumption. What am I actually seeing in someone’s behaviour? Who are the people around me voting for, and why? And how does rural Brandenburg look next to Berlin, an hour down the road? For the first time I think I’m seeing it more honestly. People are unhappy. Prices are higher than they’ve ever been. Neighbours can’t afford their mortgage anymore, or open a letter with a rent increase that makes no sense. The heart of the village used to be a big organ; now people sit at home with their phones and find answers there, extreme ones, from sources nobody checks.
We’re in a war, too, even if nobody shouts it. Not tanks at the door. It’s gas and fuel and prices, uncertainty about your job and your life, and a phone full of answers that turn out to be someone else’s agenda. Europe is turning inward the way people are. That’s what scares me: all of it at once, and the fact that I’m facing it now instead of projecting something nicer on top.
I keep coming back to this: every one of us is unique, people and animals and the trees along the walk alike, and every one of us is also part of something bigger. I still believe that. What I didn’t see before is that the bigger thing, for us humans at least, is cracking.
And here’s the uncomfortable part. We’re fine. We earn enough that the prices don’t really touch us, and I notice how much I can step out of it because of that. Part of me wants to skip this paragraph. I grew up with “doe maar gewoon” and “dit is niet voor ons soort mensen”, the Dutch way of saying keep your head down and don’t think you’re anything special, and it still pulls at me. So I’ll just say it: I’m hugely privileged. It feels like standing in a dry spot and watching the water come up around everyone else.
So where do I go when it gets too much? Work. This year AI turned into a multiplier for me. Problems that sat on my todo list for years suddenly came to life in an evening, and the excitement kept me up at night and carried me through the day. Time just flew. Some days it feels like a cheat, or a game; like the years I played World of Warcraft without a shred of guilt. It’s so much fun.
But that same place nearly ate me. In April I wrote that I was addicted to the output. In August I counted 1,338 commits in a month and 29 days over ten hours. The refuge and the thing I need rescuing from turned out to be the same room. I don’t think I can tidy that away, and I’m not going to try.
What I can do is small. I’ve been rebuilding klosterdorf.de, our village website, step by step, and the part I pushed hardest was the listening: asking the people behind each club what they want to say. The Feuerwehr turned a hundred this year. It started in 1926 with 22 men and a tractor, and it was out for the big forest fires of 2017, 2019 and 2022. ÖkoLeA began in 1990 with a handful of young East and West Berliners who wanted to live together on the land; today sixteen adults and eight kids share one purse, so that income doesn’t decide who gets what. On the first Sunday of the month there’s a neighbourhood café in their old bakery, cake on a donation basis. That’s the collective I mean, and it’s still here. It just doesn’t show up in anyone’s feed. I hope the site brings in some income, sure. Mostly I hope the people behind it feel heard.
This year I let go of the shield. What I’m holding instead, I don’t fully know yet. Something about looking straight at it, doing the small thing that’s in reach, and then going for the walk anyway, past the third tree and on to the fourth, because Fimme and Sien don’t care what the news says.
PASS IT ON.