Lower the Heat

I love hot chocolate. Especially in winter, I’ll make a small cup every day at work. One of the first times I did so, however, I ruined the microwave. I cranked it up to full blast, set the timer to two minutes, and walked away. Needless to say, I returned to a boiled over cup and ended up cleaning the entire microwave.

Yesterday, I made Maultaschen. It’s a German sort-of dumpling. They’re really nice when you slice them and fry them in the pan for a bit. Often, I’m impatient. I’ll turn the stove to the maximum setting, and some of them will come out burned.

This morning, after I came out of the shower, I set the hair dryer to high heat, but after a second, I had an epiphany: “No. Lower the heat. Take 20 seconds extra.” Naturally, my scalp didn’t burn, and my hair was much more tidy after I was done.

What all these things have in common is that intensity leads to a quicker result, but it’s not the result you truly want and, in some cases, outright disaster.

If you fire up the microwave all the way and stop watching it for a second, your milk will boil over. If you throw dumplings into a searing hot pan, they’ll burn on the outside but stay cold on the inside. And if you dry your hair in a 100-degree wind tunnel, your head will hurt and your hair will look fuzzy.

So lower the heat. Take 20 seconds extra. Or two minutes. However long it takes.

Some things in life can only be done slowly — building a career, attaining mastery, forming a relationship — but that’s not a good reason to take out our frustration on the little things by cutting corners wherever we can. In the end, even those shortcuts often come back around to bite us.

Lower the heat. Give yourself time. Do things once but right, and try not to spill the milk.

Stewing in the Question

I’m trying to redesign a newsletter. Not as in “make it look pretty” — I’m no longer foolish enough to believe I can do that. That’ll be for a pro to handle. No, what I’m trying to do is come up with a new, hopefully more engaging structure, and it’s eating me alive.

“Should I put the quote section above or below this other one? Do I make the buttons big or small? How many sections in total? What order? How often will I send it? Aaaaaaaahhhh!!”

Yesterday, I spent something to the tune of five hours on this project. As I was walking home, thoughts still whirring around margins and layouts and titles, I wished I could be done. I wished I had answers. “I just need a final structure! Why is this so hard?”

It’s hard because it’s a creative decision. There are no right and wrong answers. Eventually, I’ll just have to settle on a structure and see how people react. But as I was coming to terms with the fact that I’m not yet ready to make that decision, I remembered something else: Time solves everything. So what if I just allow myself to stew a little longer in the question?

For the rest of the day, I took it easy. I didn’t brush aside new thoughts about the project, but I also didn’t zone in on them when they came. It felt like I could have worked another 48 hours straight on it and wouldn’t have made any further progress. But lo and behold, eight hours of sleep later, I had new ideas — but also a new willingness to wrestle with this issue.

Time answers every question. Sooner or later, it will provide a response. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in the meantime is admit that you don’t have one yet. Keep stewing in the question. Even if it’s a little too hot to be comfortable, we all know a good broth needs to boil a while before it’s done.

Where Family Begins

“We want to start a family.” How many times have you heard young couples say that sentence? It’s a bit weird, if you think about it. Who decided you’re only family once you have kids? Shouldn’t you consider your partner family already? What about married couples who choose to not have kids? Are those not families?

Family can be a rollercoaster, but it’s not a theme park ride. “Must be at least three people to enter.” That’s not how it works, but, as partially evidenced by divorce rates of nearly 50% and higher, many people forget or gloss over this fact. How many couples get married because they happened to get pregnant? How many try to save their marriage by having kids? There are no precise numbers, but these things occur every day, and they often don’t end well.

Reserving the concept of family for “a group of at least three or more” is like skipping a rung on a ladder: It might work, but you might also fall. Why not put one foot in front of the other?

When you’re in a multi-year, committed relationship, treat your partner like you’d treat a cherished family member. Take anyone who works for you as a proxy. Your dad. Your sister. Your nephew. If you bring them a gift from your travels, pick up one for your partner too. In some ways, treating your partner like family will be obvious and easy. In other situations, it’ll be hard and easy to miss.

How will you go out of your way to treat your partner well? What will you give up to make time for them, to balance your relationship with all your other obligations? Because heads up: This will only get harder after you have kids. Don’t wait to learn juggling until you have three balls in the air. Practice with two for as long as you can.

I imagine this problem is exacerbated for couples in which one person wants to have kids more so than the other. Unless both are happy to sacrifice a lot for their child, one will now really feel left in the dust. And I think this breaks many couples’ backs. If you can’t think and move as a unit before your “team” grows, it’ll only get harder with each additional member.

This is a new idea for me, but it immediately made sense when it first struck me. Being a good boyfriend is as important as it will be to be a good husband or a good dad. The stakes may increase as our roles change, but in reality, they already start out high enough to warrant our very best effort.

Family is a birth-right but also a birth-obligation. Most importantly, however, it is a choice. People choose families they have no blood-ties to all the time — and for most, that process starts when they decide who shall be their life partner.

Don’t wait for the official label. Don’t listen to what society prescribes, especially when it’s not working for half the people. You choose who you love, and that’s where family begins — let’s make it count.

Keep Your Umbrella Open

This morning, there was a slight drizzle hanging in the air. Not enough to be called proper rain, but not so little as to not warrant an umbrella either — or so I thought.

On my way to work, out of hundreds of people, only a handful had their umbrellas open. At every next intersection, I was the odd one out. “Am I crazy?” I thought. I closed the umbrella. Drip, drip, drip. “Nope, still getting wet here.” And flap, back open it went.

At some point during my 20-minute walk, it hit me: “I have no idea where these people are going. Maybe they’re only walking 100 meters to get a pretzel, across the street to their office, or somewhere else where they don’t need an umbrella.” When I, on the other hand, walk a mile to work, I don’t want to do so in a constant drizzle — and so I’ll keep my umbrella open, regardless of whether it makes me look stupid or not.

Life is like that, you know? You have no idea where other people are going. So don’t worry about how your journey looks.

Maybe you’re wearing gloves in September, because your hands just get cold faster than most people’s. Maybe you ride your bike even when it’s snowing, because you love it and every minute counts. Or maybe your career looks like a jumbled mess to most employers, but for you each next job was the right piece of the puzzle, and they’re slowly starting to fall into place.

If you don’t want to get wet, keep your umbrella open. And even if the whole world is dancing in the rain, you’ll be dry and happy.

The Price of Love

When Cassian returns from a dangerous heist in a dangerous place to a home he’s no longer welcome in, a planet crawling with the spies and soldiers of the Empire, most of whom are looking for him, he makes an uncomfortable discovery: Despite finally having all the money in the world, his adoptive mother Maarva won’t escape with him from this wretched place.

Maarva is old and tired, but she’s also tired of waiting. She chooses to stay and fight, to help the Rebellion however she can. Gracefully, however, she does not try to hold Cassian back. “You have a different path, and I am not judging you. Take all the money, and go and find some peace.”

It is then that Cassian realizes the money never really mattered: “I won’t have peace. I’ll be worried about you all the time.” And to that, Maarva only says: “That’s just love. Nothing you can do about that.”


When my girlfriend is out late at night, I am worried. When she takes a plane, I am worried. When my dad has a doctor’s appointment, I am worried. And when my sister is ill, I am worried. That’s just love.

The price of love is worry. You’ll worry about your partner drinking one too many, about your kids’ bus ride home from school, and about your best friend’s happiness at work. Love is the purest admission of caring there is. Without caring, there can be no love, but wherever there’s caring, there’s also worry.

When it comes to love, worrying is not a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a sign that everything is going right. You should be worried about your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it — except learn to accept it.

The next time you wake up at night, fretting about someone you love, don’t let your brain run off into some horrific fantasy. Appreciate that worrying means caring, that life is big and you’re small, and that, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, deep down, they’ll always know their love is with you — and that is, always was, and forever will be enough.

Thoughts Are Raindrops

Some will hit you. Others won’t. Even if a thought misses you by only half an inch, it’s still an idea you’ll never have. A sentence you’ll never write. An apology you’ll never make. And the ones that do make contact with your brain? They’ll be a potpourri of potpourris — and you’ll have little say in its ingredients.

The only thing we know for sure about rain is that, eventually, it is going to end. These thoughts, too, will pass. Meditation is learning to stand in the rain without running from it. To not need to find shelter. When you meditate, you bathe in the awareness that thoughts are temporary and that, for every single one, we have a choice whether to engage with it or not.

When a raindrop falls on your skin, you can feel it. Its physical impact is undeniable. But whether you get upset at it, whether you lean into the feeling that “you’re cold” or “wet” or “there’s now a stain on my favorite sweater,” that’s up to you. You can’t deny the impulse — but you can choose how you’ll react to it.

Sometimes, the rain keeps falling longer than we’d like. When that happens, as in that song lamenting this very phenomenon, we can either yell at the sun for “sleeping on the job,” or we can admit that we’re “never gonna stop the rain by complaining.”

Whether it takes you a week of meditation, a decade, or only a little thinking, once you see that thoughts are as temporary as everything else in this life, you’ll also conclude that, “crying’s not for me — because I’m free, nothing’s worrying me.”

When the Brain Runs Out

We have a saying in Germany: “At the end of the money, I had so much month left!”

On a day-to-day basis, our brains are often the same. When you’re out of brain at 4 PM, you have there options:

  1. Fight the trend, and do shoddy work for another three hours.
  2. Kick yourself for not being able to focus anymore for three hours.
  3. Go home and get a head start on recovery — of about three hours.

Most of the time, we choose some combination of 1 and 2. I do it all the time, but actually, I’d be much better off with option 3.

When, at the end of the brain, there’s still a lot of day left, use it for something that doesn’t require your brain as the star of the show! Close your laptop, and write off the rest of the brain budget — sometimes, it just isn’t there. Then, get on with your day, and try again tomorrow.

It’s true that our brain power often runs out before we’d like it to, but it also almost always recovers fully overnight. Those two magic tricks go hand in hand, but, as with any performer-in-training, it’s up to us to know when and which card to play.

Thoughts Are Free

Have you ever had a busy period at work where, after a lot of toiling and long hours, you finally felt like you’re in the home stretch, only to be taken out by the flu a day later? It’s maddening, isn’t it?

The worst part is not even when you’re sick. It’s when you’re almost recovered but not quite ready to go. You’re already chomping at the bit, dying to get back out there, but you know you can’t — or that if you would, you’d probably be right back where you started two days later.

I’ve paced through my flat more than once, wishing the recovery would speed up. On a bad day, I’ll spend half my time fretting over when I can get back to work and what I’ll have to do. On a good one, however, I’ll just remember a song: Die Gedanken sind frei.

Written over 200 years ago, this German folk song has been a place of refuge for generations. “The thoughts are free,” it stipulates. “No person can guess them. No hunter can shoot them. It is thus and always will be: The thoughts are free.”

In 1942, Nazi resistance member Sophie Scholl played the melody on her flute, standing outside the wall of her father’s prison cell. In 1948, over 300,000 Germans sang it in Berlin, protesting the Soviet occupation of their city. And in 1989, thousands of protesters joined in on the lyric as the East German Republic was about to collapse.

Now, I’m not saying having the flu is the same as being oppressed. Not even close. I have no idea what that’s like, and the less frequently people have to hum that song in such scenarios, the better.

That said, I think you know what it feels like when an illness “holds you down.” Heck, for more than a year, a disease kept all of us in our apartments regardless of whether we had it or not! And in times like that, when you’re stuck in something, be it a health issue, your flat, or a bad situation, it helps to remember that, well, your thoughts are free.

Perhaps I can’t take a walk outside, but I can still fly around the world in my mind. I can’t shoulder my backpack and trek to work, but I can imagine myself typing, thinking, looking at the eventual end result, and take some comfort in that. Maybe I can’t eat the pizza I usually enjoy so much, but I can still remember its taste.

Even if your suffering is harmless, sometimes, it doesn’t do just to belittle it. It may be small in historic comparison, but if it hurts right now, then right now is when you need a way of handling it. Today, more oppression happens in human minds than to human bodies — and a lot of it is self-inflicted.

Wherever it comes from, don’t let the madness get to you. Your thoughts are free, and so are you — as long as you remember it.

A Penguin in the Desert

Eckart von Hirschhausen is a German writer, comedian, and TV personality. Actually, he is a physician — or used to be. Von Hirschhausen studied in Heidelberg and London, graduated magna cum laude with his PhD, and practiced as a doctor in Switzerland, South Africa, and Germany, before eventually transitioning to writing, journalism, and later hosting talk shows and performing live on stage.

Asked in an interview what brought about his remarkable transition, von Hirschhausen recounts a story. Once upon a time, he went to a zoo in Norway. Looking at a penguin waddling around his enclosure, he thought: “Poor bastard. He can’t fly, he’s fat, and the creator even forgot to give him knees.” But then he went down a flight of stairs, and suddenly, his penguin swam by behind a glass window, looking at him, and von Hirschhausen thought: “Wow. Now, this guy is pitying me.”

“If you’ve ever seen a penguin in water,” he recalls, “you know they can fly — as soon as they’re in their element. In fact, with the energy you’d get out of one liter of fuel, they could travel 2,000 kilometers. That’s more efficient than anything humans have been able to come up with — and yet, here I was, thinking this guy is a total case of faulty design.”

Von Hirschhausen learned two things from this experience, he says. The first was about how quickly we judge people, even if we’ve observed them in only a single situation, and how wrong we can be in those assessments. The second was this: “Your strengths only shine when you’re in your element.”

“If you’re born as a penguin, even seven years of therapy won’t turn you into a giraffe. It doesn’t matter how much you’d like to have a really long neck. What matters is: Who are you? What can you do? And what do you want? And if I’m a penguin and find myself in the desert, then I needn’t be surprised why things aren’t going well. And in that case, it’s not important how I got there or whose fault that was. The question is: How do I get out of here? Back into my element.”

As a doctor, von Hirschhausen struggled with doing things in a set order, time and time again. He wasn’t good with routine, and in a hospital, routine keeps both you and your patients alive and sane. What he was good at was coming up with new insights on the fly which, when you’re giving patients a diagnosis, also doesn’t help. In other words, von Hirschhausen was a penguin in the desert — and he needed to get out of there.

Nowadays, through his books and public appearances, von Hirschhausen brings questions of health and wellness to a broad audience. He uses comedy and stories to make science more accessible, and that too is a service, just a different one than treating people one-on-one.

Who are you? What can you do? And what do you want? Don’t obsess about fixing your shortcomings. Find your element. Get out of the desert. Dare to jump in at the deep end. Risk a dive into the water, and sooner or later, you will find: “I may be a penguin — but I can still fly.”

Making Peace With Your Unlived Dreams

I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080.

In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, “like tennis, skiing, or, say, snowboarding,” as long as 15 years ago. It sucks. I’d love to take snowboarding lessons. Alas, all I can do is watch videos of people doing sick stunts, living vicariously through GoPro’s Youtube channel.

When I first found out, for a good while, I was really upset about this. “How dare life take that from me!” I often imagined what would happen if I went big on snowboarding anyway. That there must be a way for me to fix my knees enough to succeed, and, to be fair, there probably is. But at some point, I realized that life is big but also short.

When asked “What’s one experience you hope we’ll share in the future?” ex-Bachelor star Sharleen Joynt tells her husband: “It’s hard. I want to do everything with you. There’s not enough time.”

You know what else I’d like to do besides becoming a great snowboarder? I want to learn kung fu. I’d also love to be a lot better at video games, get my Yu-Gi-Oh! hobby back on, and become at least fluent enough for everyday conversation in oh, I don’t know, eight more languages.

Meanwhile, back down on earth, I’m self-employed. I spend most of my time working, and when I don’t work, I try to be with my girlfriend, or family, or friends. It ebbs and flows, of course, but over the last few weeks, I’ve barely managed to make time to read, let alone pursue other, second-tier hobbies.

Even if I won the lottery tomorrow, however, I doubt there’d be enough time. There’s never enough time. If Death excused me for a few hundred years, I’d definitely take it.

And yet, somehow, the more years go by, the more rarely I watch snowboarding videos. My imagination runs wild less often, and when it does, it comes with smiles more so than bitterness. “It’s okay. Leave the snowboarding to others. You are a writer. You have things to do where you are, and that is enough.”

Use your imagination. Sometimes, dreams can just be dreams. They needn’t all come true to feel satisfying. Watch videos. Read books. Spend time with the heroes you’ll never meet. Whatever you do, don’t get angry at your unlived dreams. Extend a hand. Make peace.

We only get to sample a small taste of everything life has to offer, but in choosing deliberately, we are doing the most important job we were brought here to do.