It’s not what you do but why you do it

The undercurrent shapes everything—even the things you don’t question.

“You’re wasting your life,” my friend said, shaking her head. Around us, the café hummed—espresso machine sighing, cups clinking, conversations blurring into mundane urban white noise.

I had just told her that I hadn’t done anything for half of a year, that my dreams were crumbling in my hands like dry leaves. While blackbirds and finches were singing, my inner world had become a quiet landscape of arctic winter.

(Poetic, right? More like a personal ice age, complete with emotional permafrost.)

A stone thumped at my stomach with the same feeling as when I heard my favourite horse had been put down. The sense when you know there’s nothing you can do but face the sorrow.

“I’m sorry if I sound rude, but I honestly think you should have a life and not dwell on your thoughts. That’s what being a human is, mostly laborious and hard. Don’t take it so personally. You’ve always thought too much,” she continued, shrugging her shoulders and peeking at other tables.

The fine espresso tasted cold and sour in my mouth. I had hoped for a chance to share a sliver of my inner scenery as it was, that she would see behind my eyes and be willing to understand my state and journey. I was mistaken. She dismissed it with a shrug.

Shit. It was I who made her feel uncomfortable.

Pressing a poppy-patterned napkin in my fist under the table, I ate my cinnamon bun without tasting anything, nib sugars stuck in my throat, and kept up with the lighter topics we both knew were forced. I left the table disheartened and ashamed.

At the time, I was knocking on my thirties door, but feeling like a moss-covered stone—immovable, ancient, sealed in my private shelf. After a series of nasty incidents, I dropped out from a job that used to be my safe haven, a close-knit community that felt like a home. I had no passion or energy to do anything. My once lively social life had dried up like a forgotten houseplant, its roots tangled and withering. My daily activities, all of it, were riding a horse and cleaning its box. (Peak adulting, clearly.)

While I did cry many tears whose origin I couldn’t say, while there was a lot of melancholy, sadness, and hopelessness involved, that wasn’t all. There was also a solid, transformative part of me—a firm knowing that even in the depths of nothingness, something was stirring, something quite opposite to what my lethargic everyday life indicated. When I could put aside the expectations (only wishing to say that was frequent), I felt content and connected to a much more savoury and sweet life. Something radical was shifting during my hibernation.

Looking back, 15 years later, I now know that the life I could sense—the one rich with flavour and depth—was already on its way to me.

The inner winter arrived with long darkness, but it was also one of the most liberating periods of my life. Like a deep cleanse, I emerged with less burden and doubt, more clarity and a clear vision.

Almost anything can be either a healing balm or a self-destructive spiral.

The feverish anger you’re feeling?

Is it a way of setting healthy boundaries and learning to say no after decades of being a doormat? Or the bottomless grief of an unfulfilled need for acknowledgement in disguise? A way to feed yourself with an emotional voltage that makes you feel alive?

The longing for downgrade, quietness, escape the hustle?

Is it a call for long-needed time with yourself? Balancing the years of over-stimulation, rush, masquerading, and performing? Like myself, the compulsive urgency to vanish and retreat deeply inward? Or, hiding your head in the bushes so you don’t have to make yourself visible, face the raw discomfort of speaking your words?

The dream you have but haven’t taken any actions towards it?

Is it already outdated, but you carry it as a habit? Is it a dream that your parents, relatives, spouses, business partners, children want you to have, not yours after all? Or do you leave it unfulfilled because it would perhaps lose its preciousness and flawlessness if you brought it to reality?

If you want to look in your direction with a friend who doesn’t shrug her shoulders and peek at other tables, I have made a serene space for you. The Simplest Thing is my new 6-months passage to inner clarity and connection.

It doesn’t matter what you do.

You can start a business or buy an off-grid cabin, write a book or delete all your drafts, travel to beaches or become intimate with your couch.

You can do it loudly or quietly, messy or structured, with muddy boots or Manolo Blahniks.

None of it matters.

Why you do it matters because the undercurrent colours your every experience.

The undercurrent flows behind your expressions and actions and defines what you get out of your experience.

The world will always have its opinions. Loud ones. Magnetic ones. Opinions that sound like advice but feel like judgment.

Learning to distinguish between the outer noise and your inner knowingness—that quiet, persistent voice that knows what you need, even when everyone else is telling you otherwise—it’s a hard job. But it’s also the unwavering light that guides you even through the polar night.