a balance of my energies

I broke most rules about work in the last years, i broke even more of them in the last month. I didn’t do that voluntarily, but when the exception happened i tried to second it and accept its consequences.

In Sicily, for example, i was forced to be offline. Instead of reacting rigidly and make sure to be always close to a good network infrastructure, i opted to see that as a natural condition, and decided to make my work process more resilient to network interruptions in the future.

After the Nowhere festival, i found it hard to come back to a significant amount of working hours per day. Instead of stressing myself in order to hit a quantitative goal, i opted to relax this other constraint and communicate to my coworkers my reduced availability.

I did this by instinct. This attitude belonged to me since many years, to rely on acceptance rather than grit. Just now i am developing it further to areas where it’s really risky, since i am an honest freelancer and my income totally depends on my productivity.

Despite the risk, i’m rather calm, because i already accepted most of the potential losses involved in working in my own personal way. There is something i need to register though, as it’s unexpected and disappointing. By breaking rules i hoped to get some motivational energy, but currently i’m getting quite little of it.

One of the causes might be that i am so out of my comfort zone, that most of the energy gets wiped out by practical problems. Albeit not being subject to many rules, i still cannot put myself in a context which i consider suited to being productive and an happy worker.

Freedom of movement gives me energy, this is true. But it’s also costing me a lot of energy, and money.

My original plan was to find oases of creativity and sustainability where to live, which would give me space for expression and experimentation, but some experiences seemed to provide counterexamples to my hopes. The enthusiasm Madrid gave me, the troubles trying to be happy in Ragusa, the stark nostalgia of Berlin.

Although i adapted to the nomadic life quite naturally, my plan fell short for what involves escaping big cities, which was one of the main points of it.

Maybe this is hampering my energy now, this fundamental detachment between expectations and experiences. It’s been useful to write this, it’s giving me a direction to work towards. Maybe Ragusa has been a failure at the moment, but there is still plenty of outskirts to explore. I’m feeling the importance of this point more and more now, as it’s critical to the sustainability of my project