Oh yeah, you clicked the “second page” button – awesome!

Life is a rollercoaster.

I found a few references to the song of the same name by Ronan Keating released back in 2000, so I’ll credit him for this quote.

There are a few things that I gladly post to the internet and then there are things that should stay out of the digital ecosystem. However, I would like to mention a few things here that I have gone through in the past year, especially after breaking my leg:

Friends

Two friends managed to visit me in the hospital during my two week stay there. My best friend who was at that time in the U.S. was the first one to visit me at home while I was still on crutches (hell, I have been on crutches for like five months!) Just two other people managed to visit me until November when I dropped the crutches. This makes a total of five. Five people in six months.
To give you some relations: When I posted an image of the emergency room, about 50 messages came my way. None of them were “How are you?”, “What happened?” or “OMFG – on the way!” They were “Well, we haven’t spoken in a while, but it seems like you got some spare time now. Could you come over and repair my computer?” or my favorite one: “Hey, you haven’t answered my last message – I was wondering if I could drop my phone in your mailbox. You could repair it and return it to me tomorrow.”

Hell yeah, sure! No worries! Who needs crutches after all? Who needs to recover from a severe leg fracture? Right: It can’t be me. I am invincible.
This gave me quite some depressions and made me think about my “friends” after all. Being on crutches wasn’t fun, but having no one to talk to was even worse. And I mean talking in terms of spoken words, not written ones. I decided not to go to the annual high school meeting I used to organize since we all graduated. I told others for years to organize it – making one phone call wasn’t that hard. No one wanted to do it. And I was definitely not in the mood to take care of this since all of them disappointed me so much.
I received a message today asking for this year’s event – if it is going to happen or not. Obviously it is not. Because no one planned it. Because no one was able to take the phone and call the restaurant and set a table.

However, it has been a rough step to wrap up connections that lasted for more than ten years. However, it has been a very relieving step to do so. And it allowed me to get to know a lot of cool new people in 2017.

If I had learned something from the past sixteen months then it is

Friends are the ones who stay when you do not work as usual.

 

Fun

Enjoy the things you love. Be aware of it. I really appreciated spending time with my friends in Berlin – dining with them was a very special moment for me. I had organized it and it felt awesome to see them all come together. It was straight away awesome to be part of something bigger, something meaningful. New connections and more importantly even more friendships were made. I am in awe being the connector for a fraction of them. It  means a lot to me to connect people. And right now, I remember that I wanted to connect two more people to each other. Potentially leading to a professional career as a photo model for one of them.

I learned quite some things in 2017.
One of them was the existence of “Sonder” – The realization that everyone has a story. I came across a conversation, respectively a bunch of thoughts which can be found here.
Those two things combined together slightly shifted my ideology. But I won’t go into more details here. Everyone should give their thoughts on those two topics on their own.
However, it would be interesting – if you are aware of what’s going on around you and you can learn from the mistakes others make – you would improve yourself. Boom! Thoughtception. I am you and you are me, just not at the same time. Well, technically at the same time, but… yeah. Just think about it.

I had to take “Sonder” to a meta level. I had to become aware that I was wondering about all the other people around me. And eventually, I might try to write it down at some point.

Maybe make a book out of it. Which takes me to my next point…

Books

I got myself an ebook reader earlier this year and I really enjoyed reading a lot of books on it. It was the best invention and best investment I had ever made. But it is less about reading, rather than writing. I would love to write a bunch of books. One being my autobiography, one being a book about “Sonder” and another book about a post-apocalyptic setting.

My studies

Last, but not least I wanted to mention that I started studying Computer Science and Text Technology and Computer Linguistics in Bielefeld, Germany back in October this year.
So far, as soon as you got the hang on it, it is pretty cool. It takes up a lot of time, but it is totally worth it. I cannot say that I learned that much in Computer Science so far, but there has been quite a lot of stuff in Mathematics that absolutely blew me away. The best thing I like about studying is understanding the backgrounds. I learned coding when I was about ten years old. There was just no time for the math behind sets and arrays. But we’re getting there now.t

Any final words?

I’ll just share one final image of my vacation in Cuxhaven, Germany where I went with my very valuable friends from all over Germany which I got to know at publishing conferences and InDesign user group meetups. I like to think that this image is a metaphor of my life: No obstacles, no hurdles, no nothing.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BURnqcKhDsI/


Also published on Medium.