Step
No, right now with every step you’re afraid of what will happen.
You take half a step and then think, “What if I feel this?” or “What if I think that?”
The trick is to take a step without expectations. You step.
I actually wanted to say, “You step and don’t think further.” But better is simply: “You step.”
Step.
Step.
Take a tiny step. The feelings and thoughts lurking around the corner—we’ll see them there.
Step, step. With my whole body, I step.
Note 1: Don’t step as if you’re afraid of being hit. Step fully, with all of you.
The best thing about thinking is that you never have to stop doing it.
You can think forever. There will forever be a new thing.
I was scared a lot—until I realized I was scared about not being able to think. I want to do it my whole life.
See, I started a new thought.
For years, there has been a hetze against thinking. Buddhists only want to breathe. Kids hear that they are distracted too much.
Don’t listen to them. Thinking is fantastic.
See, I started a new thought again.
People with ADD work in shorter cycles.
For a “typical” person, the time between thoughts or feelings is longer than for someone with ADD. The question is whether that’s a problem at all, and whether it’s possible to change this rhythm.
If you visualize this as a wave pattern, someone with ADD has shorter but higher waves, alternating with very low waves (moments of low intensity, distraction, or quietly accumulating new knowledge).
A “typical” person has waves that are more monotone, longer, and less high.
This would explain why people with ADD often work in very short cycles and switch tasks frequently. It’s simply a different rhythm that uses a different body posture and energy pattern. People with ADD in hyperfocus are one hundred percent engaged.
Note 1: If you see it for what it is, it’s not scary.
Note 2: I can’t stand the term “typical people”—they don’t exist—but I needed a comparison group.
Emotional States
Everything in your body is a circle.
The simplest way to look at it is as if we are cycling through energy states.
We all cycle through energy states: present and past ones.
For me, it always feels as if they are located in my legs.
Energy states correlate with certain thoughts, emotions, and their speed. We all cycle through ADHD-ish energy states (depending on your past and present), OCD states, paranoia states, anxious states, happy emotional states, and states of love at different moments throughout the day.
One of the silliest things is neglecting energy states for too long. It’s smarter to feel sad or face your anxiety than to ignore things for too long. Otherwise, that energy state keeps cycling back.
Why You Should Worry About Unimportant Things
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who live “meta.”
Meta means this: you don’t worry about small things, only the big ones. For example: don’t worry if something happens in traffic, because there are also people who are terminally ill.
That’s not how it works. You’re much better off worrying about everything—up to the point where people think, “Is he really getting upset about something so small?”
Why? Because the day becomes much more enjoyable. In a few minutes, I’ll be tearing my hair out again over our electronic personnel file that isn’t working properly.
The problem with living meta is that you actually never get to worry about anything anymore, because there’s always something more important or worse. What you don’t realize is that people who worry about everything also end up in big conflicts far less often. They’ve already dealt with all the little stuff.
The Game We Play Backstage
The world has a frontstage and a backstage. Frontstage is the game with common knowledge. Backstage, we play high stakes. We play the game that’s called new knowledge.
You see, the reason some species survive and others don’t is not about evolution. Random mutation only accounts for very small changes in species.
The real game is about knowledge.
Let’s say there is one group of humans. Half of them know you can’t drink water from the river unless you boil it first, and the other half doesn’t know this.
How do you think this influences the evolution of a species?
Or imagine this: half of the people know how to build a new, cheap atomic bomb, and the other half don’t know. If you would go back in time, how would that look from an evolutionary standpoint?
I don’t think the theory of evolution is wrong; it’s just relatively useless when you compare it with knowledge, since you can’t transfer knowledge through DNA. Knowledge is a game that reboots itself every generation.
A very interesting thing about knowledge is that it’s multidimensional. It also means knowing that not everything is about evolution. It can be okay, for instance, to accept that your species dies. And there is a lot of knowledge that animals possess. Animals don’t want to conquer the world; they just want to live in balance with other species, unlike us.
Why This Is Important
Because knowledge is infinitely more important than evolution, things have changed far less over time than we assume. Things have been more or less the same forever. This is counterintuitive, because if you only look at evolution, you think: wow, this changed and that changed, and everything was different back then. But if you think from the perspective of people who transfer knowledge in a certain way since forever, that process has been the same forever too. So not a lot has changed.
In many things, you can still spot the genius over time — you just need to know where to look.
This brings me to my last point: language. Smart people give each other hints through language. The simplest example is the Adam and Eve story, which is about Adam’s apple. I know what this story is really about. Hint: it’s called an Adam’s apple. In which cultures do you think we figured out what this is about?
Why Knowledge Comes Before Evolution
Let’s assume there are two types of knowledge:
-
The first level is vague, intuitive knowledge.
This is like an arrow—you kind of know where something is heading or what it should be, but it’s still not fully formed. -
The second level is execution.
This is a very specific claim, like a scientific theory. It’s the moment when the vague idea becomes something concrete and testable.
Let me explain this using Charles Darwin as an example.
Darwin was obviously a brilliant man—this is by no means meant as disrespect. He grew up in a very progressive family. They already intuitively knew that slavery was wrong. That’s level 1: the collective, shared knowledge within their family. At that point, everyone kind of knew, but it was still vague. You intuitively know you're right, but you haven’t yet found the execution—the bullet.
Then Darwin comes along. His theory of evolution is the bullet. But when Darwin was alive, there were already many others coming up with similar theories. My point is this: people were already working from a collective knowledge. They were already on the hunt. So the collective, intuitive knowledge existed before the execution.
They already knew.
The Bible is like this too.
The Bible represents level 1 knowledge. When you deconstruct it with scientific “bullets,” the Bible doesn’t stand a chance. But have you ever wondered why so many things in the Bible resemble the Big Bang theory? The order in which things evolved over time?
That’s because knowledge always comes first.
Stap
Nee, je bent nu bij elke stap bang voor wat er gaat gebeuren.
Je doet een halve stap en dan denk je: “Straks voel ik dit” of “Straks denk ik dit.”
De truc is een stap doen zonder verwachtingen. Je stapt.
Ik wilde eigenlijk zeggen: “Je stapt en je denkt verder niet na.” Maar beter is: “Je stapt.”
Stap.
Stap.
Doe een muizenstap. De gevoelens en gedachten die daar om de hoek loeren, zien we daar wel.
Stap, stap. Met mijn hele lichaam, ik stap.
Opmerking 1: Niet stappen alsof je bang bent om geraakt te worden. Stap volledig, met je hele zelf.