There’s no internet in Europe! People here still drive around exclusively in horse carriages. And they speak Latin! I had to send this post by snail mail to India, where my not-so virtual assistant transcribed and posted it to my blog!

I took a vow of silence! It’s a spiritual thing. I can talk and laugh and meet nice people, but I absolutely cannot blog. Apparently, this will buy me direct access to paradise.

My dogs ate my laptop! These cute little bastards. My large list of post ideas: Gone. All my drafts: Gone. My already edited, finished, and polished posts: Gone. All that was left were some aluminium crumbles, and a couple of letters from my keyboard.

Meh.
None of these excuses work. I always was a bad liar. So here’s the truth:

I wrote “the book.”
It took longer than I thought. (Actually, as we speak, it’s “still taking.”)

In the end, “the book” needed a couple of months for gestation. It took shape after reading the answers from last year’s reader survey – and I think it was worth the effort. Hope you will like it a lot.

“The book” even has a name and a release date now, and I’m glad to announce it here today:

It’s called Beyond Rules, and it will be published on Tuesday, March 15th.

The more I experimented and the longer I wrote this blog, the more I noticed that the problem with rules is not just one of submitting to questionable authorities. Even in the context of “your life, your rules, your pace,” (see the tagline!) rules are often simply not good enough: They are restrictive rather than permissive, they are stubbornly stable rather than adapting to changing real life situations. What’s more, they take responsibility away from the people, and this is nothing I’d like to promote when it comes to living a conscious and self-determined life.

“Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware,” Arthur Koestler wrote. If we unconsciously, yet unconditionally adhere to a fixed set of rules in our lives, the same thing happens.

More on that in the book, an excerpt of which I will publish here in the upcoming days, if my next type-written letter makes it to my Indian assistant.

In other news, I just traveled to Denmark, desperately wanting to see the sea, after living in Cologne, Germany during the last couple of weeks. Here, an ice-cold wind is blowing, but the North Sea is just beautiful, and inspiring me to get the last couple of chapters of “the book” written and edited.

I will be back to Cologne for the launch, and plan to travel to Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, Austria, and probably Southern France later in April and May. Let me know if you’re somewhere near and would like to meet up.