This is the story of how an ordinary week became magical. It didn’t require spiritual experiences, meditations or special revelations. The ordinary turned out to be enough.

I was feeling frustrated with how often I postponed simple tasks. Why couldn’t I just sit down and do what I thought I was supposed to do? Things like check emails, play the piano, write the next article, think about the future – none of it is difficult. I decided to start the week by observing myself.

For years, I would have called that procrastination and immediately tried to correct it. More discipline. Better habits. A stricter schedule. 

This time I tried something else. I watched.

Every morning I made coffee and somehow found myself reading, watching videos, staring outside, finding small things to do before opening my work laptop. I thought I was avoiding my entire future. Then one morning I noticed something almost embarrassingly simple.

I was mostly avoiding my email. The strange part was that my body reacted before I even opened it. I would see a notification and already feel the tightening. I had not read the message. I did not know if it was good, bad or completely irrelevant, but some part of me had already decided that it meant interruption, another little demand on my attention.

Maybe I did not need to diagnose myself every time I did not want to do something. Maybe I could simply notice the response first.

I started seeing the same thing elsewhere.

The piano was probably the clearest example. I had wanted to play it for a long time. I had bought the mixer, connected everything, figured out how to record, and still somehow I could not make myself sit down and play.

For a while I thought this was procrastination too. Then I noticed how much noise had gathered around something that had once been simple.

The piano stopped being just a piano. It became a reminder that somebody might be watching whether I was doing enough with it. And the more I thought I should play, the less I wanted to touch it. Maybe I was avoiding everything that had accumulated around it: the expectation, the embarrassment, the feeling of being watched while trying to become something.

Once I saw that, I stopped trying to force myself to play. I let the piano sit there. And strangely, after a while, I wanted to touch it again.

Writing did not feel like that. Long conversations did not feel like that. Going outside did not feel like that. Books certainly did not feel like that. I could disappear inside a book for hours without having to convince myself.

On Friday, I went back to a cave I had visited before.

I had been thinking about going for weeks. I packed water, a painted stone, two little shells and a tiny bottle of nard oil. None of this had been planned as some formal ritual. They were just things I wanted to bring.

The climb was steeper than I remembered. At one point I had to pull myself up using branches, which was considerably less mystical than anything I had imagined beforehand.

Inside it was cool and quiet. Not completely quiet. Somewhere above me a bat moved. I sat down. Usually I have this idea that a meditation should last a certain amount of time. Longer must mean deeper. 

That day, after maybe ten minutes, I felt finished. Ten minutes? You climbed all the way up here for ten minutes? The mind was whispering, but another part of me knew there was nothing else to do.

I stayed around the cave for a while. I lay on the ground. I ate something. Near the cave there was a small hollow in the rock, almost like a natural shelf. I placed the painted stone there and put the two shells beside it.

It did not feel like an offering to some being or a ceremony I had been taught. It was simply a beautiful little gesture in a beautiful place, and I wanted to leave it there.

Going down, I found a small spring. I poured a few drops of nard oil into the spring. The smell disappeared almost immediately.

I drank some of the water and later stopped at a little waterfall. The water was freezing. I stood underneath it for a few seconds and had absolutely no noble thoughts. Mostly I was aware of how cold it was.

There was nothing to release. Nothing to wash away. I was not imagining old energy leaving my body or some purified version of myself emerging from the water. It was simply water on skin.

When I walked back toward the car, my body felt lighter. I still cannot explain what shifted, and I do not particularly want to turn it into a theory.

The next day I went to the river.

It was warmer. I sat in the sun eating strawberries, then wandered around and found raspberries growing nearby. I made little stone cairns by the river. Eventually I went into the water and leaned against the rocks while the current moved over my back and legs. It felt like nature had made a slightly “dangerous” jacuzzi. 

What I remember most is that I was not trying to accomplish anything. Even spirituality can become another form of productivity if I am not careful.