Working on this website

Running a website is hard work - but it's a joy doing it

Phil

11/25/20232 min read

In October of 2023, having finished my Bachelor's thesis, I started working on this website. And even though I am currently using a very basic website builder, it incorporates a lot of work getting everything to look as I'd like it to.

Something that came to my mind in the last couple of days is the concept of expectations and learning. To me, it so often seems that things are vastly different from how I initially expected them to be. Making music is not always fun, a website is way more work than I think, working in an office full-time is way more chill and ... somehow unproductive, compared to how I used to work before making that experience.

If there is one thing that I would call the most important skill, it would be the one of calmly distancing oneself from the happenings around one and simply taking in all the different impressions. To me, this has always been an incredibly hard thing to do, especially when things seem not to work out the way I had expected them to. It so often then feels "wasted", as if I had "missed the point" by not feeling the way I would have liked to when doing what I had planned to do.

Maybe planning things altogether is overrated and following the flow intrinsically is a more robust concept. This does require a certain inner calmness though, as letting go of judgements and interpretations can leave you feeling anxious. After all, our inner judgements are somehow habits that facilitate our everyday life. They give us security and boundaries that define our lives. Simply "observing" the surroundings, not judging anything and simply taking in all the impressions, removes all these boundaries. Anything could basically happen and your instincts are the only things that remain.

I regularly get myself in this state by meditation or in other ways minding my thoughts. It's very exhausting for me, yet most of my creativity comes from these brief moments, where everything is just an impression, a colour, a neurotic signal that feels a certain way.

I want to invite you to try the same. How do you feel?