Dreamscape Diaries: My Third Place

Cycle 12 Day 13. Friday, April 17th. It’s 03:47 in the morning.And we’re in for another dreamscape diary.This one touches on a few topics and themes that are very dear to my heart.So let’s jump into it.The DreamIn the dream, I find myself standing up.At the base of my feet, there is someone close to me, close to my body, who’s laying on his back with his legs kind of in a battle to entangle my legs and my hip.So I’m in a setting that I’ve been used to for quite a while, which is my favorite sport.The one sport I found at around 30 years of age that has stuck with me since.But it’s come and gone, which I’ll probably get to.And I can also identify who is there, on the floor, trying to wrestle with me.And it’s my dear friend and colleague Alex, from when I was working and living in London.Yeah. Working and living. In that order.It’s a Freudian slip.Which kind of tells half the story.Not living and working, but working and living.Such a Northern Hemisphere, Northern Europe kind of thing: working and living.Or as someone pointed out the other day, when I talked to another new acquaintance of mine, he had heard from his Argentinian Spanish friend that “Yeah, I’ve been in Sweden for a while now, and it’s clear: here people live to work, whereas in Argentina people work to live.”But anyway, we’ll probably get to that side note later.In the dream, I’m now wrestling Alex, my colleague from London, in our home gym, in Grapple Collective.And I don’t remember in the dream how the environment looked and felt exactly, but anyway, we were in the home gym in the dream.And then, for some reason, I come up with this new move where I put my knuckle kind of to the ground, like I have a closed fist.And I take my right arm and I cross it over to the other side downwards, and I put my fist with the knuckles pushing down into the mat on the right side of Alex’s neck (or the left side from my perspective), in the crevice that’s formed between his shoulder and his neck.And then I’m taking my left arm and crossing it over my right arm, and I’m finding a way to push down my other closed fist on the left side of Alex’s neck, right where it starts to curve out into his shoulder.And in some weird, miraculous anatomical way, biomechanical way, I’m able to use the leverage that I get from this to apply pressure to his neck.And I can also push down on him.So whether he tries to worm his way out of it or not, I’m successfully strangling him.But bear in mind, I’m just pushing my fists into the mat, into the ground beneath us.I don’t have anything to grab onto in terms of fabric around his neck.So it’s not the type of Brazilian jiu-jitsu wrestling where I make use of the fact that I get an anchor point, that I get my hooks in, so to speak, by grabbing the fabric of his neck collar.No.I miraculously am able to get leverage here and restrict his movement enough and tighten the noose around his neck enough, even though I just have my fists to the floor.So it’s completely unrealistic.But sure, I’ll take it.Because I usually don’t win out in these scraps with Alex. 😅 So in the dream, I’m a happy camper.I just tag along and I’m able to choke him out.And then I’m also a bit confused about how I actually got that to work.But so is Alex.So we try it again.But now he just lets me get that position.And it works again.And then something else happens in the dream, but I don’t remember what.And then I wake up.So yeah, that was the dream.Missing the MatsIt’s exciting for me to very viscerally, in a dream, experience performing and doing my favorite sport.Because it’s been crazy long since I did it last time now.It’s like two years ago already… All because of me having to switch to this new, very unwanted physical discipline of fighting cancer.Already at the onset, when I got the diagnosis, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be wrestling anytime soon, because I was immediately thinking of the risks involved in terms of getting an infection if I was to start treatment.My immune defense would definitely be affected by the treatment, and any infection might become more serious.There are a lot of skin infections you can get in grappling every now and then that might get more serious.But also, because you’re so intimate when you’re wrestling, or what we call “rolling”, with your partners, the people in your gym, but also when you’re doing competitions - though most of your time spent on the mat wrestling will be with your training partners in the gym - you will also be exposed to a lot of other germs just by people breathing down your neck, people breathing straight into your nose and mouth, basically.And you’re just bathing around in this pool of everyone’s sweat, basically.So it’s been two years since I grappled.And therefore I’m very happy that I got to experience it in a dream, at least, however unrealistic that actual move in the dream was. 😅 And I’m also happy to have shared a moment, despite only in the dream, with Alex, my friend.I miss him.Would have been such a blast to hang out more often.We have many more things in common than we’ve actively built on, that we just touched on in terms of our friendship.For one, he’s very poetic.He writes poetry and spoken word, which I’ve once joined him at a spoken word evening and witnessed, which was very valuable for me.It’s probably influenced me a bit in my own poetic journey.So thanks for that, Alex.And then just the fact that we share this sport whilst we worked in the same company, that’s been very valuable.And he’s been a key part in me joining that gym.He was the catalyst.The Neck InjuriesWe came onto the topic of this sport that he’d also fallen for in adult age.And what had happened for me was that I had been away from the sport, unable to feel safe enough to train physically, because I’d suffered two different neck injuries that were both caused by training accidents in the gym.And every time I tried to get back on the mats, I’d have, the same day or one or two days after, this sensitivity and stiffness and pain in the neck, around the spine, around the discs in the spine where I had contacted my previous injuries.And before that, I’d had a lot of issues with repercussions from those two injuries.They were each a bit different in nature.The first one was a “stinger” injury. Getting a “stinger” injury normally happens when, for some reason, end up with your neck twisted and with a lot of pressure on that neck.So in my case, I ended up in such a position, through a very explosive motion by my training partner that I didn’t expect, partly due to a very drastic change in tempo during a round of technical sparring/drilling. The tempo wasn’t very energetic up until that point—but then the tempo just switched very suddenly by my opponent, who had very strong legs.Me being on the side of his back and latching onto his back with a kind of seatbelt arrangement, I didn’t have the time to react by folding in my neck.So my neck just got pressured from the side, and from all of his body weight, and the explosiveness of him trying to push himself with his legs out of this position.And I ended up with the pressure on my neck that causes a stinger.And a stinger is caused when the sideways pressure on your neck puts so much pressure on one of the discs in your neck that the disc itself, or some of the spinal solid tissue, is pushing on a nerve to the extent that that nerve gets pinched very acutely and the stinger occurs.And the stinger is then an electric impulse that’s acutely sent from that neck area, from between those two discs, or between that exact space in the spine, and it’s firing like a lightning bolt all the way from your neck down through your shoulder, through your armpit, and all the way down to your forearm and into your hand and your fingertips.So it feels like a lightning bolt striking down your neck and reaching all the way down to your fingertips.And for me, this happened by my neck being twisted to the left and the impingement and the lightning bolt streaming down my right arm.Or it might have been twisted to the right.But anyway, the actual lightning bolt streamed down on my right side.And this caused such repercussions in terms of nerve damage, and that led to muscle atrophy.So still to this day, and forever, for my whole life, some muscles have atrophied, because they don’t have the same solid nerve connections as before. They’ve had to reshape and reconfigure themselves. I don’t have chronic pain from third anymore apart from when I do certain types of movements, or definitely overexert myself.So for the set of active muscles on my right side in the arm, but especially in the lower back, under the armpit, and the kind of transversal muscles there - there are some of those muscles that are no longer activated by the nerves in the spine as efficiently, or some of them have basically completely atrophied.So I need to make use of other muscles, which have thus overdeveloped and reconfigured themselves to try and compensate for that atrophy.But in certain types of movements, such as L-sit or static movements where I really need to push down with my arms and activate all my lower back, there’s a point of exertion past which I get weird nerve spasms and I’m not able to complete the movement anymore.And then, in terms of right around that neck area, it’s not something I’m suffering from daily in terms of stiffness and pain, because I’ve been doing so much rehab to this stuff so that I’ve strengthened my neck. So there’s a now reserve built up there to take from in terms of muscle and connective tissue that’s probably buffering me a lot against that stiffness and pain coming back. Hours upon hours of daily morning neck training sessions have made that tissue more resilient and less sensitive to having had this injury. And the injury itself has hopefully, and probably also, healed up a bit.And then the second injury was an even more annoying event where, during just a training drill, we were just training to be in a dominant position or not, and we were going at a medium tempo, medium intensity, but nothing more.I was probably going at a lower one.My training partner wanted to get back at me because of his ego, so he wanted to score points on me.But then it was even worse than that, because I kind of let him get me in a position where I end up in turtle, the turtle position, with my back towards the sky.And then he’s in front of me, and he’s laying on top of my head with his chest, and then he grabs my neck and he squeezes for dear life.And this is, imagine, a Central Asian dude who’s grown up doing greco-roman wrestling, so he’s super strong, and he’s just squeezing.For some reason he decides to start squeezing my neck from up there.So it’s like he’s crushing a melon between his chest and his arms. And there’s not enough time for me to react, to tap to this… So in the blink of an eye, I feel like—and I can probably even hear—a crackling sound in my neck.And then it’s too late.He’s popped one of my discs in the neck.So something is bulging out.It’s like a disc has been displaced in some way, or one of the vertebrae has been displaced in some way.And that caused me to have to go back to the drawing board in terms of rehab and trying to get back to the sport.And that one is very sensitive.If I don’t get enough sleep for a set period of time, or if I have a long-standing flu, then that can definitely light up again.Finding My Way BackBut back to how I got back to the sport.So I tried for these five, six years when I was off to try and get back, but every time my neck just flamed up.These old injuries kept making themselves remembered.And then, in conversation with Alex—sometimes it’s interesting, because you meet someone in the streets or you meet someone in a social event or, in this case, at my company, and the way you talk about things, and I think the way you move and you take up space, sometimes there’s this instinct of thinking: okay, that person might be doing this sport that I’m doing: grappling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or in our case submission wrestling.And I think I asked him straight away in a conversation, and he said yes.And he had a group that he was training with, but that group didn’t have their own gym yet, because it was a break-off from a previous place, and the coach was trying to find a new permanent place to rent where they could train.So they were kind of a vagabond gym for now, where at that very moment they were training in the sports hall of a school in northern London, or central northern London, or central east, around—let me look it up in Google Maps.It was around—I mean, it was in East End.But let me see where exactly.Yeah, wasn’t it around Spitalfields?Let me see.I have a feeling it was around Arnold Circus, around the Shoreditch area.Spitalfields, Brick Lane, somewhere there.Arnold Circus.Anyway, we were in that sports hall, and I was training.We set up the training mats ourselves, because we just had these mats that—I don’t know if they were there from before in the sports hall or if Max, the coach, had purchased them and placed them there.But I think they were part of that sports hall.And then we put out all of those mats so we had the training area.And then we trained.After a bit of warmup, we had some initial more technical drills. I think it was a bit of stand-up where we were doing hand fighting and maybe trying to grab each other’s necks, and I did that with a few people.And then we were doing some things on the ground, and then we were rolling, standing and rolling.And it felt good.It was a good environment and a good atmosphere between the people in the gym.And the best thing was when I left and the days after, I didn’t have any strong persistent neck pain.It was a bit sore, but I felt like: this is something we could try again and see how it goes.But then I had so much work.So we’ll get to that theme later.But I think a week passed, maybe even less.And I don’t remember if I came back to that place or not, where they were renting in the school.But what happened anyway, what Alex told me, that this coach, Max, had just found a place.And it was a place that he would be renting for himself.And he would be renovating it from scratch.So it was an old kind of warehouse facility in one of these most lovely railway arches that you can see around London.In many places where the railway goes in London, they built these arches so that the trains can go above the traffic and above the cityscape.And in those arches, originally there were just arches.But through the city being more and more densified, I think what’s happened more and more is that vendors and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes have started to move their businesses into these railway arches.So they have their company workshop or their creative studio or their restaurant or, in this case, their grappling gym in the cavity under one of these arches.Which is architecturally beautiful - to make use of that space and kind of full in the blanks of the city.And inside, if you haven’t reconstructed the ceiling, you actually have the ceiling vault-shaped just like that arch.So it’s a beautiful thing, albeit quite industrial-looking.And so he was to build this new gym of his for us, for our sake.And I was on the train now. I was jumping back into this.I was just hoping that my neck would be able to bear with the training.And soon enough, he had done the renovations to be able to open up the gym.And I joined as one of the first members.And I was so happy to have found this place.And with every training, I was happy to see that my neck could withstand and gradually adapt to the training.And I kept coming there.And what Max named Grapple Collective became my definite third place in London.What a Third Place MeansIt’s very important to have at least one third place.There’s a social theory about the third place where they postulate that the first place, that’s your family, that’s your home, which is important for most of us.The second place, it’s your work, or where you spend your days doing what you’re dedicated to do, or what you at least need to do materialistically to get on - or what you at least tell yourself you need to do to materialistically get on.And then the third place, it’s something entirely different.It’s this other space that covers what the other two spaces, the first and the second space, are kind of lacking.It’s the space in between.And in the social-theoretical sense, it’s defined as a space where you have quite a large number of people that gather often in one physical place—but it could be a virtual place—and they share something.They have something in common.But there are also many things they don’t have in common.So they come from different backgrounds.They have different baggage coming into this space.And the space itself is centered around this one setting, this one common denominator.So in this case, it’s the sport.It’s the love of the sport.It’s the love of all of the benefits you feel and you can share by being in this space and doing the sport.But in another third place, it might be a place where you can relax and disconnect, which is definitely the case here in the grappling gym as well.But I’m thinking more like a pub, maybe.Another component to the third place is that it should be a place that you can come and go as you like.So it’s not a place that is bound by duty, per se, although you might feel a duty to the place.But it’s an open space, or a semi-open space.And here, in terms of a grappling gym, you even have this kind of institutionalized because many gyms have what’s called an “open mat”.So even if you’re not a member of the gym, even if you haven’t committed to paying for a class, many, and most, gyms have an “open mat”, which is once a week, often on weekends, where you’re invited as a non-member from anywhere in the world, if you’re just a respectable person and you kind of know what you’re doing coming to a grappling gym, you’re most invited to come and join and train with us.And this day, this session, this open-mat session, is often one where you focus on sparring.So you’re doing more freestyle drilling, or you’re doing more freestyle, free-form rounds of sparring, where you’re doing that with a training partner.And there are probably other facets to the definition of a third place that I’ve missed.But the main point I want to drive home is that I think people are in big need of such third places.And sometimes, in our contemporary society, that can be somewhat lacking if you end up being too wrapped up in the first and the second place.Because in parts of our modern society, we can be pulled into a direction where we need to isolate ourselves as a small family because of the outside world being so overstimulating and so intense.And then there’s this other component where the second place can definitely grab a hold of us.And I’ve been most suffering from this, where I’ve allowed the second place to drain me.And if you want to get conspiratorial—or not conspiratorial, but for me, just if you want to speak the truth—it’s what we’ve been raised to do in our part of the world: to overexert ourselves in the name of being valuable in the marketplace, being valuable to someone else.But not just in the marketplace.Being valuable to society at large, being valuable to “The People”, to “Humanity”, this most abstract collective...There's this definite tendency in many of us to push ourselves into a specific mind state, into a psychological frame, that we grow up building around ourselves and that is built around us through all the institutions that we’re exposed to, including our own parents, but stretching into schooling and how government agencies push information on us, going into the workplace. This mind state has us defining ourselves overly by our job, by our occupation, by our daily toil.This is sometimes referred to as a Lutheran work ethic.There’s Max Weber, the German philosopher, who’s talked a lot about this kind of overly obsessive defining of our own sense of self-worth and our own self-image based on our daily toil, on our work. The idea that our work defines how ethical we are, and how much of a worthy person we are.We self-define, and we define this in others.And there’s this mass psychosis we play around with between ourselves, and we create for ourselves, in terms of that we define ourselves by our work.But it’s not based on how much you value it, genuinely, when you look in your heart of hearts and you really get to know yourself and listen to yourself and pursue such more basic emotions towards what you feel like you want to do, what drives you, what would be your life’s creative force pushing you onwards.No.It’s defined by these collective ideas about what type of occupation, what type of daily toil, is worthy of a person of your stature in society.And that can be shaped by your exact socioeconomic upbringing, how the social fabric has wrapped itself around you and the people most close to you that you grow up around. And it’s tough to break out of that mold.I’ve definitely been stuck in that mold for most of my adult life, which has had me overemphasize—even if it’s not at the core of what I in my mind thought of as my self-image and sense of self-worth—it still propelled me in the wrong way.It’s had me emphasize my work and how I deliver in my work, and it’s pushed me to stay and bear with occupational roles that are maybe not exactly where I want and should be in life, if I ask in my heart of hearts.And this is what happened in London.So I sacrificed so much of my life energy just at the altar of my working role, to the detriment of everything else in my life:my quality of sleep, my mental health, my amount of free time and energy I had overall at all, my will to collaborate with other people.Because it was this huge enterprise project that was so unwieldy and so filled with political twists and turns.And I was there as a subject matter expert, for one, wanting to solve the actual process problems and the automation problems and the logistical problems and the supply chain setup configurations that I was convinced we needed to do in certain ways.And to do that in terms of planning the design of those, but then also being in this weird straitjacket role where I was also expected to manage and oversee the work of a small team or a medium-sized team, but then also neighboring teams of developers and then testers, and then liaise with a super-user from the customer side.And there were other layers to this in a big enterprise IT project where there was a lot of change management and stakeholder management in order to be able to stay on course and keep focusing on the development items in the pipeline that we had already started working on and planning in increments for three months at a time, on what big design changes we should implement in terms of process automation and the automatic calculations and such in the supply chain space for this customer.And having to work in a scaled agile environment, with a scrum master, and everything having to be predefined and effort-estimated and then annoyingly looked at and reviewed in detail, and sometimes having effort that I was forced to change last minute or to scrap already-spent effort just sometimes arbitrarily because someone else said so.So a very frustrating situation where I was working day and night.I was working very long hours.My overtime stacked up to where I basically worked 16-hour days for some stretches of time.And annoyingly, it wasn’t even overtime that I was allowed by my company to get compensated for, whether in money or in compensatory leave, to any large extent.So I’d sacrificed myself on the altar of this daily toil to the detriment of me fully enjoying grappling.Although I was still able to get my grappling hours in. I prioritized it above anything else basically outside of my work, because I needed it as well.It was a lifeline in this scenario for me.Because if I wouldn’t have been doing grappling, or such similar exercise—but it’s not just exercise, it’s a stress reliever and it’s something that can reset your brain, your body, and mind, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand that whole year of indescribably gruesome toil at work.Even if you’ve had a shitty day at work, when you come to the gym and you put on your spandex, your rash guard, so to speak, and you get on the mats and you start training, soon you’ll find that you’re not thinking about what you just did at work anymore.You’re just thinking about what’s happening on the mat.You’re there.And it’s just then and there - it's the “here and now” of then, in each and every moment.You’re so wrapped up in this practice and being present in order to react, in order to feel exactly what’s happening in that place at that time.Of course, it’s a physical stress to your body, but that is so much more natural a stressor that we’ve been evolutionarily adapted to over the eons, as opposed to the abstract mental stress that you feel if you sit all day, long day, in front of a computer screen, staring and being stressed and tapping away at a keyboard while speaking into a microphone with people all around the world in a virtual meeting or in a chat forum, in a chat thread, in order to try and affect your environment and to relieve yourself of that stress in a setting where that stress might never be relieved....and where what you guys are working towards, it’s this never-ending story that’s going to carry on for months and years.You might not be there to see the end of it.So the grappling was still, in this life situation of mine, a very important resetter.And I was so lucky that I was able to keep training.And I kept training and I kept going to the gym, despite not as frequently as I should have prioritized for myself.But then again, it was a crucial choice for me to choose to do grappling as opposed to something else to relieve myself after work.Competing AgainAnd after a while, I felt that I’d gotten warm enough in being back that I should actually go and compete again, which I’d done a bit prior to getting these injuries.So I signed up for a competition in London.And as anyone who’s competed in grappling and in submission wrestling knows, when you haven’t been to a competition for a long time—or whether it was when you did your first competition—you get such an adrenaline dump if you don’t warm up intensely beforehand.And I did that same mistake here.So I got such an adrenaline dump after my first match because the intensity had to jump from basically zero to a hundred.And then I had to do my best recover quickly because in these tournaments you have a pool of people, and there’s often not too much time between matches because the number of participants in your brackets, in your weight class, for your belt level, is usually not that big.So I had to be able to get back to the second match and then the third and the fourth match.And it went well.Much better than I’d expected.Though you never feel like you show your true form in a competition, especially if you’ve been off it for a long time.I was commended by Coach Max for my defense and how good I was at retaining guard.And I was able to get to the final match, where I lost to the same person that I won against initially.So I got a silver, second spot, second place, which was my second grappling medal, I think, in a competition.And then a few more months passed, and there was a competition to be had in Brighton where my coach had been urging all of us to think about joining.So we were a big group of people going to Brighton.And I competed in two classes:one which was white belt normal bracket, where you could win on points but you could also win on submission,and then the second bracket was submission only.So as opposed to IBJJF, in the submission-only one—but in both brackets, leg locks were allowed, for example.And I was able to win a third place in the first class that I was competing in.And then in the second class, the submission-only, I won my two matches and I got the gold.Many more of the other members in my gym also won their matches and got medals and everything.So we were such a big group of people.And yeah, maybe in retrospect I’ll put up a few lovely pictures from this here where you see a big landscape-oriented image of all of us when we’re smiling to the camera, celebrating.And then came the most beautiful moment.Because when we were there, the whole group, in front of everyone, Max asked for everyone’s attention and then he handed me my blue belt.Saying a few words about my journey.And yeah, I don’t cry normally, and I didn’t cry then, but I was close to tears and I was really happy.I had a smile on my face which was broader than most people have seen me smile.Just thinking about it now makes me smile widely.So I’m very much thankful for Max believing in me, and me being able to deliver on that belief, and joining the gym, and being that consistent with my training, despite all of the daily toil I was doing at work.And this competition was actually held already when I’d moved from London.So I was specifically traveling back to London from Helsinki, where I’d been re-stationed, to join this competition with the other girls and boys from the gym.So it was a very valuable moment for me personally in my life’s journey.And of course, I wanted to keep grappling, so I joined a gym in Helsinki, which was great as well.But I got a bit of an knee injury there after a few months, which forced me off the mats for a couple of months.Previously, back when I was initially training in Stockholm, I had already suffered a tear—not a full tear, but quite a major tear—to the LCL, the inner ligament on my right knee, inner-side ligament, which is still a littlebit weaker than my left knee. But as long as nothing’s flared up, I’m still very functional in the right knee.And then in Helsinki, I kept training at Art of Ground Games, run by Van Nikken, a very good guy, and Juri - two good coaches.And then I moved back to Stockholm, Sweden.And I joined Stark, which means strong in Swedish.But the problem was then I ended up with my cancer diagnosis.So since then I haven’t trained.So I haven’t been able to be back on the competition mats.Because I was thinking of competing in Finland, but then I got injured.And then once I recovered from that injury, I’d moved to Sweden. And soon thereafter I got my cancer diagnosis.Why This Dream Came NowSo to wrap things up: a really cool dream.Thankful to have had that dream.And I think part of why that theme came to me was that during this past weekend Max and Greg Souders are having a training camp. Greg, a prominent figure in the grappling space, him and Max, they’re at the forefront of—especially Greg Souders, but also Max—they’re at the forefront of this other approach, non-traditional approach, to learning grappling, but also learning basically any type of movement, training movement, based on our core psychology around learning and movement. As opposed to doing strict technical drills and repeating those drills and describing very much in detail how you should apply a certain technique and what steps you need to take in order to get there, this approach is much more organic.It’s much more based on actual human physiology and behavior, where you indirectly stimulate learning to achieve the goals.So the specific goals that are set in your sport—or that are indirectly created in your sport based on the objective of the sport—in grappling, that would be to have the opponent submit to you.But if you extend that, okay, how are they able to submit to you?Or what are the avenues you can go down in order to have your opponent submit to you?It’s through strangulation, or through compression and injury, like the applied pressure and leverage to a joint, for example, and that reaching a level where your partner needs to tap and give up or faint.So what are the avenues to go down in order to affect that?It’s more about reaching an objective rather than prescribing any exact method to reach that objective.The way you train for that is to have more organic drills where you have a starting condition and you have an end point that you aim toward, and then you iterate on that, you cycle through that on different levels of detail, to build up a library of instincts basically, as opposed to a library of techniques.And those instincts, they can more naturally turn into free-form movement, which is much more resilient and anti-fragile than strictly contained, constrained technical drills in controlled settings.Because those controlled settings will never reappear in a real wild scenario.And what’s happening is this weekend, or for four days, Max and Greg and some other coaches, they are holding their shared four-day seminar in Málaga where people will be grappling and sharing their knowledge and getting such good coaching on site in Málaga.And it would have been a bliss to be there.But I don’t want to risk that still now with my life journey and me being back on treatment.But it’s almost worth the risk, because now, just having dreamt of the feeling of being on the mat grappling, it’s such a unique experience that I cherish so much.And I’m just hoping I can be back there someday.But there are other fish to fry, right?So we keep frying the fish in front of us.We’re not going to go across the lake for water, as the Swedish saying goes.We need to dig where we stand, to mix metaphors.And we could go on at length about my one year in London and how it turned out so opposed to my what expectations I had before arriving there.But let’s do that another time.Now I need to get back to sleep.So yeah, hang loose, fam.Be mindful of that life force of yours.Namaste. 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