Anxiety

Day 12. Wake-up feel: 6.

One below yesterday. Not a bad sign. Just honest.

Half an hour before sunrise I walked to the Bodden shore. Five wild boar — big ones — foraging at the water's edge. Unhurried. No anxiety about foraging. Just appetite and direction. I stood and watched until the light changed.

Cold. The wind settling after days of pushing. The kind of quiet that arrives after something has exhausted itself.

I am starting to realize what slowing down actually implies.

I have not been in this state for years. Possibly longer than years. The doing has always been there — the project, the next task, the next phase. Even here, in the first days at Gut Nisdorf, the doing found me: the Ghost posts, the documents, the architecture. Useful. Necessary. And also: familiar.

Now something is shifting. The structure is holding itself. The land is here. The garden is here. Achim and Ina are away. No agenda imposed from outside.

And I am uneasy.

Not a collapse. Something more precise than that. A limbo — the space between the doing and whatever comes after the doing stops. I am somewhere in between: the unease sitting quietly, and it pulling toward filling the space. Not yet resolved in either direction.

I named it this morning: anxiety.

Not the clinical kind. The existential kind. The kind that arrives when the doing stops and the being hasn't caught up yet.

The Tao Te Ching knows this terrain. Wu wei — not forcing, not filling. But wu wei is harder than action. Action has a shape. Non-action has none. You cannot optimize your way into it. You cannot build a document structure for it.

The boar this morning had no such problem. Appetite, direction, the cold water, the light coming up. Simple.

I watched from the outside of that simplicity.

Phase 2 closes tomorrow. Large Intestine — the organ of release. I thought release would feel like relief. It turns out release can also feel like vertigo. What goes when the holding stops.

The anxiety is about the limbo itself. And about what the limbo might reveal.

Both. That is the honest answer.

Two more days to sit with it before Phase 3 arrives and asks me to move.

A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan — Gut Nisdorf 2026
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — April 2026
CC BY-SA 4.0 — Michel Garand