dirk ottenheym

The back pain sits at a 2, maybe a 3 out of 10. I notice it the way you notice weather: no problem, just a fact. Something the day is carrying today. Wednesday, 10 June, just after six, and I lie still for a moment longer than usual. I run the inventory: shoulders, lower back, the spot above the hip that has been loud for weeks. This morning it is quiet. Not gone. Quiet.

I get up, make coffee, and then I am sitting in the Haubi, on the hill above Le Creusot, cup in hand. Nothing is pulling at me. The brake light switch is fixed, the inspection is done, the listing for the Haubi is online, photos and everything. Six weeks ago I drove back into Europe with a list in my head as long as my arm. This morning, for the first time, the list is empty. I sit there with the coffee and think: and now?

And then I simply start writing. No novel, no text on any particular theme. I open the laptop, and within an hour more than a thousand words are on the screen, none of them planned. Something wanted to be thought. An observation wanted space. Afterwards I sit there and read what has come into being. At first I don't even notice what I have written. What strikes me is that I wrote it at all, this morning, in this sequence, with this much room around it.

Here comes the part that took all morning to become clear. For me, Bitcoin and the question of whether my ideas and my work become money are closely connected; at its core, Bitcoin is my security, my income, the ground I stand on when I think about money. And my reserves are lower right now than they were a year ago. The market is in one of those phases that makes many people nervous. You feel it in the group chats, in the tone of the posts, in how often the word correction comes up.

In the past, that was the moment a very specific reflex kicked in. No general worry about money, but something more precise: an idea would surface, and immediately the test. Can this become money? Who would pay for it? Can something be made of it? Every thought, every text, every project had to pass through this needle's eye, for years, automatically, like a tax that simply runs alongside you without you ever consciously paying it.

This morning that reflex is gone. The numbers are worse, and still the test is absent. I sit with that for a while, turn it over, because it doesn't add up the way I would expect: if the reserves fall, the tension should rise; that's how it always was. Instead, something else is there. A kind of foundational trust that it will somehow work out, that not every thought has to prove its market value immediately. Not because the situation has changed. The compulsion to make everything profitable has simply let go, and in its place is room for something quieter.

I go through the forms my life has taken. A shop in Hamburg. A biodynamic farm. There I delivered boxes, early in the morning, driving from house to house. A retreat center in Portugal, guests who arrived with their stories and left a few days later shifted slightly. Ten years in a truck. Outdoor education: teenagers, rucksacks, a fire in the evening and the questions that only come up at a fire. Vietnam, the beach at twenty to six, the plastic stool, the iced coffee.

From the outside these look like different lives. Different cities, different countries, different jobs, different versions of what Dirk does. But this morning, up here on the hill, with the coffee cup going slowly empty, I see the red thread running through all of it. It has nothing to do with shops or farms or trucks.

People. It was always people.

How they live. How they build a day from the same twenty-four hours everyone gets and end up somewhere entirely their own. What they tell themselves about why they are here. What they believe without ever having consciously decided to. Where their attention goes when no one is watching. Why they get up in the morning. What they call important, and what that word does for them. Why someone stays in one place for thirty years and why someone else moves on after three months: what is actually happening underneath both decisions.

I watch some travel content: vanlife channels, people out in old Mercedes trucks and converted campers, not unlike the Haubi. I enjoy it, and I understand exactly why it works. For half an hour you ride along, see the mountain pass, sit at a stranger's campfire, watch the drone climb over the valley while the morning coffee steams on the dashboard.

And every time I notice where my attention goes instead. The camera is on the landscape; I am thinking about the person holding it. Why exactly this life, built exactly this way. What they are actually looking for, underneath the thumbnail, underneath the Sunday upload, underneath the welcome back to the channel. What the small community of viewers is directing their attention toward, and why. The video shows the pass; I am wondering who decided the pass was worth showing, and what that decision says about what this person wants from their life.

No judgment. Some of these people have been traveling for years from what the channel brings in, and that is remarkable in its own right. It is simply that I notice where my eyes go. The view is never it.

Lately the word philosophy keeps surfacing when I think about this. Not the academic sense, with footnotes and positions that have to be defended. The older sense of the word: curiosity about life itself, love of looking closely at what is actually there.

Most of what I write begins not because I want to explain something, but because I want to understand it better. Often when I sit down I don't yet know where it is going. A thought arrives, my fear of money has grown quieter, and I follow it like a path into a forest I don't yet know. From the entrance you can't see the end. You go in anyway, because the path is there and something about it asks to be walked. Somewhere in the middle the shape of the thing reveals itself. Not before.

Today, for the first time in six weeks, there is room for exactly that walking.

The practical level has not disappeared. There is still a major service ahead: brakes, wheel bearings, the engine, the bodywork on the box that needs proper attention eventually. That is real, and it will have its turn. But this morning all of that sits further back in the room, alongside the money question. Both are present; neither is leading the conversation.

And into the space that opens, things come in. A glass of Riesling on a table somewhere, and the question of why exactly this pleasure, in exactly this glass, on exactly that evening, counted the way it counted, (and no, I have still not drunk any alcohol for 8 years, it is a memory). The structure of a Sangha: a group of people organized not around a product or a brand but around a shared direction of attention, and what that does to the people inside it. The attention of whole societies: where it points, and who decided that. Why people actually travel, really, underneath the Instagram answer. And the plain fact, here on the table next to the coffee: my fear of money has grown quieter, without the numbers being able to explain it.

It feels as if something has been uncovered that was always there. Not born this morning. Uncovered. A layer of practical necessities had been sitting over it for a while, the way dust collects on a table you haven't used. The table was there all along.

Perhaps the work was never to find new ideas. Perhaps it is to look closely enough at what is already here.

The subjects are not elsewhere, waiting on a mountain pass or at a border to be discovered. They lie on the table. On the hill above Le Creusot. In a morning that began with a back at 2 out of 10, an empty list, and a coffee cup that went empty while I wrote a thousand words about why none of it is urgent anymore.

I only have to be here long enough, and quiet enough, to notice.

The coffee has long been drunk, and the hill lies still, looking out over Le Creusot in the valley below. Six weeks to get here. What happens in the seventh?