I don’t know if you guys remember, but before the monetisation of the Internet, before everything was about money, politics and influence, personal blogs were different.

For example, in the times before Geocities, a blog post was, well… there was no blogs. I created a blogging platform on a Linux server that we (a shared-apartment community of 4 friends) kept in a cupboard (mainly to be able to play “computer games” together over wired LAN, wire-less did not yet exist for home entertainment). I used Python and Apache, and published on my domain travelsheep.com, long before WordPress or Blogger came to be. And on there, at that time, a blog post was like a page of a diary you would read to a friend. Or like a letter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have written to his wife Maria Constanze Mozart. And maybe there were stars flying from left to right in the background, and everything was in Times New Roman. Something like this. The Internet was different, blogs were different, everything was different.

So. Here’s to the old times.

ONE. I just had my first dentist appointment in over a year. Here in Vietnam I can finally see the dentist again without having to produce one of these new passports they want us to have. And gladly everything is fine. I got a good cleaning, x-rays, and a chat with the doctor. I just wish I already knew as a kid what I know about tooth health and maintenance today.

TWO. I was thinking about the sequence of lessons. I just finished the shorter than 5 minutes, power-assisted head turning lesson for Youtube, and I really want to do a longer version, one without cuts and zooms and time pressure. I want to have a relaxed, long version where I’m free to think and act and talk. Therefore, I think I’m going to film such a version next, as the last lesson to my “Tight neck? Here’s hope!” series. But then, I still have another lesson in the pipeline (so to speak), I was planing to do one more progression of the “Sinking the spine” lesson, the one I wrote about in the previous post (“This is how you lengthen your psoas”).

And this conflict made me think of lessons in general. How long do we spend time with one lesson? A day, a week, several years? Do you have a favourite one? How long do your favourites stay your favourites before you discover and move on to a new one? And do you ever go back to your past favourites? Isn’t it a bit like looking at a book you’ve already read? I mean, great, fine, good memories, flipping through the pages brings back some moments we had, but it’s not the same blazing fire anymore. Innit?

THREE. Something like two years ago I’ve seen a speech by Adam Andrzejewski on Youtube, titled “The Depth of the Swamp”. This speech impressed me on several levels, one being how well he could recall all these numbers from the top of this head. I would guess twisting just one of these numbers would get him in serious trouble. Therefore, deep respect for his memorisation skills. And of course the catchy title impressed me as well, a title that totally lived up to the speech.

I was thinking of Adam’s speech this morning, as a sort of aftermath to my power-assisted neck turning lesson (there’s a longer story to that.) And because I’ve seen an advertisement for a popular influencer who goes by the name, “Sadhguru”. The swamp in terms of consciousness, perception and meditation is just as deep, if not deeper. There’s a reason why a movie like “The Matrix” or books like “The Alchemist”, “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”, or just for example, “Journeys Out of the Body” hit a nerve with people. People who are still able to feel, and to think, and who know, they know, there’s something going on, something is missing, terribly so, and those books, those speeches remind them of it. But what is it, what is it, them gurus are not telling, because they’re stuck deep in the swamp themselves, deeply, deeply, they don’t know, they don’t know themselves. And how could they?

But as long as there’s money to be made the feet are stuck and people keep losing their shoes. So, maybe that could be something I could write about in an article, or in an article-like blog post.

Now, I just finished my tea. It’s time to lift my head up and away from this blog post, click Publish and continue to move through the eternal summer of South Vietnam.