The Race

~ tveskov ~ 1 Comment

So I was on my bicycle going towards downtown Fredericia. It was a grey and windy day, but I was going at full speed. When I bike, I tend to go fast, or at least as fast as possible, and to be honest, I’m just not a big fan of being overtaken. It especially feels like it’s against the laws of nature when I’m being passed by little old ladies on electric bikes. It just feels wrong somehow, but I have slowly learned to live with it.

As I was entering a very long, even stretch of the bike lane along the harbour and marina section of my route, I vaguely sensed something slowly but surely coming up behind me. I could also sense that it wasn’t a bicyclist; the high-pitched sound was different. I increased my speed a bit, but the person was coming closer and closer. I took a quick glance over my shoulder, and it kinda looked like I was being chased by something resembling a big inverted ice cream cone.

I was a bit confused by this but also determined not to be overtaken, so I increased my speed further. But so did my pursuer, and after a few hundred meters of racing, the ice cream cone crept up on my left side. Both of us were now clearly going at max speed, like two heavy trucks taking way too long to pass each other on the highway. I discreetly looked over to the left while maintaining my maximum speed, sweating, headwind was brutal, heart beating like crazy.

The woman was about the same age as me, dressed in a huge curry/brown-ish jacket with a kind of waffle pattern. The jacket was very wide at the bottom, almost hiding the struggling electric scooter underneath her. So it came down to this: me against the finest low- to midrange e-scooter that Temu has to offer. There may or may not have been smoke coming from the motor of the scooter. But there definitely was smoke coming from the transparent neon green vaping device she was clutching with her left hand. I looked straight ahead, and gave it all I had in me, determined not to let her triumph.

And then it happened; I looked her way, she did the same, and we were locked in eye contact for a few uncomfortable seconds. It felt like the longest time. She was kind of looking right through me with cruel, dead eyes while she let out a big puff of scented smoke and then turned to look straight ahead. And right then and there, I knew that I was beaten; all energy and determination left my body. I knew it, and she knew it too. Something in me broke; I just gave up. Almost like in slow motion, I watched her disappear in the distance while I regained my breath. I am sure she has long forgotten the incident, but I will never forget.

Good luck / Bad luck

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Clever quotes from famous people are a mixed bag; most of them sound great on paper and contain some truth, which is why they have stuck around. But then there are a few that touch you, those that ring so true that they can’t be ignored. Sometimes they can change your perspective on the world a tiny bit. Here’s one from the late American author Cormac McCarthy;

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from”

No further explanation needed, I guess. Similarly, when you experience something really good, you want it to go on. And when it ends, the first instinct is to feel sorry it didn’t last longer. But as with the bad luck, the good thing could have ended sooner, or it could also not have happened at all.

I’ve found this to be a useful way to think about both good and bad luck.

Go watch some good movies

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Here is a list of 50+ movies I like, all dark and red judging by the covers. If you watch a lot of movies, you have surely seen some or most of these. And if you like the ones you’ve seen, there is a fair chance you will like the rest. I would say that the common theme of those movies is transcendence, but judge for yourself. Enjoy!

Vibes & Energy

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Vibes and energy have become shorthand terms in a world with way too much data and way too many opinions. Those two little words are used all over the mainstream now; back in the day, they were mostly reserved for the new age/neohippie crowd, but over the last half-decade or so, they have spread far and wide. It’s a kind of compression tool: that person has a weird energy, we are in for a vibe shift, matching energy, just vibing, and on it goes. Vibe coding is red hot; all of us non-coders can now use AI to create disposable apps in an hour or two (and then spend five hours trying to debug it!) I’m also not sure the AIs can fully grasp the meaning of vibes yet; perhaps that is still a human stronghold?. Content that is more vibe-based than plot-based is on the rise; Season 3 of ‘The White Lotus’ and Season 3 of ‘The Bear’ are more about vibes than about what is happening—in both cases, often bad vibes—but still. It would not take many sentences to describe what plays out over all those hours of TV, you will have to feel the vibes to get it. With that said, I did not really like any of those Seasons, but loved S1 and S2 of both shows.

And, also loving the fact that this photo of Rick Rubin has become the universal symbol of vibe coding..

I don’t think these concepts will go away any time soon, after all what is the universe other than vibrating energy?

Small synchronicities

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August 1993: After a couple of hectic weeks in San Francisco, I decided to head down towards LA. It was late in the evening, pitch dark and raining like crazy and I was in a bad mood. Had missed the chance of a couple of interviews and appointments. But for some reason I suddenly regretted my decision to leave SF, so I turn around and head north again. I have no clue on where I am, but in need of a place to sleep, so I just take the first exit from the highway and drives to a quiet street and pull over. This is before the internet takes off, so I have a look in my physical Lonely Planet guidebook. Looks like I’m somewhere in Oakland and finds the name of some semi-seedy motel in the book. I remember thinking, “How am I going to find this place in the godforsaken weather at this late hour.?” and then looking out and up. Then I realize that I am parked just in front of a huge but dark road sign. The sign has the name of the motel, so I’m right next to the place. After that, I took a couple of extra days in San Francisco, met some good people there AND managed to get my interviews sorted as well.

January 2024: Just grabbing some goods at the supermarket. At the cashiers I remember I have a few curly receipts for recycled bottles and cans. There’s three in my purse and by chance I find a fourth one in the inner pocket of my jacket. The cashier assistant looks at me a bit funny and says “Well, that’s a bit strange – you don’t have to pay anything because the amounts adds up exactly!”. Of course this is probably bound to happen out of all the many times one has paid for stuff, but still felt strange in the moment.

January 2020: Out walking in my neighborhood. It’s cold and dark (January in Denmark can be grim), and I am listening to a podcast about the early years of Prince’s career. I pass by a house, and through a large window I can see a family sitting around the dinner table. The reason I am looking extra intently is that the room is lit up in a stark, nasty purple color, probably some kind of Philips Hue situation gone terribly wrong. At that very moment, the podcast voice in my ear says ‘.. he referred to them as his purple family’, while I’m looking straight in at this very purple family. I hope they’ve gotten the lighting situation under control.

March 2025: I sadly never got into the ‘Severance’ show, and in January, I wrote a quick post about that with a random GIF from the show included. A couple of months later, I tried watching it again (people hyping it again, still not a fan). As I wrote a follow-up post and pressed ‘publish’, I looked up, and realized I was at that exact moment in the show, with the GIF playing simultaneously on my phone. It felt really weird.

June 2019: Talking to a friend who is an experienced meditator. I mention that sometimes when I meditate, it feels like I am looking outside myself, even with my eyes closed. He reminds me that this look ‘out’ is also just a part of myself, which makes a lot of sense to me. After he leaves, I’m sitting outside on the porch thinking about this. I hear a blackbird singing and as I always do look over at the neighbor’s roof where the bird is often sitting at the ridge of the roof (I have a long tradition of taking Instagram photos showing this exactly). But there is no bird.. I’m puzzled, but then I realize that the bird is sitting on MY own ridge just above my head. This made me smile.

July 2025: Sending my youngest son a text regarding some soon-to-expire tickets to LEGO House. His response is a bit baffling as he noticed that the podcast he had just started came out almost three years ago, same date as the one on the tickets. But that’s not the weird(est) bit; the topic of the podcast is the (most excellent) 1955 movie ‘The Night of the Hunter’ which we watched together a while ago. The podcast opens by listing a some significant things as old as the movie; the seatbelt AND the LEGO system! (the brick itself is older, but the idea of the building system saw the light of day 1955. Strange!

August 2025; During a game of ‘Hint’ I was challenged to draw red things, and in one round illustrate “The Red Crescent” (aka Red Cross). So I drew a moon and split it in half (my game partner guessed it, easy). On my way home there was a beautiful red moon, and looking at the photo the next day I noticed the moon was spilt by a wire, just like on the drawing.

I am a volunteer at a wonderful local museum here, a job I enjoy a lot. Not too long ago, I lost my ID card. I had been on a shift at the museum and knew that I had the card on me when I went into the city to run some errands afterwards. When I came home, it was gone; I must have lost it somewhere in the city. So the next time I came to the museum, I thought, “Better borrow a card for this shift; I’ll just grab a random one with a male name on it for now.” All the ID cards for the volunteers are hanging from several bookcases in huge bundles, probably 150+ of them. So I reached out and grabbed a random badge. It had my name on it. I was rattled for a moment there.

Maybe just a few random occurrences from the ‘What are the odds’ department. Most of us get those, especially if we are a bit present and aware. But it’s fun and sometimes a bit spooky when it happens. And these are the small ones; later we can get into the bigger ones where help occurs just when needed. Perhaps you have a good synchronicity to share?

If people were gears

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You meet a new person. Everything clicks, and sometimes it can happen quickly. I quite like the term fast friends; we don’t have that term in Danish (yet). For that to happen, both parties have probably put their most accessible side forward, the good side. And sometimes that is enough, and you can go back and forth for a while. But at some point, it will be clear that the motion can’t be sustained; you can only go so far. Depending on the speed, it can take anywhere between minutes to decades to see how far you can go. But even if the gears don’t fit perfectly together, it is still possible to keep moving; it might be a bit noisy and uneven, but still. This can be said for potential friends and/or partners. But probably shouldn’t be said. BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE NOT TWO DIMENSIONAL GEARS. Us humans have thousands of moving parts, and we can change and adapt over time. But sometimes it feels a bit like the illustration above, that’s why I made it and shared it here. Makes sense?

“All models are wrong, some are useful” as George E. P. Box famously put it.

LHF : Kickstarting Creativity

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The simple secret to creativity from painter Jasper Johns: do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

The first ‘do’ is by far the hardest. And if you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.

The best framing on how to start something creative came a couple of years ago, it’s already classic. It came from Rick Rubin who also did one of the few great books on pure creativity, The Creative Act. Some people found it too fluffy and hippie-like, but I took many notes while reading the book.

But back to the framing, this is brilliant;

If you’re making something with a freedom of “this is something I’m making for myself for now”, that is all [you have to do].

It is a diary entry.

Everything I make is a diary entry.

The beauty of a diary entry is that I can write my diary entry and you can’t tell me that my diary entry wasn’t good enough. Or that [the diary entry] is not what I experienced. Of course, it’s what I experienced: I’m writing a personal diary for myself and no one else can judge if it is my experience of my life.

Makes it much less scary, do it just for yourself. Don’t announce anything creative, make it and then show it. Maybe to just one person, maybe to the world. And if you like it, other people might also like it.

Oh, LHF = Low Hanging Fruit

That’s it!

Doing things without purpose

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I don’t meditate to calm a busy mind. I don’t take long walks to get good ideas or to get healthier. I don’t pay attention to my breath because I need to soothe my nervous system. Those things are enough in themselves. Why does everything have to have a purpose?

Those long walks having great, thoughtful conversations with smart people could be turned into a ‘product,’ some kind of long-form podcast or perhaps a commercial version as an extended coaching session? No thanks. Opportunism & instrumentalization—everything can be turned into means to an end. It’s a major disease in our culture that almost everything is done to achieve something else. Kids should play because playing is good, not to prepare them for something. Play is enough. Mindfulness should not be a bandaid on a hellish daily existence. That is also why I low-key hate ‘networking events’ where the only purpose is to meet people because it might be mutually beneficial. Note-taking and diaries are a big part of my daily routine, not because all those notes and recorded thoughts need a purpose, but because the act of thinking through writing feels good. And sometimes I do use a note for something else later, but even if I never did, it would still be worth it. But I want to try and share a bit more, for instance on this page.

Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time*

Sure, there may be all kinds of benefits and all sorts of good side effects of doing the things mentioned above, but things can be what they are in themselves. It’s enough. Doing things without purpose can even feel a bit provocative, but so be it.