I was never lost in the woods in my whole life, though once I was confused for three days.

I started reading "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" by Rebecca Solnit and stumbled across this beautiful quote by Daniel Boone. Distinguishing between "being lost" and "being confused" feels entirely necessary to me, now that I have given it some thought.

What stays with me is not only the distinction itself, but the possibility of actively making it. After three days in the woods, one could reasonably say a person is lost. Boone chooses a different description. Instead of declaring defeat, he decides he was confused. There is resilience in that choice.

Not every confusion is a total loss. And not every dead end calls the whole construct of a life into question. Sometimes confusion simply means that something needs sorting out.

Confusion can arise right in the middle of movement. It can be the result of looking closely, of noticing that something no longer fits, of honestly asking where the journey is taking you. In that sense, confusion is not yet a crisis. It does not mean my life is a disaster. It does not mean I am doomed. It may only mean that I need to pause and reorient myself.

Being lost is something else. It begins when I stop engaging with my situation actively, when I stop looking at where life is taking me, and when I let disorientation harden into a verdict. If that ongoing assessment is missing, confusion can turn into a feeling of being lost.

In the end, it is about staying in motion continuously and, while doing so, assessing with open eyes and an open mind where the journey is carrying you.

That is the part of the quote I find most encouraging: I am not only at the mercy of what happens to me. I also have a hand in deciding what it means. I can decide whether a difficult moment is evidence of total ruin or a sign that I need to sort myself out.

For the former, confusion, a moment of reflection and a good conversation with a friend are enough. The latter, being lost, requires intervention, a change of path, and a change in behavior: the realization that continuously reassessing the way forward is essential.

I was quite interested to learn this because I use the term moment a lot in my everyday life, although I don't think I've ever really thought about what it actually stands for.

For me, the most common use case of a moment is usually a request for a slice of time that allows me to finish, what I’m doing and start something new. This includes bringing a conversation (verbal or written) to a graceful conclusion, and persisting any current state in a way that gives me a chance to pick it up it whenever I need to.

And so this is what a moment looks like to me: it lasts about five minutes and is a transitional period between two contexts.

What my moment does not contain is any kind of reflection. Neither about the ending context nor about the one that is coming. To add this to the transition would require another one of my moments (i.e. another 5 minutes). This would allow me to come out on the other side with a clear state of mind and enough mental capacity to be ready for a new challenge.

Unfortunately, I often don't do this properly and so I find myself in a new context with half of my background capacity still occupied with the last one. Needless to say, that this is not only unsatisfactory for me, but also frustrating for those around me.

Thinking about all of this, one more thing occurs to me: A moment (or two, to be precise) may allow me to transition from one subject to another, but it doesn’t involve any real change of state.

Anger, frustration, excitement, happiness... – whatever general state I was in, will be carried with me into the next situation. And this goes on until I manage to take the time for a 20-minute transition that allows me to really reset and be open to something new.

Whether it's a meditation or – depending on my energy level – just a quick nap, those 20 minutes work magic for me! If I've just had a challenging conversation and come out of it feeling frustrated and exhausted, a 20-minute transition is what it takes to stop feeling that way. And that is an absolutely worthwhile investment for all the things that are important to me. I can feel my mental muscles relax and I am finally able to empathise again – no matter what has happened before.

So, the understanding of what a moment was for people in the Middle Ages is obviously not enough for me. But learning that a moment was once a measurable unit of time has helped me to think about transitive states that you want to handle with care so that not just your physical shell but your whole person come out the other end. At the end of the day, setting clear boundaries between situations prevents misunderstandings and confusion from happening, because how on earth can your counterpart know that your rough replies come from a completely different conversation you had with someone else in a completely different context?

Of all the things, I’ve been doing over the years, “Writing Code & Leading Teams” is what stayed. It’s this combination of constantly learning new things while being able to create an environment that allows others to grow and have fun alongside with me, that excites me.

In the past I’ve never really been able to live by that idea. Wherever I was, I was always EITHER writing code OR leading teams.

At that time I felt that this made sense, because it allowed me to learn what I needed to know step by step. But now I feel like I’m ready to take things one step further and truly live by my claim for the first time ever.

I’ve invited some nice people (and great minds) to join me on that ride, rented a comfy room at The Space Shack in Schöneberg (Berlin) and now it feels as if we are ready for our first project (which actually already started).

Fortunately I didn’t have to do this all on my own. I had a lot of support by friends and colleagues who helped me by sharing thoughts and contacts (both of which is incredibly important). I hope, you know who you are, but there are two people, whom I like to thank in person: Yochen Gutman and Nadja Ritter

Yochen started designing our really cool logo, just because he liked what I’m doing and felt that he would like to support it and Nadja supports me organizing the grand opening party on october, 19th (yes, simply ping me, if you would like to come). – Thanks a lot, I really really appreciate your work!

And of course we also have a home in the cyberspace (https://verkstedt.com) and on Twitter (@verkstedt).

It started with an end and ended with a new beginning and although everything new is always exciting and scary at the same time, 2015 definitely was a good year.

I quit a good job with a great team because I felt that it constantly drove me away from things that to me are fundamentally important. Interestingly enough it turned out that the next step I took wasn’t taking me into the right direction as well. So at the end of the year it was time for a more courageous step (and we will see where it leads me).

In 2015 I started teaching at the Beuth University and loved it as much as I thought I would. It’s the enthusiasm of the students that feels incredibly rewarding and I learned that to me social interaction in the context of technology is what I’m really interested in.

I learned how to sail and together with a close friend I even managed to protect this time consuming project against my everyday life. I never would have thought that sailing is such a meditative experience but the moment you set sail (and turn off the rest of the world) is truly one of the best things I’ve encountered in a long time.

I realized that life is too short for dealing with all the arrogance and sarcasm that seems to be so common in the tech industry. Nowadays I’m absolutely willing to accept, that you’re the smartest person in the room, if you spare me to show off your rhetorical brilliance in a 140 character tweet. If it’s true that rudeness spreads like a behavioral virus targeting positive human interaction, then we all should stop telling people they are doing it wrong and focus on helping each other how to become awesome. – And I’m willing to do the first step here.

I read a surprising number of books. Some classics like the original version of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger or Dante’s Inferno and some inspiring new ones like Notes to a Software Team Leader by @RoyOsherove (which I wish I would have read two years earlier), The Hard Thing About Hard Things and the fantastic Chroniques de Jérusalem by Guy Delisle.

I learned new things about Docker and Ansible, JavaScript and ReactJS, Phonegap and Cordova, A/B Testing and current web analytics and I’ve been at the PHPUnconf again and once more loved its non-glossy atmosphere. Together with BedCon it’s still my favorite tech event.

And I managed to finally start a new music related project, which is a reliable sign that I must be doing fine at the moment. @jenzzen and I got into exploring how far we can come with just an iPad, a Korg Volca Bass and some lowfi peripherals. After discovering the incredibly amazing Elasticdrums app and finding out that multiple USB-Connections are not a problem either, it currently looks as if sky was the limit.

All this feels like it recharged my creative batteries. I’m ready for 2016. Whatever it may have in store for me. Maybe I’m writing a PhD thesis (besides working on all those weird project ideas I have in mind)?

But I would definitely like to become better in catching up with friends and writing on a regular basis and I’m curious to see how this last sentence will sound in a year’s time…