If there is one thing, that never ceases to fascinate me, it is giving up control.
Stop messing with it.
Stop overthinking it.
Abandon your plan, and anything you think you should be doing for a certain outcome, and instead do nothing and see what happens.
Let go of the steering wheel of Life, even if it’s while promising yourself you’re allowed to grab it, within a week, a day, a minute;
But get a sense of what “it” does, if you are not doing anything.

What are the powers in play here?
What happens when do not grasp or intervene?

One place where in retrospect I did not plan anything, is this book.
It is called A Map Into Unknown, and it consists of:
– the Facebook novella Demons and Daemons
You can find one chapter at the bottom of this post, including a link to the entire novella. The novella is a diary which was written in three weeks in July and early August.
– these chapters from The Book Club
These go on top of the original chapters.

So A Map Into Unknown started in July with single posts on Facebook, then after three weeks I bundled them up to a novella Demons and Daemons;
Then I started going over the chapters one by one in The Book Club project.
And then I decided I would call these two books together, or book within a book;
A Map Into Unknown.

Only to then drop it, leave it untouched for months, and pick it up when a man I don’t know invited me to a seven day masturbation challenge, and I realized this book still had 7 to 8 open chapters.

Resulting in these “The Final Week” Chapters, that you’re currently reading.

This Sunday I will have written my most layered book, by doing nothing.
I had no idea where it was going.

In fact, I was so in the dark, that just two days ago I didn’t even know if I was going through with publishing the end result. 
If it would ever “be” something. And that was fine.
I was too curious to see what would come out of it, even if it could not be published or did not have an ending or something.

But now?
When on more or less “day 1” of what I have been calling my new White Tigress life, I receive a copy of my first English book around the White Tigress, and love it?
Now I realize you really cannot, and should not, plan.
I ordered this book two weeks ago when I had no plans to start identifying as a White Tigress again, nor did I plan on using these yoga exercises.
To be getting the book White Tigress out, was a business decision, or artistic decision. It was not because I wanted to read the book myself.
My yoga practice at the moment is entirely different and I don’t use schedules.

But I picked up this book.
And not only was it glossy, and beautiful, and exactly right, so I could open the link for distribution.
But I loved the exercises!

My two White Tigress posts from the last two days, about yoga, and becoming a White Tigress, have inspired me.
So I did practice yoga with the book today.
Exercises I have developed in the 15+ years I taught yoga professionally.

It is like a legacy of a woman I no longer am, physically.
It is her message, or gift, from my past self to the current day writer me, who oftentimes struggles to do yoga in combination with her desk work.

And I realized that not only did the yoga book White Tigress arrive at exactly the right time, but also that A Map Into Unknown came together exactly as it should be.
This complex journal from July to November 2020, will be one of the many books I will bring to print in 2020; but a very recent and unexpected one!

After 2020 I expect to keep writing as LS Harteveld, but I won’t be harvesting or publishing any work, any time soon.
I foresee I won’t be publishing for a minimum of three years, maybe longer.

So not only did I receive my White Tigress yoga book, which has been in the making and under construction for more than four years, on the day my new life as a White Tigress begins;
With Demons and Daemons/The Book Club, falling together in my 2020 diary A Map Into Unknown, I have also received an unexpected final book.

The closing book of my upcoming 2020 collection, and final book for an indefinite period of time, will be called “A Map Into Unknown”.

You cannot make that up, even if you tried.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

.

the Book Club: Demons and Daemons

You just read part 1, my column.

Today’s chapter below, from Demons and Daemons, is one that is about entrepreneurship in Covid times.
It’s from July but if feels ages ago I was called to speak why I quit teaching, or why I quit my business

This is what I wrote:
.

Chapter 12, Untitled Notes from Lauren #11

“The Right Side Up“

day 18, Wednesday July 30

I was contacted with regard to wanting to talk about my yoga business..

I think it was the same show that contacted me in December.
Although right then I still saw myself as a yoga teacher (a writing one and not one teaching classes. I only taught to friends, until Covid came and I stopped doing that too), I declined then.

And I declined now.

.

The reason they asked me now, was accurate;

They were looking for entrepreneurs who had quit their business.

It was done with the Chamber of Commerce, so this indicated to me that we were supposed to be giving some advice on how to run your business.

Like: How can you prevent you have to stop, kind of thing.

.

The reason I declined to give an interview, was that I had no uplifting words for newborn entrepreneurs.

My advice would have been:

“Run! Run! Flee while you can!!”

.

And I answered with a detailed explanation of why I would strongly advise against starting a business, before you have at least a €25.000 a year hustle going.

Work as an independent seller.

A civilian.

Let people pay you without VAT.

And we have a special tax box in The Netherlands for “Other income”; Just put it there.

Or ask to be put on the payroll, or paid through a payroll agency.

Don’t do anything illegal.

I m not telling you to dodge taxes or anything, just whatever you do?

Do.

Not.

Start.

A.

Business.

.

After I had clicked send in the Facebook chat, I realized I had failed to make one more final argument;

“Oh, and with Covid you’re the gofer for our government. You’re supposed to be collecting health statuses from your clients, when in 2018 you were obliged to draw up a detailed company privacy statement because you occasionally saw some name-address-city data.”

.

There.

Big go f yourself, Dutch government.

Go find someone else to do your henchmen work, because at some point Dutch entrepreneurs are simply going to decide to go underground, work a payroll job, or will simply refuse to lift another finger because they re not interested in continuously being bullied into submitting themselves to ever more legislation, depending on what agenda it is now you want to push.

.

I ve seen yoga teachers who made less than a thousand euros a year, yet they still had to register at Chamber of Commerce, register for a VAT number, keep a VAT administration, a business administration, get professional liability insurance.

.

Trust me, until you’ve got €25.000 in sales, there is no reason you would want to invest in being a proper business.

.

So the question on if I wanted to cooperate with a tv program on entrepreneurs who had quit their business, basically unlocked the doors to my internal hell.

If I had wanted to speak kind words, I would not have known where to find them.

.

“My vision on this is so dark, I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for,” I ended my message.

.

I knew I had 20 years of bottled up anger and resentment to this over-legislation, especially with Anglo Saxon countries coming with ever more books like The Side Hustle, The 4 Hour workweek (in the Netherlands just doing your admin and drawing up all your legal papers would take you 4 hours a week!)-

Yet I had no idea it was this close to the surface.

.

That one question was enough to trigger me in saying so many bad things.

.

I felt it was a bit like the Upside Down;

A parallel universe in the series Stranger Things.

All the landmarks, buildings and so on are the same as in our universe, but there are no people just monsters like in Alien.

It is always dark.

And everything is covered in slime.

.

In season 1 of Stranger Things, a girl who has been used for medical experiments, El, is the only one who is strong enough to fight the creatures who live there, because she has superpowers.

.

This shadow world The Upside Down has portals into the normal world, but the main characteristic is:

It IS the normal world.

.

It is the normal world, when all of our nightmares have come true, and we’re cold all alone hiding under a damp blanket in the middle of the dark forest.

.

Already when watching this series, I started wondering:

“If there is a dark Upside Down world;

Would there not also be a parallel universe of light?”

.

And today I expanded on that question:

“If there is a topic that gets me so vile and nasty and unforgiving, in a flash of a second;

Is there a topic that gets me in the best of spirits?”

.

I realized, that yes, there is. There are.

But just like in the series;

The dark sticks to you so much more.

Once the cold has set into your bones, it seems impossible to get rid of.

.

Once you’ve seen the darkness, it becomes increasingly impossible to see the light.

To see the good.

Even just for a second.

.

The Right Side Up world, as I will call it, becomes a place of fiction and myth.

Whereas The Upside Down world of darkness and despair, seems ever more real.

.

It took El’s superpowers to cast the beast back into the shadow world, and to close the portal.

And even she was sucked into that world, as a result of her brave action.

No one thought to go look for her afterwards, or rescue her there.

.

And meanwhile everybody else had their Season 1 Happily Ever After.

.

On payroll, I presume.

———-

Chapter 13 of Demons and Daemons,
will be shared soon,
in a new episode of The Book Club

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About The Book Club

In The Book Club you can find:
– a post
– and one Chapter of my novella Demons and Daemons.

These Book Club posts will form a new book, “A Map Into Unknown”
Covering a journey of three weeks into darkness (Demons and Daemons)
and the rest of 2020, finding my way back to the light!