I start the conversation with the words: „It feels like a fare niente day today, not much to do, only two sessions in my office, one in the morning, the other one in the evening, duties postponed for later, lots of ideas, but so far no force into any direction, a rare day in my life, when I can think about a walk in the sun.“
My assisstant: „That actually sounds like a small luxury day — fare niente in the middle of an otherwise very dense life. … From a psychological point of view, these pauses are interesting: when there is no urgent demand from others, no external pressure to decide, something like mental breathing space opens. Often that’s exactly when associative thinking, integration, or simply bodily presence becomes possible again — walking in the sun instead of staying in permanent anticipatory tension for decision making.
A day like this is almost a lived exercise in not forcing meaning, not forcing action, letting the field remain open rather than prematurely closing it with interpretation or activity.
If the sun is out, I would genuinely take it as an invitation. The nervous system learns as much from unstructured, embodied quiet as from analysis and decision-making — maybe more, especially for someone who usually operates at such high cognitive and relational density.
Enjoy the walk. Sometimes the best decisions and the best thoughts happen when you’re not trying to produce them.“
Me: „Exactly, but when I take a walk, for me it’s just streching my legs, however, yes, you may be right, unintendedly this opens space for something not expected to emerge. There is a poem by Goethe, it starts with the words: ‚Ich ging im Walde so für mich hin, nichts zu suchen, das war mein Sinn …‘.“
My assisstant: „Yes — exactly that: you go out only to stretch your legs, with no intention to find anything — and precisely that non-intention creates the psychic aperture for something unexpected to emerge. That’s very much in line with your whole thinking otherwise, letting experience ripen rather than forcing closure.
And the Goethe poem you’re recalling could hardly be more fitting. It’s „Gefunden“:
*Ich ging im Walde
So für mich hin,
Und nichts zu suchen,
Das war mein Sinn.Im Schatten sah ich
Ein Blümchen stehn,
Wie Sterne leuchtend,
Wie Äuglein schön…*
The entire poem stages exactly this logic: walking without purpose, without instrumental intention — and then something meaningful appears, not because it was sought, but because the subject was open, ungrasping, receptive. The flower is not conquered, not analyzed, not exploited; it is carefully transplanted and allowed to grow. A quiet metaphor for a non-violent relation to meaning, to time, to emergence.
In psychoanalytic language one could almost say: the ego suspends its demand for mastery, control, and anticipation — and thereby allows unconscious or preconscious material to surface in a benign way. It’s the opposite of paranoid hypervigilance, the opposite of compulsive sense-making. It’s a lived form of what you described some time before as waiting for the unfolding of meaning: allowing experience to unfold before deciding what it means.
There’s also a subtle epistemological humility in the line „nichts zu suchen, das war mein Sinn“: meaning is not hunted; it happens when the subject stops hunting.
So yes — even if you consciously frame the walk as merely stretching your legs, something else may quietly take place underneath: a loosening of cognitive grip, a rebalancing of inner rhythms, maybe even the silent incubation of your next idea — or simply the pleasure of sunlight on the skin, which is already more than enough.“
End of conversation. (This text is an hommage to Zager und Evans and their song: „In the Year 2525“ (1969).
Weiterlesen: Psychotherapiepraxis in Berlin, Wolfgang Albrecht