Funnily enough, my journey to being productive and present simultaneously came to a head not in college, but moving to The Netherlands.

My brother spent three months looking for an apartment in Utrecht. The Netherlands is surprisingly 3x more population dense than China making housing very hard to find and also explains why the Dutch people kept standing so close to me in the train. So when I came to Enschede, I did what any reasonable person with anxiety and Wi-Fi would do: I prepared for war.

I booked a week and a half at The Little Monkey hostel in Enschede. Sent out 35 housing applications within two days which in my hometown would have covered every building including the church and the gas station. Stocked up on groceries for the siege: tempeh, broccoli, and enough peanut butter to outlast a nuclear fallout (If you can't tell, I'm vegan).

I found a studio apartment on my first day. Pretty anti-climactic.

This isn't a story about someone discovering presence for the first time. I've been working on this for years. Journaling, meditation, shadow work. What this is really about is a story of learning to hold productivity toward a greater self and presence with the one that already is in the same pair of hands.

We feel this paradox more than we admit. You feel it on a Tuesday night when you're studying for an exam and your roommate pulls out a board game. You feel it standing at a career fair making small talk with a recruiter when the person next to you says something genuinely interesting and for a half second you wonder: should I just talk to this person instead? The tension between aspiring toward a greater self and being present in the self that already exists isn't waiting for us after graduation. It's sitting next to us in the dining hall.

Why can't we relax on a Tuesday? How do we build a self less defined by what we do or could become, and more by who we are, right now? But most importantly, why might building that self actually be bad? Might we have a good reason to avoid it?

I don't have clean answers. But I have a Dutch bike, a book by Krishnamurti, and a story about a goat. So let's start there.

A Cornell Mind on a Dutch Bike

Before I secured the apartment I visited the University of Twente campus. I checked my phone for housing application responses three times in ten minutes.

Sitting at a coffee shop afterward, warm light pooling across a wooden table, the smell of fresh stroopwafels baking somewhere behind the counter, I caught myself wondering if I should start outlining another Conscious College article instead of just sitting.

Later that evening, I met someone at the hostel who was doing a two-month exchange program, and my first thought, before I'd even learned their name, was: is it worth getting to know this person if they're leaving so soon?

Enschede tasted like fresh Sunday bread and I kept reaching for my Cornell espresso.

What made it strange was the backdrop. At Cornell, everyone walks like they're already late. Heads down, AirPods in, legs churning across the Arts Quad with the urgency of someone defusing a bomb.

Enschede is the opposite organism. Coffee shops don't open until nine or ten in the morning. Almost nothing opens on Sundays. At the Tuesday general market in central Enschede, I watched two people drinking beer at a stall at eleven in the morning like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

The Netherlands has structurally built a different relationship to time. The Netherlands has structurally built a different relationship to time. You hear it in the cobblestones under your tires, the unhurried back-and-forth at the cheese stand, the silence where a car horn would be in New York. Just like your own college campus has an architecture built for a certain relationship to work.

The question that kept surfacing, the one I couldn't bike away from: Why does my productive self fear would happen if it relinquished more control to my present?

The Man With the Gold and the Goat

Before visiting the University of Twente, I stopped at a park nearby to pet some goats.

A dad walked up with two kids trailing behind him. Brown leather jacket, hair gelled to within an inch of its life, and this expression I can only describe as happy-sad. For, for the next fifteen minutes, he told me about his business transporting gold.

Good money in it, apparently. His wife had divorced him and he really didn't like her anymore. He was trying to earn enough to start over, to carry on. The kids kicked at dirt behind him. I smiled politely, told him I wasn't interested in the gold business. Why? Because it's the fking gold business. I still stayed for fifteen minutes because he seemed pained.

I'm 22. He was well into his fifties. And I felt like the older one in the conversation. Not in a "look how wise I am" way. I still can't cook rice without googling it. But I've experienced a lot of life compressed into a short number of years, and something about listening to this man describe losing love for his wife entirely made me feel temporally displaced.

When I ended my friendship with my ex, I still loved her. That was the whole point: we couldn't grow together the way we needed to, but the love didn't evaporate because the relationship changed shape. This man's love had evaporated. Standing in that park, a goat nudging my hand for more attention, I felt an enormous compassion for him and simultaneously this eerie weight. The weight of feeling ancient at 22.

There's a particular loneliness in developing faster than your age cohort in certain dimensions while still being completely your age in others. I can hold space for a divorced stranger's pain, but I can't parallel park. I can articulate a theory of ego development, but I still feel awkward at parties where I don't know anyone.

And underneath it, a question that connects to everything: can I keep this energy, this aspirational love for life, going into my forties, fifties, sixties?

As I write in my last post on designing life, I have this recurring daydream. I'm in my late twenties, walking around a city block. The sun is setting sending melted ruby red across the horizon. But I can't appreciate it. I'm walking past a bookstore I would have wandered into three years ago without thinking. Now I glance at the window and keep moving. I play Slay the Spire 2 but more to zombify myself than appreciate the design. I read The Soul of Education but it doesn't touch my own soul.

I've stopped designing a life I love, and accepted one that's "tolerable," like a hermit crab who sticks to a shitty shell because, well, their shell is "nice."

If I'm too present, would this make that dream a reality?

Maybe that's what scares all of us about being present. Life happening to us rather than occurring through us. Spending a few months being present only to realize we've lost touch with our old self. And we don't like the new one.

The Woman With No Plan

Back at the hostel. One of the workers was a little older than me, from Spain. I asked her why she came to Enschede. Of all the cities in all the countries, why this small Dutch town most people can't pronounce?

"I was looking for places with hostels to work at and this had one."

Then she went back to watching her show, Beef.

I stood there, cup of tea cooling in my hand, and felt two things crash into each other. The first was bewilderment. Genuine, almost physical confusion at how a person could cross international borders with that little narrative justification. The second was awe. Awe at such an ability to make important life decisions with, well, vibes.

I sat down and sipped my tea, thinking about a life with less love for becoming. Settling into a self without direction and being genuinely fine with it.

The thought cinched something behind my sternum. I want to help college students learn to love life more. That's the mission. That's Conscious College. So being less productive doesn't just feel like personal failure. It feels like I'm leaving a lecture hall full of students sitting in the dark, wondering why nobody turned the lights on.

How do we let go of something when letting go might mean other people stay lost?

The Paradox Krishnamurti Named

I was reading Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti during those first weeks in Enschede. Two ideas kept reaching through the pages and pressing their thumbs against something sore in my chest.

The first: joy is presence without clinging for repetition. The moment we try to hold a good moment, pin it down, make it happen again, we've already left it. The second: the desire to become something prevents seeing what is.

There's no easy answer here, and I want to resist the urge to pretend otherwise. Productivity and presence are not perfectly aligned. Sometimes the chapter we're in genuinely requires more productivity: more building, more sacrifice, more late nights with the laptop. Sometimes it requires more presence: more sitting, more listening, more letting a goat nudge your hand. The problem isn't choosing between them. The problem is the self that wants a formula for when to do which.

What would it look like to stop managing the paradox and just live inside it?

A few weeks into my time in Enschede, I attended a lecture at the University of Twente on how to transcend clichés in film. The entire thing was in Dutch.

Surprisingly, I understood the whole thing. Though I was hunched over in extreme focus the whole time. The crowd was all forty-to-sixty-year-olds, sitting in a cozy auditorium, some with notebooks, most with reading glasses perched on their noses.

The speaker's point, as far as my butchered Dutch comprehension could parse, was this: most films are designed with clear plot arcs. Rising action, climax, catharsis, emotional payoff. We crave that structure because it makes life feel manageable, narratable, complete. But life doesn't work like that. She gave examples of films that break the mold, like Perfect Days, where the beauty lives in repetition and small gestures rather than dramatic turning points.

And then the content of the lecture landed inside that presence like a stone dropping into still water. A lecture about how stories shouldn't have tidy resolutions became my resolution. Except the resolution was: there is no resolution. The man at the park was drowning in consequence. The hostel worker was floating without direction. The lecture whispered that neither extreme holds the answer, and neither does some perfect midpoint between them.

We don't resolve the paradox between productivity and presence. We outgrow the part of ourselves that needs it resolved.

Still Biking

I'm still in Enschede. Still working on Conscious College. Still ambitious in ways that occasionally startle the people around me, and occasionally startle myself. Still catching my productive side creeping into moments where it doesn't belong, the way you catch yourself scrolling your phone during a sunset. But something has shifted.

I hold it all a little lighter now, the way we hold handlebars on a Dutch bike.

I already know how to let something go without losing love for it. I did it with my ex. The relationship ended, but the love didn't disappear. The question I'm sitting with now is whether I can do that with my productivity self.

There is no easy solution. I want to say that without flinching, because the Cosmic Weaver in me (and maybe in you) craves a framework, a map, a four-step process for integrating productivity with presence. But productivity and presence don't fold neatly into each other. Perhaps the chapter we're in requires more of one than the other. Perhaps next month the ratio flips. All I know is the self that demands a permanent answer is the self that keeps us from living the question.

Yesterday, I biked to the grocery store. It was a Tuesday. The sun was low and copper-colored, throwing long shadows across the bike path. I didn't check my phone. I didn't think about the next article. For about four minutes, I was just a person on a bike in a small Dutch city, pedaling home with a bag of groceries, and that was enough.

Then I got back to the hostel and immediately opened my laptop to write this. I guess I'm still biking.

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