I Open The Doors To My Dreams

It's the last day at my old high school in Rotterdam, and I must prove that I am worthy of the school, and of passing on to the next phase in my life, by writing a paper. The paper needs to be about a subject that I know nothing about, and has to be submitted at the end of the day. I go home to work, but there are no results because I am unfamiliar with the subject, and the internet, computers and Wikipedia are still decades into the future. I decide to retreat to a distant, quiet place to be able to better concentrate on the job, and I find myself in a wooden cabin in the woods near the fictional town of Twin Peaks in the US. Every morning the cabin is also a hotel where I have breakfast, and this hotel looks like the police office from the Twin Peaks TV-series. While working in isolation it starts to dawn on me why I need to work on this subject: to lift myself to the next level. Once I understand this I have the the knowledge and the energy to finish. When done I enthusiasticall...

It is autumn. I am in a forest with my manager and some of my colleagues. During the past months it has been my task to report on a dead tree trunk that has been lying on the ground where we are standing. The forest is part of the office, but situated a few kilometers away at the same time. Would the trunk deteriorate? Would it be visited by animals? Would it be eaten by insects? Would people come to take bits of the trunk for firewood? I have not done a good job, because the tree trunk is gone and I don't have a clue what happened. My manager and my colleagues are unhappy with the results. Months have passed, why haven't I provided any information on the situation of the trunk? I suggest to put down a new trunk and start all over again, but the proposal meets with indifference. And rightly so, because where would I find another trunk, and if I did, how would I transport it to this location? Everybody starts walking back to their cars. Nobody talks. There is an atmosphere of di...