“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions“, Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have said once. (Don’t worry, I had to look him up as well:) So, the orange person ‘dancing out of line’ (or: aus der Reihe tanzen) is the old one, the grey people are the young ones.

What at first sounds really convincing, especially if you are working in the army or if you are a marriage counsellor – makes you wonder on second thoughts, especially if you are in any other profession or, as the case may be, if you are not happy with the status quo. I have found that it is the ‘old’ ones, the ones who are firmly part of the establishment, who have stopped questioning, who accept the way things are, and who have lost all enthusiasm.

I had a conversation today with someone who is very familiar with how a group of people developed something similar to what we are trying to build with An Saol, in another country. He said that that group was a “verschworene Gemeinschaft“, a really close-knit “sworn” community. They collectively ‘danced out of line’ did not accept the status quo and, together, managed to radically change how persons with severe acquired brain injury were treated.

We need to build that community and start dancing. Absolutely and completely out of line!

Pádraig had such a busy day today: exercises in the morning, a brilliantly relaxing massage, speech and language therapy, and music therapy in the afternoon. He started to spell words again as we were trying to find the best way to help him select the letters using a hand-operated bleeper. It’s so incredible: I truly believe that the biggest barrier for him to communicate with us, to spell out words and sentences are we, not providing him with the right means. He knows what he wants to spell, he can spell, but we have still not found the right way for him to select the letters in a way that is consistent, works in a functional/mechanical way, and doesn’t take an incredibly long time. It must be so frustrating for him.

What was the best part of today? – I went running in a snow shower this morning, got something like a cold-burn on my chest, and somehow got pinched so that I was bleeding, without noticing a thing. It felt good. Wild. Pádraig smiled at me when I came back, feeling how I was radiating the cold. We both must have felt alive, really alive that moment!

PS: Watch out tonight for the incredibly rare combination, all the the same time, of a supermoon, a blue moon, and a total lunar eclipse!