Overture

I have one bad habit: I put things off.

The idea to write first crossed my mind somewhere around thirty-five. There were enough thoughts by then, enough experience, enough things that felt worth saying. But I didn’t start. Not out of laziness — more because it wasn’t the right time yet. A tree doesn’t fruit early just because you want it to. Some things simply need to ripen.

I’m considerably older now. And it seems the time has finally come.

Let’s start with a question I’ve been sitting with for a while: why share anything at all?

Not that I’m reaching for some noble answer. The one I keep landing on is plainer than that. It’s a sense of debt.

Most of who I am, I got from people who decided to share something. From books. From musicians who recorded. From programmers who published their code. From photographers who wrote about what they shot and why. From thinkers who took the trouble to put into words something that would otherwise have stayed only in their heads. None of these people had to. They did it anyway. And something of what they gave stayed in me — shaped how I think, pointed my interests in certain directions, changed how I see and feel things.

Sharing knowledge also has one property I find genuinely fascinating. I noticed it first while teaching music, and later again in the world of IT. It doesn’t behave like giving away money. Give money away, and you have less of it. Give knowledge away, and it doesn’t disappear — you understand it more deeply instead. Explain something, and you end up understanding it better yourself. Teach something, and you get better at it. The more you hand over, the more firmly it stays with you.

That’s one reason this site exists. The second reason is harder to put into words.

When people around you start leaving — not in the abstract, but specifically, including the people closest to you — you start thinking differently about what stays behind. Not in some morbid way. Just practically.

Children are our most direct continuation. But alongside them, so is everything else we make: music, photographs, words, ideas. Only what exists independently of our physical presence has any chance of outlasting us.

Among the people who left in the past while was my father. I won’t go further into that here — I mention it only because some truths only gain weight once you understand that time isn’t an unlimited resource.

Oliver Burkeman — a British writer whose books have hit me harder than almost anything else in recent years — points out that we get roughly four thousand weeks. That’s what life gives us, if we’re lucky. Put a number on it, and it stops being an abstraction. Four thousand. A meaningful share of mine is already spent.

What Burkeman says doesn’t fill me with anxiety. It does something closer to the opposite — a strange kind of relief. Precisely because time is limited, there’s no need to turn every decision into a drama. The perfect moment isn’t coming. There are no guarantees waiting for you. You just start. The rest works itself out along the way.

So this isn’t a grand debut. It’s not a promise about how often I’ll write, or what shape it’ll take, or how long any of it will be. It’s just an attempt.

On this site I’ll write about music, photography, technology, and travel. About what interests me — and especially about the connections between worlds that look, at first glance, like they have nothing to do with each other. I’ll write in both Slovak and English, because the people I care about sit on both sides of that language line.

Thank you for being here.