Ashtrays, Pelinkovec, and Personal Development

Since moving from Bratislava to Ljubljana, I have become a regular in a small place by the river.

Most people are surprised I go there instead of the place across the street — the cultural, cool-looking café with good music, designer lamps, and people who probably describe themselves as “curious minds”.

I sit on a large covered terrace where I often cannot even hear the river because of a football match on TV or a loud group of friends drinking cheap beer and pelinkovec at the next table. I barely hear the conversation between the young waitress who occasionally sits down with the old man who came once again for his glass of red wine.

This terrace somehow became my office for meeting clients. A bit rough around the edges. Sometimes loud. Ashtrays on the tables. Definitely no meditation room with waterfalls and relaxing forest sounds in the background.

…Interestingly enough, the coffee is actually quite decent. (and their bitter pelinkovec is my favourite type)

It is imperfect. Maybe unfinished. The place does not try to convince anyone that it is exceptional. And somehow, precisely because of that, it became exceptional to me.

I think many people today are exhausted from trying to become versions of themselves that are easier to sell… to accept… to love.

We optimise, heal, perform awareness, curate lifestyles, and slowly turn life into a development project with colour palettes and productivity systems. Even authenticity has quietly become a form of branding.

Sometimes it feels as if people no longer attend workshops because they genuinely want to live more deeply, but because they are afraid to stop moving. Afraid that if they stop “working on themselves”, they might suddenly realise that life was already happening meanwhile.

Just now.

I no longer believe that life happens so we can optimise ourselves. I think life happens first.

And maybe development only makes sense when it helps us become more capable of being in relationship with reality: with people, with work, with failure, with love, with endings, with ourselves.

Not perfect. Not finished. Not fully healed. Just here.

Do you need to change something in your life? 

If you are waiting for the sign, it may never come. You will simply have to make another decision – just as you did a thousand times before. And yet, the biggest changes often begin when we stop fighting life quite so much and start paying attention to where it is already moving.