The last two days have been intense. I’ve been coding a game idea that’s lived in my head for years. A hobby I’ve done since childhood, losing hours without thinking. Two days of it, non-stop, time vanished. But at the end, I felt unfulfilled.
This left me confused. Some part of me felt that if I could get so lost in an activity that time disappeared, it must be aligned with who I am. Yet I found myself wishing I had spent that time writing instead.
Now that I think about it, I used to lose track of time watching TV too, but TV was never really aligned with me. Just like with this coding, I would stop watching with that same feeling of emptiness.
So I’m learning that a flow state does not always mean alignment.
Which leaves me wondering: What is it about coding this game that has me so enthralled? There is something there, but coding the game itself doesn’t feel like the answer.
There has also been this idea kicking around in my head lately about ‘visiting’ worlds I find in my imagination. The idea came when I followed an impulse to play Myst of all things. Then my YouTube feed suddenly started showing me videos about something called ‘World Building.’ Was it listening to me? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a small way the universe is whispering something.
The day had started with me pulling The Tower card. I had a pounding headache from the last two days of intense coding. I sat on the sun porch peering into the dark outside, watching the fish swim back and forth in the tank and puffing on my pipe.
What was all this pointing to?
A recognition started to form. Perhaps the reason I keep getting drawn to coding a game is not so much about coding a game at all, but about the medium itself: building worlds.
Perhaps it doesn’t feel aligned because the restriction of coding games can’t contain what I actually want to work on.
Then I had a dream where I was running through a parking structure, and the world kept morphing around me. It turned into a set of Euclidean stairs and then I found myself flying towards an energy portal. There was a tower to my left. I kept trying to look at it, but I was pulled into the energy portal.
What if I had visited the tower? What would happen?
The following day I closed my eyes, lay down, and set the intention to visit the tower. I did.
This experience will become the seed of my world. A set of journals from a man exploring a place that’s fluid, constantly morphing around him. A world where memory is fleeting and a journal becomes the tool of travel through this strange land.
Now, standing at the threshold of this world with the tower behind me and journal in hand, the real questions begin to unfold.
What else is here? What connects to what? Who are the characters I’ll meet in the spaces between memory and forgetting? Where will this experiment lead, and what will it reveal?
Related 2026-02-16 (The seed, perhaps now starting to sprout): https://naturalplaceblog.com/2026/02/16/daily-reflection-water-into-form/
The World Compendium: https://digital-garden-henna.vercel.app
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