It took many years for me to realize what I had to do in order to  stop being unhappy. A holiday trip to Mallorca was what really set things in motion. There I experienced several full days of walking in the Tramuntana mountains. It was christmas time, the air was crisp and fresh, and the pale daylight made everything appear in a mysterious glow.

I felt happy and calm and had complete trust in the performance of both body and mind. Excited as a small child on Christmas day I was moving silently along soft narrow paths passing through quiet oak forests and climbing steep rocky trails hanging on the mountain sides trying to decode the more or less cryptic instructions from the guide-book that I was carrying.

It was like playing an adventure game like Myst or Riven on the computer but this was real. Strange and unfamiliar things everywhere, like charcoal burners bread ovens, mill wheels, and other old remains of human made structures, scattered all over the mountains, all those  stone walls, arduously built by generations of men under the burning sun. And it was quiet. Very, very quiet. Not a bird to see or hear, not a rabbit. Nothing. Anywhere. All this together changed something inside of me and I was never to be the same again after that. But it still took me almost another ten years to break loose from my old life.