Wait a minute ... no, this is still not about the news of Traces of Illumination. Right: Right after Unite 2008, I was on a 12-day intensive meditation experiential seminar. That was a pretty great experience with many hours of deep meditations every day - in a group of around 70 people of which each has been meditating on a daily basis for at least a year (many for many years ;-) ). If you might find that kind of thing interesting - you might want to have a look at the Sambodha Website.

One particularly interesting issue that came up inside of me during that seminar had to do with my father. If you've been following this blog from the beginning, you may remember that I mentioned that my father died when I was ten years old - in this posting.

There are a few important aspects to know about this: As far as I remember, my father was a very sensitive person - which is nice. And in fact, he was the one who saw the talent I had with computers and immediately started supporting me in that. Which is just plain awesome.

But he also had some rather serious struggles in his life. There were long times of unemployment and he had a serious issue with alcoholism. It had seemed that he had come out of that. He finally had a job again, and things looked very promising. One afternoon in early January, I was doing some experiments with firecrackers that were left over of New Years Eve. Basically, I had invented something that worked like a gun, with which you could shoot little projectiles. I wanted to show this to my dad when he would come home from work. He appreciated my inventiveness a lot - and unlike my mother, he would primarily have seen the invention I came up with instead of the risk I was dealing with.

I didn't know what it meant when his boss came to our home to talk to my mother - I was busy inventing stuff. And my mother wasn't at home. So my dad's boss asked me to tell her to call in the office. When she came home, I told her ... and noticed that this worried her quite a bit. So she called, and pretty early during that conversation started crying. I had no idea what was going on. So I asked. But it took her quite some time until she finally was able to answer: Her husband - and my father - had died at age 45 from a heart attack at his office.

It took me 13 years until I would finally allow myself to start to feel what really happened back then. Of course, I remembered every little detail all the time. But it's a very significant difference whether you can talk about the abstract details of a story - like, what happened in which sequence, what was said, what actions were taken, what the results were - or you know what that story feels like. For about 13 years, I simply did not know what it felt like. My heart was simply frozen in shock - without me even noticing.

I was 23 years old, when a friend of mine commented one of my sharply analyzed and mentally understood reports of what had been going on in my relationships and how that was related to the story of my father's sudden death with: Well, now you didn't feel anything at all when you were telling me that, or were you?

That got a long-lasting process stared. It was they key to get that ice around my heart to start melting and start reclaiming that lovely sense of feeling ;-)

There's obviously many things that happen on many different levels when a child loses its parent at a comparatively early age. However, the thing that came up during that particular seminar for me had to do with failure. When your primary role model (you're a boy and this is about your father) struggles with life and doesn't manage to "make it" - in a rather final manner - that does leave behind a certain impression of what's possible in life, and what is not. The problem is when you believe that impression.

And I did.

So what life does to support you in such a situation: It offers you situation after situation which looks like you will not make it. And it offers you situations where you do make it. Like, being able to buy a car you had been wanting for ten years - or getting coverage for your game in a printed magazine. Or having your game being showcased at a developer's conference as one of the entries to a game developer's contest.

And it is within your power of free will to take that opportunity to check if your old impression of what life is like still holds; if you want to hold on to something that had defined your identity that you either won't make it, or if you make it you don't really deserve it - just because you made the mistake of believing something that was not really true even back then - or if you want to open yourself to the possibility that this time, it's different.

It takes quite a bit of acceptance to get to the point where you are able to make that choice - but nevertheless it's quite possible.

So, once I had realized this and had it out of the way - I was even more inspired for Traces of Illumination. But since I was at the seminar and that was not the ideal place to jump right into development, I had to be a little patient.

Just like you - if you chose to follow the chronological order of this series of blog postings.