After the texts on attention, perception, affordances, learning, memory, language, and thinking, one might get the impression that a human being is above all a conscious subject who chooses, assembles the world, remembers, names, analyzes, and decides. As if somewhere inside there were an “I” managing the whole system: now I will pay attention, now I will interpret, now I will remember, now I will name, now I will think, now I will decide.

But a human being does not work this way. Or at least, they do not work this way most of the time.

Before the “I” notices, a great deal has already happened. Before I say “I am afraid,” the body may already be in alarm. Before I think “he is judging me,” another person’s face may already have been read as a threat. Before I decide whether I trust someone, my system may already set distance, tension in the voice, the range of the gaze, readiness to defend. Before I name the situation, the organism may already shorten the breath, quicken the heart, pull the shoulders back, sharpen hearing, narrow attention, or prepare words I have not yet spoken.

Consciousness often arrives late. Not as the first cause, but as a later witness, interpreter, narrator, sometimes corrector. Experience seems obviously “mine,” but many of its elements have been prepared before the feeling appears: “now I see this.” This does not mean consciousness is unimportant. It is very important. But it is not the solitary king of the system. It is more like light falling on a fragment of an enormous labor that is already underway.

Underneath, an automatic background is at work.

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This background is not a single mechanism. It is not a little hidden person inside a person. It is rather an entire layer of processes that operate quickly, partly outside attention, often without full words and without the need for conscious command. Habits of movement. Automatic associations. Learned predictions. Reading faces and tones. Preparing the body for action. Micro-reactions of fear, shame, approach, withdrawal. What “comes to mind by itself.” What is “immediately obvious.” What we do before we think that we are doing it.

In a certain sense, all life needs this background. If we had to consciously manage every movement, every word, every breath, and every assessment of a situation, we would not be able to survive a single day. We could not walk and talk at the same time. Drive a car and respond to traffic. Recognize a familiar face in a crowd. Respond to a change in tone. Catch a cup before it falls. Read sentences without analyzing every letter. Maintain the rhythm of a conversation without counting every pause. Consciousness is too slow and too narrow to run everything by itself.

That is why the system automates.

What is repeated begins to require less effort. Movement becomes smoother. Reaction faster. Recognition more immediate. When you learn to ride a bicycle, at first everything is conscious and stiff: balance, pedals, handlebars, road, brake. After a while, the body rides. Not because the complexity has disappeared, but because the complexity has been moved into the background. When you learn a language, at first you search for words, and then sentences begin to come. When you learn an instrument, the fingers eventually know more than you could calmly describe.

Automaticity is therefore an economy of life. It allows us not to begin from zero every time. It allows us to use what the system has learned. It allows consciousness to deal with what is new, difficult, ambiguous, or in need of correction. Thanks to the automatic background, a person can have a history of skills, not merely a set of conscious instructions. They can move through the world with an entire infrastructure of learned movements, recognitions, predictions, and shortcuts.

But the same background that helps can also imprison.

The system does not automate only what is good. It automates what is repeated, strong, necessary, or adaptive in a given environment. If for years one had to watch someone’s mood, the automatic background may become a scanner of tension. If mistakes were punished with shame, the background may immediately activate defense against trying. If closeness was unpredictable, the body may pull back before the head has time to say: this person is not that person. If rest was treated as laziness, tension may appear at the very moment of inactivity.

This is one of the most uncomfortable truths about human beings: not everything that works in us waits for our permission.

Sometimes the reaction has already begun before we notice it. Sometimes the word has almost come out. Sometimes the body has already fled with its gaze. Sometimes the voice has already hardened. Sometimes the interpretation has already set the scene: he is attacking, she is pulling away, shame is about to come, I have to defend myself, I must not show weakness. Only afterward does a thought arrive and try to explain it. And very often the thought does not say: “my system has activated an old pattern.” It says: “but this is how it is.”

The automatic background can pretend to be reality. What appears quickly often feels true. If I immediately feel threat, the world seems threatening. If I immediately feel shame, the situation seems shaming. If I immediately feel distrust, the other person seems suspicious. If I immediately feel guilt, my very existence seems like a problem. The speed of a reaction gives it the appearance of obviousness. And obviousness, as we already know, is not always the same as truth.

That is why it is so important to distinguish the first reaction from full recognition.

The first reaction is information. It does not have to be a lie. It should not be dismissed. Sometimes the body really does notice something consciousness has not yet named. Sometimes tension is a wise signal. Sometimes distrust protects. Sometimes a quick assessment saves us. But the first reaction is not a verdict either. It may be an echo. It may be a habit. It may be an old prediction. It may be a reaction to similarity, not to repetition. It may say more about the history of the system than about the present situation.

A person matures, among other things, when they learn to see their own automatisms as automatisms. Not in order to silence them with contempt. Not in order to say to oneself: “I should not react this way.” Rather, in order to recover at least a little space. I can notice: my body is already defending itself. My voice is already becoming hard. My mind is already looking for blame. My attention is already selecting only signals of threat. My system is already predicting abandonment. This does not remove the reaction. But it introduces a difference between “I am the reaction” and “I see the reaction.”

This difference may be small, but it is fundamental.

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Because the automatic background works best when it remains completely transparent. When it cannot be seen that it is working. Then a person says: “this is just how I am,” “this is always how it is,” “it cannot be otherwise,” “I have to,” “I cannot,” “it is obvious.” But when the background becomes even slightly visible, a question appears. Is this a current response, or an old map? Is this really this situation, or a similarity to something from the past? Do I have only one possibility, or does my system, for now, see only one? Can I wait one second longer before following the first movement?

This question is not an abstraction. It has a body. Sometimes it means one breath before answering. One step back. Relaxing the hands. Noticing the tightness in the stomach. Naming it: I am activated. Asking for a moment. Checking the tone. Saying: I am not sure I am reading this correctly. Sometimes the whole breakthrough does not consist in a grand transformation, but in the appearance of a minimal pause between stimulus and automatic reaction. In that pause, there is not yet full freedom. But there is the beginning of another movement.

The automatic background also shows why knowledge alone is often not enough. You may know that conflict does not have to mean the end of a relationship, and yet your body may behave as if abandonment were about to happen. You may know that rest is necessary, and yet feel guilt. You may know that not every mistake is a catastrophe, and yet freeze before trying. You may know that someone did not intend to hurt you, and yet hear an attack. Knowledge lives in one layer of the system. Automatic prediction lives in another. A bridge has to be built between them.

That bridge is built slowly.

Through repetition. Through regulation. Through new experiences. Through relationships that end differently from old ones. Through the practice of noticing a reaction before it takes over the whole. Through a body that learns it can survive tension without immediate defense. Through language that allows us to say: “this is old,” “this is alarm,” “this is only the first version.” Through an environment that helps the system not return constantly to the same modes.

Because automatisms do not change through decision alone. A decision can be a beginning. It can direct attention. It can choose a practice. It can say: I want to learn differently. But the decision itself does not rebuild the background immediately. Someone may decide that they will be calmer, and then in the first difficult conversation discover that their nervous system has its own history. Someone may decide that they will trust, and then see that the body does not trust on command. Someone may promise themselves they will not be afraid of judgment, and then feel old shame before they have time to use arguments.

This does not mean decisions are worthless. It only means that a decision has to descend into practice, and practice has to descend into the body. A new way of responding has to be repeated in real situations, not only written down as an idea. The system has to pass many times through small corrections: notice, pause, name, check, choose a little differently. It will not always work. Sometimes the old pattern will win. But even then, learning can continue: what activated me? When did the reaction begin in the body? What was the first signal? What did I need earlier? What smaller pause might be possible next time?

This is how awareness of the automatic background develops. Not through total control, but through noticing earlier and earlier. First, you realize an hour after the reaction: I responded in the old way again. Then after ten minutes. Then during the conversation. Then at the moment when the voice begins to change. Then even earlier: when the stomach tightens, before a sentence appears. This is real change. It does not mean the background disappears. It means it becomes less absolute.

It is also worth seeing that the automatic background is not only private. It is socially created. We learn automatisms in relationships, families, schools, cultures, technologies. We learn whom to yield to. Whom to fear. How quickly to answer. What success means. What failure means. What a “normal” body looks like. When one is allowed to cry. When one has to smile. How to speak to authority. Whom to recognize as “one of us,” and whom as “foreign.” Many reflexes that seem entirely personal are traces of the social world in the body.

This is especially visible in prejudices and judgments. A person may consciously believe in equality, and yet their automatic associations may operate faster than their declarations. They may want to listen, and at the same time more quickly assign credibility to someone who fits a learned image of authority. They may consider themselves open, and still reflexively feel distance toward what is unfamiliar. This is uncomfortable, but very important. Conscious values are necessary, but they do not automatically erase the traces of culture, history, and repeated images.

That is why responsibility does not mean pretending we have no automatisms. It means, rather, examining them, correcting them, and not mindlessly handing power over to them. If the first reaction appears before choice, then responsibility often begins a moment later: what will I do with it? Will I check it? Will I let it write the whole behavior? Will I notice that it is only the system’s first setting? Will I create conditions in which, over time, the background can be rebuilt? We are not responsible for everything that automatically appears in us. But we can gradually take responsibility for how we work with it.

This is more delicate and more honest than simple moralizing. Moralizing says: you should be different immediately. Understanding the system says: see what operates quickly, where it may have come from, how it affects others, and how it can be changed. Not in order to excuse oneself. In order for change to be real. Contempt toward one’s own background usually does not help. Often it only adds another layer of shame, which itself becomes automatic. Attentive responsibility is better: I see that this works in me, and I do not want to pretend it is not there.

The automatic background also works in a positive direction. Not everything automatic is a problem. Tenderness can become automatic. Attentiveness to someone’s fatigue can be a reflex. Good boundaries can, over time, appear more quickly. The ability to apologize can become more available. Returning to the breath can become a habit. Pausing before a sharp word can enter the body. Trust can become easier. Joy can have its pathways. Sensitivity can be not an effort, but a way of being present.

This shows that the goal is not life without automatisms. The goal is rather to shape the background so that it does not constantly work against life. So that some good responses become easier. So that care does not require heroism every time. So that the body does not have to renegotiate every sign of safety from the beginning. So that the world can sometimes be received without immediate defense. So that a person has not only conscious beliefs, but also learned ways of returning to themselves.

This leads us to an important conclusion: character is not only declarations.

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Character is also the automatic background trained by repetition. It is what you do when you do not have time for a beautiful theory. How you respond when you are tired. Whether you can stop before you hurt someone. Whether you can return and repair. Whether your body knows the road to a boundary, to care, to courage, to truth. Of course, no one is perfect. Fatigue, stress, and fear bring us back to older layers. But this is precisely why what we practice every day matters, before the difficult moment comes.

In a difficult moment, we often do not rise to the level of our ideals. Rather, we fall to the level of our established patterns.

That is why it matters so much which patterns we feed. What we repeat in relationships. How we speak to ourselves after a mistake. Whether we teach the body pause, or only tension. Whether our environment strengthens distraction, haste, comparison, and alarm, or also offers rhythm, silence, presence, and return. The automatic background does not come from nowhere. It is a history of repeated conditions. And the future of the background depends on what conditions we begin repeating now.

This closes the whole cognitive segment.

We can now look back at the path so far once more, but more deeply. Attention selects, but not always consciously. Perception constructs, but many of its assumptions operate in the background. Affordances show the world as a field of action, but what seems possible is often recognized automatically. Learning reorganizes the system, and much of that reorganization later works without words. Memory binds time, but not every memory is a story. Language gives meaning, but many meanings have been prepared before a sentence appears. Thinking predicts, but its first scenarios often grow out of automatic expectations.

A human being is therefore more complex than the conscious “I.” Not less human because of this. More human. Because this shows that we are layers: a body that reacts; a history that predicts; attention that selects; memory that returns; language that names; thought that simulates; an automatic background that prepares the world before we have time to say “I.” Consciousness does not disappear in this image. It only stops pretending that everything begins with it.

We might put it this way: before a person consciously notices, thinks, and names, their system is already working. It selects, evaluates, compares, predicts, prepares the body, and activates old patterns. This automatic background is necessary, because without it life would be too slow and too heavy. But it is also dangerous if it remains completely invisible, because then old maps can pretend to be reality, and first reactions can pretend to be truth.

Maturity, then, does not mean that everything becomes conscious. That is impossible.

Maturity means rather that a person learns to recognize enough of their own background not to be entirely led by it. That they can sometimes pause at the first reaction and ask: what is operating here? What has my system already assumed? Is this the present, or an old pattern? What is the smallest different movement available?

And this is where our cognitive layer ends. Not because everything has been explained, but because we now have a fuller foundation. A human being is not a passive receiver of the world. They select, construct, recognize possibilities, learn, remember, name, predict, and act against the background of an enormous automatic labor of the system. From the outside, it sometimes looks as though they are simply “reacting.” But beneath the reaction lies an entire history of life, body, environment, and meaning.

Now we can ask about something that can no longer be postponed.

Why do some stimuli, memories, words, possibilities, and thoughts carry weight for us? Why are some things indifferent, while others move us immediately? Why does something attract or repel, soothe or alarm, awaken hope or disgust, shame or tenderness? Why is the same world an invitation for one organism and a threat for another? Why is understanding so often not enough for suffering to subside?

Here the next block begins.

Emotions.

Not as chaos after cognition. Not as an obstacle to reason. Not as an addition to “real” thinking. Emotions are the way the organism marks value, safety, loss, need, and direction for action. They are a compass that can be wrong, but cannot be thrown away without losing orientation.

That is why, after the automatic background, we can go deeper into the question of what moves a human being.

Not only what they see. Not only what they remember. Not only what they think.

But what matters to them enough that the body begins to respond.

With the past, which has already passed. With the future, which has not yet happened. With people who are not in the room. With one’s own fear, hope, guilt, plan, memory. We can sit motionless at a table while whole conversations unfold inside. We can return to a sentence someone said yesterday. We can prepare a response to a situation that may never happen. We can imagine failure, success, an argument, a meeting, loss, change, escape, return. The body is here, but the mind can be in several times at once.

And this is where thinking begins in a fuller sense.

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Not as a cold machine for solving problems. Not as pure reason separated from the body. Not as a private office of logical operations, where someone calmly arranges arguments and draws conclusions. Thinking is rather one of the ways in which a living system tries to orient itself in a world that cannot be fully controlled. It is a movement between what was, what is, and what may happen. It is an attempt to prepare for the absent.

In everyday life, we very often confuse thinking with analysis. We imagine that to think means to sit calmly and consider arguments. To organize data. To draw conclusions. To make decisions. And of course, this too is part of thinking. But a huge part of our inner life does not resemble a calm seminar at all. It resembles a simulator more than anything else. We constantly create versions of events. We test possible responses. We predict other people’s reactions. We return to old scenes and try to understand them differently. We build the future before it arrives.

A human being thinks because they do not live only in what is immediately present. If we reacted only to what was striking our senses right now, our life would be simpler, but also far more limited. Instead, we can plan for winter in summer. We can save for something that does not yet exist. We can fear the consequences of a decision before the decision has been made. We can restrain an impulse because we remember what happened last time. We can imagine someone else’s pain before we say something. We can postpone pleasure because there is a goal beyond this moment.

This is a great capacity.

But also a great burden.

Because the same mechanism that allows us to plan also allows us to worry endlessly. The same mind that can predict danger can produce it where it does not yet exist. The same language that helps name experience can turn into an inner court. The same system that can learn from the past can constantly replay old scenarios. Thinking gives freedom from immediacy, but it can also imprison a person in what is possible, imagined, or long gone.

That is why we need to begin with a simple sentence: thinking is not the opposite of life.

It is one of the ways in which life tries to get ahead of itself. The organism does not only want to receive. It wants to prepare for what is coming. Perception was already connected with prediction: we see not only what is, but also what may happen in a moment. Memory was a map of possible consequences: this hurt, this helped, it was safe there, one must be careful there. Language allowed experience to be arranged into meanings. Thinking takes these layers and begins to move them through time. It asks: what follows from this? What comes next? What can I do? What if it fails? What if I respond differently? What if I lose? What if I try?

Thinking is the internal testing of reality.

Before we do something in reality, we can do it in imagination. We can rehearse a conversation. We can test different variants. We can predict that if we say something in a sharp tone, the other person will close down. We can recognize that if we rest now, tomorrow we will be more capable of action. We can notice that apparent relief will bring a later cost. We can build a plan that helps us move through something difficult. This is extraordinary: a human being can create internal trials of the world before taking the risk in the external world.

But the simulator does not always know when to stop.

This is one of the great problems of the human mind. Thinking can serve orientation, but it can also begin to spin around itself. Planning can become control. Caution can become catastrophizing. Reflection can become rumination. Inner dialogue can become inner violence. Suddenly a person is no longer thinking in order to see something more clearly, but in order to preserve the illusion that if they analyze everything long enough, nothing will surprise them.

And life surprises us anyway.

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That is why thinking is so closely connected with uncertainty. If the world were completely predictable, we would not have to simulate so much. If we always knew what others would do, what we would feel, what would succeed and what would fall apart, thinking would be much simpler. But we live in a world of partial knowledge. We see fragments. We remember selectively. We understand incompletely. Other people have inner worlds we cannot see in full. The future has not yet been settled. Thinking appears, then, as an attempt to build a bridge over a gap: between what I know and what I do not know.

That is why we so often think most intensely when something is unclear. When someone has not replied. When a conversation ended strangely. When we are waiting for a result. When we have to make a decision. When we feel that something is changing, but do not yet know what. The mind then begins to produce scenarios. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe this is the end. Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I should call. Maybe it is better to wait. Maybe I should have said it differently. Maybe this is repeating itself. Maybe this time it will be different.

Sometimes this helps. Sometimes it destroys peace.

Because thinking is not neutral. We think with the whole system. A tired person predicts differently from a rested one. A frightened person differently from someone who feels safe. A ashamed person differently from someone who feels accepted. Hungry, lonely, overloaded, in love, wounded — each of these states changes not only emotions, but also the way of thinking. What appears to be a logical conclusion is often a logical conclusion inside a particular state of the organism.

A person in alarm thinks alarm.

This sentence is worth taking seriously. When the system is in threat mode, thinking narrows. It searches for the worst possibilities. It tries to detect danger earlier. It prefers a false alarm to a reaction that comes too late. Then the inner dialogue may sound like a constant warning: be careful, do not trust, something is about to happen, do not make a mistake, you have to control this. From the outside, someone may say: stop thinking so much. But from the inside, this is not only a habit. It is a strategy of protection.

Except that a strategy of protection can become a source of suffering.

If the mind rehearses catastrophe without pause, the body often responds as if the catastrophe were already happening. The heart speeds up, muscles tighten, breath becomes shallow, sleep worsens. A future that has not yet happened begins to affect the organism like present reality. This is one of the most human things: we can suffer not only because of what is, but also because of what might be. An image is not “just an image” if the nervous system begins to treat it as a signal to prepare for defense.

This shows how powerful thinking is. It can carry us beyond the moment, but the body often follows. If you imagine humiliation, you may feel real shame. If you remember a loss, you may feel real pain. If you predict rejection, you may already begin to withdraw. If you create an image of possible success, the body may feel energy. If you plan calmly, step by step, the system may recover a little control. Thinking, then, is not only “in the head.” It is an event in the whole organism.

One of the most everyday forms of thinking is inner dialogue. Sometimes it is almost invisible. Short sentences, comments, questions: what now? Do not forget. That was stupid. You can do it. Do not do that. I wonder what he meant. I need to prepare. I overdid it again. Calm down. Such sentences move through the background of the day, but they are not insignificant. They position us toward ourselves and the world. They can regulate or dysregulate. They can help us choose the next step or preserve an old fear.

Inner dialogue often arises from external dialogues. What we once heard from others can become the way we speak to ourselves. The voice of a critical parent, a shaming teacher, a demanding environment, a cold relationship, but also the voice of someone tender, supportive, calm — all of this can, over time, become part of inner speech. A person rarely thinks entirely alone. Even in silence, they carry traces of old conversations inside.

That is why the question “how do you speak to yourself?” is not a small one. It is a question about the environment you carry within. Is there someone inside who immediately accuses? Someone who mocks? Someone who panics? Someone who orders you to grit your teeth? Or is there also someone who can say: stop, check, breathe, this is difficult, but you are not alone, you can take one step. These inner voices are not only a metaphor. They are real ways of regulating attention, emotion, memory, and action.

Thinking, then, is also a relationship with oneself. A person can be a witness, caregiver, prosecutor, commander, translator, enemy, companion toward themselves. They can internally create conditions in which it is easier to rise again, or conditions in which every mistake becomes proof of worthlessness. This does not mean that speaking kindly to oneself is enough for everything to be repaired. But it does mean that inner language is one of the places where the system either receives support or another threat.

Sometimes a person suffers not only because the world was harsh. They suffer also because they learned to carry that harshness inward. Then even solitude offers no rest, because no one outside is needed anymore in order to feel judged. One’s own thought is enough. “You failed again.” “You shouldn’t feel this way.” “Others cope better.” “You have no right to need anything.” “You must solve this immediately.” In such an arrangement, thinking is not a space of orientation, but a constant interrogation. A person tries to live, while at the same time constantly explaining themselves before an inner court.

This is one reason thinking can be exhausting. Not every activity of the mind tires us in the same way. There is a difference between creative consideration and the compulsion to analyze. Between a plan and obsessive control. Between reflection and beating oneself over the head. Between the question “what can I learn?” and the question “why am I like this again?” The first can give direction. The second often takes strength away. And although from the outside both look like “thinking,” from the inside they are entirely different experiences.

Good thinking does not always mean more thinking.

Sometimes it means less, but more precisely. Sometimes it means a pause. Sometimes moving down from general fear to a concrete question. Not “what will happen to my life?”, but: what is the next honest step? Not “why do I always ruin everything?”, but: what exactly happened today, and what do I need now? Not “what if everything goes wrong?”, but: what do I have influence over, and what do I not? Thinking becomes more helpful when it stops pretending to have total control and begins to serve orientation.

This distinction matters: thinking does not have to control the world in order to help. It may be enough that it organizes the nearest stretch. That it distinguishes fact from interpretation. That it shows resources. That it names risk without turning it into a verdict. That it allows us to prepare for difficulty without living as though the difficulty has already happened. That it leaves room for not knowing. Mature thinking does not remove uncertainty. Rather, it learns to coexist with it.

And this is very difficult, because the system often wants certainty more than truth.

Certainty calms. Even painful certainty can be easier than ambiguity. “They will definitely reject me” may paradoxically offer more control than “I do not know what will happen.” “I am hopeless” may be terrible, but familiar. “I will never change” may hurt, but it closes the question. Sometimes the mind prefers a narrow but stable picture to an open space, because open space requires tolerating tension.

Thinking matures when it learns to say: I do not know yet.

This small sentence is enormous. I do not yet know what this means. I do not yet know how this will end. I do not yet know who I will be after this change. I do not yet know whether this relationship will survive. I do not yet know whether I will manage. Not as resignation, but as honesty toward reality. Such not-knowing is not emptiness. It is a space in which one can observe, ask, check, take steps without turning every possibility into a verdict.

At this point, thinking meets freedom. Not full freedom from biology, history, and conditions. Such freedom would be fiction. But a small, human freedom between impulse and response. Between the first interpretation and the next question. Between the old scenario and the possibility of checking whether it truly has to repeat. Thinking does not always stop a reaction. Sometimes it is too late; the body has already responded. But sometimes it can create a crack. And in that crack, another movement may appear.

That is why thinking is so strongly connected with responsibility. If I can predict, I can also, to some extent, weigh consequences. If I can remember, I can learn from what was. If I can name, I can ask whether my words wound or help. If I can think about the future, I do not have to be entirely enslaved to impulse. Of course, this capacity differs between people and between states. Stress, trauma, fatigue, illness, pressure, fear — all of these reduce the space for thinking. But the very possibility of prediction introduces into human life a dimension of responsibility for the next step.

This is not about moralizing. It is about the fact that thinking expands the time in which a person lives. An animal, too, can learn and predict, but human language and autobiographical memory allow for the creation of very complex scenarios. We can plan whole years, consider alternative lives, regret choices, make promises to a future self, speak with the absent, write letters to the dead, prepare for the birth of a child, fear old age, ask about the meaning of death. Thinking means that a person lives not only in space, but also in extended time.

And this time can be a blessing or a burden.

The future can offer hope: not everything is closed yet. One can learn. One can repair. One can try. One can meet someone one does not yet know. One can become a slightly different person. But the future can also become a source of fear: everything may fall apart, one may lose, fall ill, be rejected, run out of time, fail. The past can offer wisdom, but it can also pull downward. The present can be a place of action, but it is often squeezed between what was and what may be.

Thinking tries to reconcile all this. It tries to build some kind of orientation out of past, present, and future. Not always beautifully. Not always accurately. Sometimes chaotically, sometimes painfully, sometimes creatively. But this is precisely where its function becomes visible: it is not only about producing thoughts. It is about maintaining direction in time. A human being thinks in order to know how to go on being in the world.

This “going on” is very important.

Because thinking always contains some movement toward what comes next. Even when it returns to the past, it often does so because something from the past is still affecting the future. Why did I do that? In order to understand whether I will do it again. Why did that hurt me? In order to know how to protect myself next time. What does this situation mean? In order to decide whether to stay, leave, speak, remain silent, repair, let go. Thinking, then, is a form of preparing a response.

But not every response has to be an external action. Sometimes the response is a change in one’s relationship to one’s own thought. Seeing that a thought is not a fact. That a scenario is not a prophecy. That an inner voice is not always an authority. That “I am afraid” does not mean “this will definitely happen.” That “I remembered it” does not mean “I am back there.” That “I thought something terrible” does not mean “I am terrible.” This capacity to see a thought as a thought is one of the important transitions in cognitive maturation.

The point is not to cut oneself off from the mind. The point is not to fall into every production of the mind as if it were reality. A thought can be a signal. It can be a hypothesis. It can be a trace of memory. It can be a symptom of fatigue. It can be an attempt at protection. It can be a question. It can be an old sentence that returns automatically. If we treat every thought as truth, we are thrown around by inner weather. If we treat thoughts as phenomena that can be noticed and checked, a little space appears. Not always much. But sometimes enough not to hand them the steering wheel immediately.

This space is not cold rationality. It is more like kind awareness. I can notice: my mind is predicting rejection right now. My mind is looking for blame right now. My mind is trying to protect me through control right now. My mind is repeating an old scenario right now. Such sentences do not invalidate the experience. They do not say: this is stupid. Rather, they say: I see what is happening. And seeing the process is something different from being entirely the process.

In this sense, the whole second segment has led to this place. Attention selected what would gain access at all. Perception assembled selected stimuli into a working version of the world. Memory bound experiences into continuity. Language gave them names and meanings. Thinking begins to operate with all of this in time: it compares, predicts, simulates, plans, worries, explains, searches for a way out. These are not separate boxes. They are layers of one process through which a living organism tries not only to survive, but also to understand who it is and where it may go.

But we cannot stop here.

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Because a human being is not only a cognitive system. They do not select, perceive, remember, name, and predict in a vacuum. Each of these processes is saturated with value. Something is important or unimportant. Safe or threatening. Close or foreign. Desired or repellent. Worth the effort or not worth it. Thinking can create scenarios, but emotions very often tell us which scenarios hurt, which tempt, which terrify, which seem unbearable.

And that is why, after the cognitive layer, the affective layer must come.

Because so far, we have spoken mainly about how the world becomes experience and meaning. But now we have to ask: why do some meanings move us, while others do not? Why do certain thoughts return with the force of alarm, while others pass without a trace? Why does the body recognize something as safe, close, valuable, disgusting, dangerous, desired? Why is understanding so often not enough to stop suffering?

The answer leads to emotion.

Not as an addition to reason. Not as an obstacle to rational life. Not as chaos that simply has to be mastered. Emotions are one of the basic ways in which the organism marks value and safety. They are a compass that is not always right, but cannot simply be thrown away.

We can therefore say that this second segment closes here: a human being is not a passive receiver of reality. Their system selects, constructs, remembers, names, and predicts. Out of the vast world, it creates the lived world. From the traces of experience, it creates a sense of continuity. From words, it creates meanings. From thoughts, it creates possible futures.

But only emotions will show why some of these worlds become so important to us.

And that is where we should go next.

let the pieces move.

This is the point where design stops being only symbolic. A piece may have a good name, a strong role, and a clear place inside the warband, but the real test begins when it enters the board. Does it create useful pressure? Does it overlap too much with another piece? Does it make the game more readable, or only more complicated?

The current prototype is built around a simple principle:

one action, one turn.

A player chooses one figure, makes one move, one capture, or one shot, and then the consequences are passed to the next side. This keeps the rhythm clear, especially because the board is meant to support more than a two-player duel. In games with three, four, or six sides, even one small move may create an opening for someone else.

So the figures cannot be too complicated individually.
The complexity should come from the board, the center, and the interaction between roles.

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The board needs pressure, but also air

One of the first balance questions was density.

The warband cannot be too large, because the board needs space. If too many figures appear too early, the game stops being about positioning and becomes a traffic jam. Lines close before they become meaningful. The Throne becomes crowded before players have time to create plans.

But the warband also cannot be too small or too uniform.

If every piece solves the same problem, the game becomes flat. A real group — whether we think about it as a warband, an army, or a small society — does not work as a collection of identical functions. Someone leads. Someone protects. Someone fights in contact. Someone controls distance. Someone raids. Someone creates the exceptional moment of breakthrough.

That became the central design question:

not how many pieces can fit on the board, but how many different roles the board can support without losing clarity.

The current set is built around that spectrum.

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The Knyaz — the claim

The Knyaz is the most important figure, but not the strongest fighter.

That distinction is important. If the leader were also the most powerful unit, the game would become too direct. The player would simply push the strongest piece toward the center and try to force victory through combat.

Instead, the Knyaz moves slowly: one hex in any of the six directions. He can capture adjacent enemies, but he has no special attack, no jump, no ranged power.

His strength is positional and symbolic.

Only the Knyaz can claim the Throne. When he enters the center, the game does not end immediately. The claim has to survive. The opposing players get time to react, attack, block, or use the chaos for their own advantage.

This makes the Throne less like a finish line and more like a public declaration.

Reaching the center is not the end.
It is the beginning of danger.

The Footman / Shield-Bearer — the body

The Footman is the simplest figure, but that does not make him unimportant.

He moves one hex in any direction and captures adjacent enemies. His rules are easy to understand. His value comes from placement.

The Shield-Bearer holds space, blocks lines, protects more important figures, and gives the warband its body. He does not create an invisible aura of control. Enemies can stand next to him. His defense is physical: he occupies a hex, blocks a line, and shields what stands behind him.

This became especially important in relation to the Archer.

A ranged figure can easily become too powerful if nothing answers it. The Shield-Bearer gives the game that answer. He cannot be removed by a distant shot, and he can protect figures behind him.

That means the weakest-looking piece creates one of the most important defensive structures in the game.

The Warrior — contact

The Warrior is the main contact fighter.

He moves up to two hexes along a legal path and can turn during that movement. This makes him useful in the crowded middle of the board, where straight lines are often blocked and small changes of direction matter.

He does not jump.
He does not shoot.
He does not have a special rule for the Throne.

His strength is reliability.

The Warrior is the piece that contests space directly. He removes threats, supports the Knyaz, fights in the center, and adapts to local pressure. In early balance thinking, this kind of figure can easily become too good, because flexibility is useful almost everywhere.

So the goal is not to make the Warrior weak. The goal is to make sure he is not universal.

He should be good in contact, but he should not replace the Skirmisher’s line pressure, the Archer’s distance, the Shield-Bearer’s protection, or the Banner’s breakthrough.

The Skirmisher / Harrier — the line

The Skirmisher exists because the Warrior should not be the only aggressive piece.

Where the Warrior is flexible, the Skirmisher is directional. He moves up to two hexes in a straight line. He cannot turn during the move, but he can jump over a piece on the first hex of the line and land beyond it, if the final hex is legal.

This gives him a different tempo.

He is not made for slow central wrestling. He is made for sudden pressure, punishing bad alignment, and breaking through a screen. He can capture at distance one or two, but only along the line of movement.

The difference is simple:

The Warrior bends.
The Skirmisher cuts through.

That contrast is one of the key balance relationships in the set. The two pieces may both be combat figures, but they ask different questions.

The Warrior asks: how do I fight in the crowd?
The Skirmisher asks: where is the line I can exploit?

The Archer / Marksman — distance

The Archer is the figure that makes empty space dangerous.

Without ranged pressure, most threats are local. You mainly fear what stands next to you or what can reach you in the next move. The Archer changes that. A clear line across the board becomes a threat even before anything moves into contact.

In the current rules, the Archer moves one hex, but his main strength is the shot. He can shoot in a straight line at a distance of two or three hexes. The shot does not move the Archer; the target is removed, and the Archer stays where he is.

This is powerful, so it needs limits.

The Archer cannot shoot through any occupied hex. Any piece blocks the line. He also cannot shoot a Shield-Bearer from distance. If a Shield-Bearer stands in the line, he protects himself and anything behind him.

There is also a close-combat restriction: if an enemy stands adjacent to the Archer, the Archer cannot ignore that enemy and shoot somewhere else. He must deal with the immediate threat.

That rule matters because it prevents the Archer from becoming detached from the rest of the game. He controls lines, but he is not safe by default. He needs protection. He needs positioning. He needs distance.

The Archer should feel dangerous, but conditional.

A good Archer position makes the opponent uncomfortable.
A bad Archer position becomes a liability.

The Banner / Chorągiew — controlled breakthrough

The Banner is the most exceptional figure in the warband.

It is not meant to be common. Its role is not to fight like a Warrior or simply raid like a Skirmisher. The Banner exists to create a controlled moment of breakthrough.

In the current prototype, its special value comes from planned movement and landing. It can move farther than ordinary pieces, but the important part is how its capture works. A Banner attack is not only about removing an enemy figure. It is also about where the Banner ends after the action.

That makes it tactical rather than merely strong.

A capture may be good because it removes a threat.
It may be better because it lands the Banner in a protected position.
It may be decisive because it opens the path for the Knyaz.
It may be bad if the landing leaves the Banner exposed.

This is why the Banner has to remain limited. If many figures could attack and reposition with this level of control, the whole board would become unstable. Defensive lines would collapse too easily.

The Banner should feel like a rare instrument.

Not the army.
Not the ruler.
The moment of breakthrough.

Why the pieces need each other

The balance of the game does not come from making every figure equally strong in the same way.

It comes from making each figure necessary for a different reason.

The Knyaz gives the game its objective.
The Shield-Bearer protects and blocks.
The Warrior fights in contact.
The Skirmisher creates linear pressure.
The Archer controls distance.
The Banner creates breakthrough.

This is also why the movement rules are intentionally simple. Most figures have one clear movement idea. The depth should not come from memorizing exceptions. It should come from combining roles.

A Shield-Bearer in the right place can make an Archer useless.
An Archer in the right place can freeze a careless formation.
A Warrior can clean the center, but not jump through a line.
A Skirmisher can jump through a line, but cannot turn.
A Banner can create a dramatic opening, but cannot be everywhere.
A Knyaz can win the game, but only if the others make survival possible.

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The interface as a soft tutorial

The prototype already helps teach these relationships visually.

Movement, captures, shots, range previews, blocked targets, landing fields, and threatened hexes are not only interface features. They are part of the design process. They show whether a rule is readable.

Some rules sound complicated in text but become clear when highlighted on the board.

For example, the Archer’s blocked shot against a Shield-Bearer is easier to understand when the player sees the target marked as visible but illegal. The Banner’s landing rule is easier to understand when the possible landing fields appear after selecting the target.

This is the kind of tutorial I prefer: not a separate lesson, but a board that explains itself while being played.

What the first playable version suggests

At this stage, the game feels most promising when each figure keeps its own identity.

The pieces do not need to be overloaded. The board already creates pressure through geometry, the Throne, player count, and turn order. If the roles are clear, the rules can remain relatively clean.

The current balance is not final. It still needs more testing, especially across different numbers of players and against different styles of play. But the direction feels right:

protect the Knyaz,
respect the Archer’s lines,
use Shield-Bearers to block,
send Warriors into contact,
look for Skirmisher lines,
save the Banner for the right moment,
and remember that the Throne is not won by reaching it, but by surviving there.

That is where the game begins to move.

Language, then, appears as the next layer.

Not as an ornament placed on top of ready-made experience. Not as a label attached to a world that had already been fully understood beforehand. Language is not only a way of speaking about what has happened. It is one of the main tools through which experience becomes possible to grasp, share, remember, think through, and change.

In everyday life, we treat language very practically. It serves for asking, answering, explaining, telling, arranging, arguing, apologizing, naming things. “Pass me the water.” “I don’t want to.” “I’m afraid.” “This is a table.” “Let’s meet tomorrow.” “I love you.” “I don’t understand.” In this view, language looks like a tool of communication: something is inside, and then, by means of words, it is transmitted outward.

And of course that is true. But only partly.

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Because language does not only carry ready-made meanings. It helps create them. This is very easy to overlook, because words seem transparent. When we say “tree,” “home,” “pain,” “love,” “I,” “guilt,” “freedom,” we have the impression that we are simply pointing to things that already exist. As if the world were a set of ready-made objects and states, and language merely attached names to them. But it is enough to look a little more closely to see that naming something changes the way that thing exists for us in experience.

As long as you do not have a word, something may be present, but blurred. You may feel that “something is wrong,” but only a word allows you to separate one thing from another. This is not only sadness; it is disappointment. This is not only anger; it is the feeling of a boundary having been crossed. This is not laziness; it is exhaustion. This is not indifference; it is freezing. This is not weakness; it is overload. Each such distinction changes the situation. It does not automatically remove it, but it gives it shape. And what has shape can already be held in some way, looked at, communicated, sometimes regulated.

Language therefore works as a tool for dividing the world. Where before there was one fog, differences appear. Where there was only “bad,” an entire map may emerge: I am tired, hurt, frightened, ashamed, lonely, overloaded, hungry, disappointed. And each of these names leads in a different direction. Fatigue may need rest. Shame may need gentleness and contact. Anger may need a boundary. Loneliness may need presence. Fear may need safety. Hunger may need food. If everything is called only “bad,” the system does not know what to do. If we begin to distinguish, the possibility of a response better fitted to the situation appears.

The same applies to the external world. When a child learns words, they are not learning only sounds. They are learning the divisions of the world. That this is a dog, this is a cat, this is foreign, this is mine, this is yours, this is today, this is tomorrow, this is a request, this is a prohibition, this is a promise, this is a lie, this is a joke. Language does not so much throw names onto a ready-made reality as help organize reality into categories that can be recognized and passed on. Thanks to language, the world becomes more shared.

Without language, one can react, feel, recognize, approach, withdraw, learn. Animals do this without our sentences and definitions. An infant, too, lives, feels, and responds before it begins to speak. So the point is not that without language there is no experience. That would be too strong. But language changes the kind of experience. It allows us not only to live through something, but also to say: that was something. It had a name. It can be told to someone else. It can be compared with what you lived through. It can be remembered as part of a story.

Language opens a space between experience and experience itself. This sounds strange, but it refers to something simple. When I experience fear without words, I am more immersed in it. When I am able to say “I am afraid,” a minimal distance appears. I do not stop being afraid, but the fear becomes something I can notice. It is in me, but it does not have to be all of me. I can speak about it. I can ask where it comes from. I can show it to someone. I can distinguish it from fact. Naming is not a magical solution, but it is often the first movement from being flooded toward orientation.

That is why words can calm. Not because they are magical. Rather, because they help the system organize arousal. When someone says to a child, “you got scared because it was loud,” they are not only passing on information. They are helping connect a bodily reaction with a cause and a meaning. The child gradually learns that what is happening inside can be named, understood, and survived. Similarly, an adult sometimes needs to hear a simple sentence: “that sounds like overload,” “that may have been shaming,” “no wonder you are defending yourself.” Suddenly, chaos receives structure. And when chaos receives structure, it does not always disappear, but it stops being absolute.

Language is therefore a tool of regulation. Not the only one, because the body, sleep, touch, breath, movement, relationship, food, and safety still matter. Not every wound can be talked away. Real support cannot be replaced by an elegant description. But language can help the system understand what is happening to it. It can create a bridge between reflex and reflection. Between the body and story. Between what is still undefined and what can be worked with.

But language also has another side.

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Because if words organize experience, they can also distort it. They can help us see more, but they can also close down seeing. When you call yourself “a failure,” that word begins to organize memory, attention, and predictions. When you call someone “an enemy,” it becomes harder to see their fatigue, fear, helplessness, or good intention. When you call your needs “weakness,” you will hide them even when they are an ordinary part of life. When you call rest “laziness,” the body may be asking for regeneration, and you will hear accusation.

Words are not innocent. They are small tools, but they can arrange entire fields of experience. One word can open a possibility, and another can close it. “I don’t know how yet” is not the same as “I’m not cut out for this.” “I need help” is not the same as “I am a burden.” “I made a mistake” is not the same as “I am a mistake.” “I was hurt” is not the same as “I am broken.” Grammatically, these are small differences. Existentially — enormous ones.

Because language does not only describe a person. Sometimes it imprisons them.

Very often, suffering is preserved not only by the event itself, but by the sentence that began to explain it. Someone was rejected and remembered not only the pain, but also the conclusion: “I am not worthy of love.” Someone made a mistake and recorded it as: “I cannot be trusted.” Someone lived through chaos and made a rule out of it: “I have to control everything.” Someone was invisible and named themselves “unimportant.” Such sentences are not ordinary thoughts. They become frames through which the organism later reads subsequent situations.

And then language begins to work like a second memory.

We remember not only what happened. We also remember what we called it. And the name can outlive the scene itself. Sometimes we no longer remember the details, but we carry a definition inside: “I am too much,” “I must not be a bother,” “I have to earn it,” “there is something wrong with me.” These are not only sentences. They are condensed maps of the world. They show where one is allowed to go, what one is not allowed to want, what one must fear, how fully one may exist alongside others.

At this point, language meets identity. Because the “I” becomes, to a large extent, something that can be spoken about. Not only something that feels and reacts, but something that can say: this is what I am like, this is what I was like, this is what I want, this is what I fear, this happened to me, this changed me. Language allows us to create a story about ourselves. And a story can hold life together, but it can also narrow it. It can say: I survived. It can also say: I am only a victim. It can say: I am learning. It can also say: I always fail. It can say: I have a history. It can also say: I am condemned to repeat it.

That is why we need to be careful with sentences that sound like final verdicts. “That’s just how I am.” “She will always be like that.” “People never change.” “With me, it can’t be any different.” “That definitely means nothing.” “That definitely means everything.” Such sentences bring relief because they organize uncertainty. The system likes definitions, because definitions reduce chaos. But sometimes we pay for this relief with a narrowing of the world. What began as an attempt at orientation becomes a prison. Language, which was meant to help us live, begins to replace living experience with a ready-made formula.

This does not mean that we should distrust words. Without language, we would not get very far. We could not build shared plans, pass on knowledge, tell stories, create law, literature, science, therapy, prayer, jokes, promises. We could not say “I’m sorry” or “help me.” We could not learn from those who are not beside us, because language carries experience beyond one moment and one body. Thanks to language, a person can draw not only on their own memory, but also on the memory of other people.

Language is therefore also a tool of community. When I tell you what I have lived through, I do not pass the experience itself to you in pure form. You cannot enter my body, my memory, my nervous system. But language creates a bridge. Imperfect, but real. Thanks to it, something from my world can appear in yours. You can understand me a little better. You can respond. You can say: “me too.” You can say: “it was different for me.” You can say: “I didn’t know.” And suddenly experience stops being locked inside a solitary nervous system.

This is one of the most important functions of language: it carries lived experience out of isolation.

A person can suffer wordlessly for a very long time. The body reacts, memory returns, behaviors repeat, but there is no sentence that could show it to someone else. When words finally appear, the possibility of being heard often appears too. Not always. Not everyone listens well. Not every confession is received. But without language, many experiences do not even have a chance to enter the space of relationship. They remain private tension. And private tension that no one understands very easily begins to look like loneliness or a flaw in character.

Naming something can therefore be an act of reclaiming oneself. “That was violence.” “That was neglect.” “That was fear.” “That was the need for closeness.” “That was a boundary.” “That was exhaustion.” Such sentences can change the arrangement of an entire story. Not because they change the facts. Because they change their place in meaning. Something that was once personal guilt can be recognized as a reaction to conditions. Something that was shame can become harm. Something that was “strangeness” can turn out to have been a survival strategy. Something that was chaos can become a signal.

But here, too, we need caution. Because language can offer explanations that are too easy. It can close something too soon, something that would still require patient contact. One can name oneself with a diagnosis and stop seeing the rest of the person. One can name someone’s behavior with a single concept and stop listening to the details. One can use grand words in order not to feel simple things. One can hide helplessness under theory. One can cover living experience with an elegant description.

Not every naming is understanding.

Sometimes a word truly lands. Sometimes it only pretends to. Sometimes it organizes, and sometimes it cuts off. Sometimes it allows us to see, and sometimes it protects us from seeing. That is why our relationship to language has to be double: deep respect and a certain distrust. Respect, because without words many things could not become part of awareness and relationship. Distrust, because no word is the same as the whole experience.

The word “pain” is not pain. The word “love” is not love. The word “I” is not the whole person.

And yet without these words, it would be difficult to grasp anything at all.

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This tension cannot be removed. Language brings us closer to experience and, at the same time, moves us away from it. It gives form, but every form leaves something out. It allows us to speak, but what is spoken is never the whole of what has been lived. That is why, after a long explanation, we sometimes say: “that is not quite it.” And we are right. No sentence can fully carry the weight of a single life. But without sentences, that weight often remains completely alone.

Perhaps, then, language is not a mirror of experience, but its working tool. It does not show everything, but it allows us to work with something. It arranges fragments. It creates distinctions. It builds bridges. It allows us to return to the past and ask what it means. It allows us to imagine the future and prepare for it. It allows us to say “no” and “yes.” It allows us to promise, refuse, confess, mourn, explain, hide, reveal, wound, and repair. It is one of the most powerful ways in which a human being influences themselves and others.

Because words do not remain only in the air. Words change the body. One sentence can calm the breath or quicken the pulse. It can relax the face or tighten the throat. It can restore someone’s sense of dignity or take it away. It can open a conversation or end a relationship. It can allow someone to stop feeling ashamed, or deepen shame for years. That is why language is not light simply because it is immaterial. A word is an event in the nervous system.

This is especially visible in childhood. A child receives from the world not only food, touch, and protection. The child also receives words about themselves. “You are well-behaved.” “You are difficult.” “You’re exaggerating.” “You can do it.” “Don’t cry.” “I am here with you.” “There is always something with you.” “It’s normal that you’re afraid.” Such sentences are not neutral background. Gradually, they become the material from which the child builds the language of their own interior. Over time, the voice from outside can become a voice inside. A person begins to speak to themselves in words they once heard from others.

And here language becomes inner dialogue.

Even when we are silent, something often speaks inside. It comments, plans, predicts, accuses, soothes, explains, rehearses conversations, creates scenarios. This inner voice is not the whole of thought, but it is one of its important forms. Sometimes it helps us maintain direction. Sometimes it offers support. Sometimes it becomes a constant tribunal. Sometimes it repeats old sentences that no one outside says anymore, but which still work as if someone were standing next to us.

This shows that language is not only between people. It is also inside a person. A person partly becomes an interlocutor for themselves. They can question themselves, calm themselves, frighten themselves, mobilize themselves, shame themselves, encourage themselves, stop themselves. They can say: “let’s try again” or “you ruined everything again.” They can say: “this is difficult” or “you are hopeless.” They can say: “I need rest” or “I have no right to be tired.” These inner sentences are not just private commentary. They influence attention, memory, the body, and action.

That is why a change in language can be a change in the inner world. Not through artificial positive slogans. Not through telling oneself something the system does not believe. Rather, through gradually finding words that are more accurate, more honest, and less harmful. Instead of “I am lazy” — “I am overloaded and avoiding because I do not have the resources.” Instead of “no one wants me” — “I am afraid I will be rejected again.” Instead of “I have to be strong” — “I learned that I cannot count on help, but perhaps now it is worth checking.” Such sentences are not soft decoration. They are more precise maps.

And a more precise map can lead to a different movement. If I call myself lazy, I will punish or force myself. If I call myself overloaded, I can look for rest, structure, help, a smaller step. If I call my fear the truth about the world, I will defend myself. If I call it a signal from an old protective system, I can check the situation. If I call the need for closeness weakness, I will hide it. If I call it a need, I can recognize it as part of being human.

Language does not solve everything, but it changes the kind of response that becomes available.

In this sense, language is an engine of meaning. Not because it creates the world out of nothing. Not because thinking is exclusively language. There are images, sensations, movements, intuitions, tensions, and recognitions that appear before words or alongside words. A human being is not a sentence machine. But when words appear, they begin to organize what has been lived in a particular way. They provide a category. They create a relationship between events. They make it possible to ask: “why?”, “for what?”, “what does this mean?”

And meaning is something more than information. Information says that something happened. Meaning says what it does to my world. Someone left — that is information. “I was abandoned,” “I lost someone important,” “a certain chapter ended,” “I was not loved,” “I have to learn to live differently” — these are meanings. One event can carry many possible meanings. Not arbitrary ones, because facts resist, but not completely closed ones either. Language is the place where these meanings begin to arrange themselves.

That is why the struggle over words is often a struggle over reality. In relationships, families, societies, cultures. Do we call something punishment or upbringing? Violence or conflict? Rest or laziness? Boundary or selfishness? Obedience or safety? Sensitivity or exaggeration? These names are not merely descriptions. They arrange responsibility, emotions, and possible actions. If something is called “normal,” it becomes harder to question. If something is called “harm,” the possibility of protection appears. If something is called “weakness,” shame appears. If it is called “a need,” care may appear.

Language, then, is not a private toy of the mind. It is also a structure of power and community. But here we do not yet have to enter deeply into politics, culture, and large social systems. For now, it is enough to see the basic movement: a person needs language so that experience can become meaning. So that the body can say something more than alarm. So that memory can become story. So that relationship can move beyond gesture and tone. So that the “I” can not only exist, but also ask who it is.

And here we arrive at the limit of language. Because language can do a great deal, but not everything. There are experiences that outrun words. There are moments when speech seems too small. Awe, trauma, love, mourning, pain, silence, the presence of another person — sometimes every sentence sounds like a simplification then. This does not mean language is useless. It only means that it is not the master of all experience. It is one of its tools, not the whole of life.

A human being therefore needs two abilities at once: the ability to name, and the ability to respect what cannot be fully named. Without the first, we remain in chaos. Without the second, we begin to confuse words with reality. Mature language does not mean that everything is finally explained. It means, rather, that we can create words good enough not to be completely lost, and humble enough to know that they do not exhaust the world.

We might put it this way: language is the process through which experience is named, divided, connected, and transmitted. Thanks to it, the world is not only a stream of stimuli, and memory is not only a collection of traces. They become something one can think about, tell, question, share, and sometimes transform.

Language is not the whole of thinking.

But it opens one of the most important paths of thinking. Because once we have attention, which selects; perception, which assembles; memory, which binds time; and language, which gives meaning — the next step appears. A person can begin to do something even more complex. They can simulate. They can predict. They can speak with themselves. They can create scenarios, worry, plan, imagine the future, and try to gain control over what does not yet exist.

And that is where the next text leads us: toward thinking as an inner movement between memory and the future.

This way of binding time is memory.

Usually we think of it as a storehouse. Something happened, it was recorded, and later it can be taken down from the shelf and looked at again. We say: “I have it in my memory,” “I keep that memory,” “I replay that day in my mind.” This language is understandable, but it deceives us a little. Because memory is not an archive in which untouched recordings of the past lie waiting. It is not a freezer for experiences. It is not a library with perfectly described files for every moment of life. It is rather a living process through which the past remains active in the present.

This means that memory does not only store. It also selects, strengthens, weakens, connects, shortens, fills in, and changes the meaning of what has been lived. Just as perception is not a pure reflection of the world, memory is not a pure reflection of the past. It is the way the past continues to work in the organism.

This is important: memory does not sit behind us. Memory works in us now. When you recognize someone’s face, memory is present. When you know how to open a door, how to hold a cup, how to arrange a sentence, how to walk down a familiar street — memory is present. When you hear a tone of voice and immediately feel that “something is wrong,” memory is present too. When you fear something that resembles an old situation, even if now it is not identical, memory is present. Not always as an image. Sometimes as an expectation. Sometimes as tension. Sometimes as a way of looking. Sometimes as readiness to defend. Sometimes as trust that comes easily because the world was once predictable enough. Sometimes as distrust that comes automatically because once it was necessary.

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That is why memory is not only what one can consciously recall. This is a very important distinction. When we say “I remember,” we most often mean a memory that can be told: where I was, what happened, who was there, what I said, what I felt. But there is also a quieter memory. The memory of movement, habit, reflex, atmosphere, body. You may not remember exactly when you learned to fear someone’s silence, and yet the body reacts when it appears. You may not remember the first moment when you felt that attention had to be earned, and yet many years later you may still live as if that were true. You may not have one concrete memory that explains your fear, and still the system may remember a certain pattern.

Memory, then, can be a story, but it can also be the organism’s setting.

This leads us to something deeper still. If memory is not only a storehouse of facts, but a way in which the past shapes the present, then our “self” is not as simple as we like to think. In everyday life, we speak of ourselves as if we were one stable object moving through time: I was a child, I went to school, I fell in love, I made a mistake, I changed. There is something obvious and necessary in this language. Without it, life would be difficult. But when we look more closely, the matter becomes strange.

Because the body has changed. Cells change. Beliefs change. Needs, language, face, voice, relationships, fears, dreams — everything flows. The person from childhood, the person from ten years ago, and the person today are not identical. Often they do not want the same things, do not understand the world in the same way, love differently, suffer differently, defend themselves differently. And yet we say: it is still me.

Where does this sense of continuity come from?

Memory is one of the answers. Not the only one, but a very important one. It is thanks to memory that life is not only a series of disconnected moments. Memory stitches moments into a story. It allows us to say: something happened to me, I learned something, I lost something, I survived something, something remained with me. Thanks to memory, morning is connected with yesterday evening, today’s fear with an old experience, present closeness with an earlier hunger for closeness or an earlier wound. Thanks to memory, a person can recognize themselves as someone who does not begin from zero in every second.

But this stitching is not neutral.

We do not remember everything. We remember selected fragments, and often not because they were the most objectively important, but because they mattered to the system. Something was very painful. Something was very safe. Something was new. Something was repeated many times. Something was tied to shame, fear, love, loss, triumph, or humiliation. Memory does not act like a fair chronicler. It acts more like an organism that asks: what from this may be needed later?

That is why we remember so much through emotion. This is not only about great dramas. Sometimes we remember the smell of a stairwell, the light in a kitchen, the weight of someone’s hand, the way someone spoke our name. Sometimes we remember one sentence from an entire conversation, one look more than the facts. Emotion acts like a marker: this had weight. This concerned safety, bond, value, threat, or hope. This must be kept, because it may still be useful.

In this way, memory becomes a tool of prediction. We do not remember only in order to know the past. We remember in order to enter the future better. If something once hurt, the system tries to recognize similar arrangements earlier. If something gave safety, the system tries to return to it. If a certain kind of person, tone, place, or situation was associated with danger, memory may sharpen vigilance. If something was a source of soothing, it may pull us in that direction. The past, then, is not only an album. It is a map of possible consequences.

The problem is that the map is not always up to date.

Sometimes memory helps. It protects, guides, reminds, gives wisdom. Thanks to it, we do not touch hot metal a second time. We do not trust someone who has hurt us repeatedly. We return to places, people, and rituals that regulate us. We learn. We mature. We do not begin over and over again. But sometimes memory mistakes similarity for repetition. A new situation is read through an old wound. A new person is fitted into an old pattern. Today’s mistake activates old shame. Today’s silence sounds like old abandonment. Then a person no longer lives only in the present. They live in a present saturated with the past.

This can be very subtle. Someone speaks in an ordinary tone, and you feel like a child beside an adult who must be pleased. Someone does not answer immediately, and your body behaves as if it were about to be abandoned. Someone points out a detail, and within you an entire old world of evaluation, shame, and the need to be flawless awakens. Objectively, little has happened. But memory has added context. Not in order to deceive you. In order to prepare you. Except that sometimes it prepares you for a world that is no longer there.

And this is precisely why memory is so ambivalent. It is the basis of continuity, but it can also be a prison. It gives the feeling of “I know who I am,” but it can lock a person inside one version of themselves. It allows one to say “this shaped me,” but sometimes it whispers “this defines me forever.” Memory connects life into a whole, but the way it makes that connection matters enormously. From the same facts, different stories can be built. Not arbitrary ones, not false in every direction, but different ones.

One can remember failure as proof that “I am hopeless.” One can also remember it as a moment in which I did not yet know how to do something. One can remember loss as the end of everything. After a long time, one can also remember it as a wound that truly changed life, but does not exhaust all of life. One can remember childhood only as a sequence of harms, and one can also, without invalidating those harms, see within it fragments of strength, cleverness, survival, tenderness, which were also real. This is not a simple rewriting of history. History resists. But because memory is alive, the arrangement of meanings can change over time.

This does not change the facts. It changes the relationship to the facts.

This distinction is very important. Mature work with memory is not about pretending that something did not happen. It is not about smoothing over suffering or quickly finding the positives. Sometimes the most honest thing is to say: that was wrong. It hurt. It should not have happened. But even then, the question remains: what is this memory doing to me now? Is it still only an alarm? Can it also become knowledge? Is it a sentence? Or can it become part of a story that does not have to take away the whole future?

Memory, then, is not only about the past. It is also about freedom in relation to the past.

Not complete freedom, because no one steps outside their history the way one steps out of a room. You cannot simply take life off yourself. But there can be a difference between being led by memory without awareness and seeing that memory is working right now. Sometimes the simple sentence “this is old” changes something in the situation. It does not remove the pain, but it introduces distance. It does not erase the reaction, but it allows us to see that the reaction does not belong only to this moment. It is an echo. It is a pattern. It is an old map activated by a current stimulus.

And when we see memory as memory, the present can recover a little space.

This also concerns identity. Very often, a person thinks about themselves through the memories that are most easily accessible. If images of one’s own failure often return, identity begins to say: I am someone who does not succeed. If images of rejection often return, identity may say: I am someone people leave. If situations in which everything had to be controlled often return, identity may say: I am someone who has to keep watch, otherwise everything will fall apart. Over time, memory stops sounding like memory. It begins to sound like a definition.

And definitions are very powerful.

“I am shy.” “I am difficult.” “I am not enough.” “I am strong.” “I am the responsible one.” “I am the problem.” “I am someone who always has to manage.” Each of these sentences may have a history. Each may be a shortcut through many experiences. But each may also stop being a description and become a cage. Because a person begins to choose from memory what confirms the definition, and to omit what might loosen it. Just as attention selects the world, memory selects the story that fits the image of “me.”

And here we can see how deeply the earlier texts connect with one another. Matter is not a dead lump. The organism is a system. The body is a process. The nervous system creates a world of signals. Attention selects fragments of reality. Perception assembles them into the first version of the world. And memory begins to arrange these versions into the continuity we later call life.

This is not an addition to the human being. It is one of the axes of being human.

Without memory, there would be no learning. There would be no relationships, because every person would have to be recognized anew. There would be no guilt or responsibility, but there would also be no gratitude, loyalty, mourning, promise, longing. There would be no “I return,” “I have been there before,” “I do not want to repeat that,” “that mattered to me.” Memory ensures that time does not pass through us entirely without a trace. Thanks to it, life has layers.

But layers can weigh heavily.

Sometimes a person suffers not because they do not remember, but because they remember too strongly, too often, too bodily. Certain experiences are not calmly placed into the past. They return as the present. The body reacts as if the threat were still ongoing. An image appears uninvited. A sound triggers alarm. A touch carries someone to a place they do not want to return to. In such situations, memory is not a story told from a distance. It is an event still trying to complete itself.

This shows that memory needs not only recording, but also integration. Experience has to be included somehow in the whole of life. It has to find a place. Not always as something good. Not always as something meaningful. Sometimes only as something that happened and does not have to keep happening again endlessly. Integration does not mean reconciliation with everything. It means, rather, that a memory can become part of a story instead of constantly tearing the present open. That the past can be the past, even if it still hurts.

This is one of the hardest tasks of the human system: to allow what was to remain important, but not all-powerful.

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We do not do this only through thought. Memory changes through the body, relationships, repetition, sleep, conversation, language, safety, new experiences. Sometimes through someone finally listening differently. Sometimes through a similar situation ending differently than it once did. Sometimes through a person saying out loud something that for years had been only tension. Sometimes through the body experiencing calm in a place that previously was associated with alarm. The system does not learn only through arguments. It learns through lived corrections.

That is why one good experience rarely frees an old memory immediately, although it may be a beginning. If for years the world taught you that closeness ends in pain, one good conversation may be beautiful, but the system may not yet believe it. If for years a mistake meant shame, one situation in which no one shamed you may not immediately change the whole map. Memory needs new repetitions. It needs evidence that another world was not an exception. It needs time to stop treating the past as the only available textbook for the future.

And yet this is possible. Not in the sense of complete erasure. Rather, in the sense of a transformed relationship. A memory may remain, but stop governing every similar moment. An old pain may remain true, but no longer have to define the whole person. What was once the center of the story can become one of its chapters. An important one, perhaps a painful one, but not the only one. A person does not have to stop remembering in order to be freer. Sometimes they have to remember differently.

And here we reach the core of this text: memory does not only store “what happened.” Memory co-creates the sense of “who I am.”

Not because we are only history. Body, temperament, relationships, current conditions, desires, and choices matter too. But without memory, there would be no axis around which continuity could be felt. It is memory that allows one to say: I was there, I lived through that, I changed, but my life is still mine. It gives the sense that today’s “I” did not come from nowhere. That it has roots, even if some of them hurt. That I am a process, but not chaos.

Memory is therefore a bridge between change and identity. If everything were stable, memory would not be so necessary. We would simply be the same object. If everything were completely changeable, memory would not be able to hold anything together. We would be a series of unconnected moments. But a human being is somewhere in between. They change, and at the same time recognize themselves. They lose and preserve. They rewrite meanings, but they do not begin from a blank page. They are continuous not because nothing in them moves, but because the changes are somehow connected.

This connection often takes the form of story. This is not yet about the great literature of one’s own life. It is about the ordinary sentences we carry within us: I always had to manage on my own, I was never enough, I managed to survive, I learned not to trust, only later did I understand, that changed me. Such sentences are like threads. They connect facts, emotions, and meanings. Sometimes they help maintain coherence. Sometimes they impoverish it. Sometimes they are needed for a while, and then they become too tight.

That is why the story about oneself is not innocent. The way we remember influences what we consider possible. If I remember myself mainly as someone who fails, it is harder for me to enter a new experience without fear. If I remember myself mainly as someone who must be strong, it is harder for me to accept help. If I remember myself mainly as someone who has been harmed, I may fail to notice areas of agency. If I remember myself only as the one who causes harm, I may not allow my own fragility. Memory does not only say what was. It suggests who I am allowed to be now.

And yet a human being is always a little larger than their own memory.

This, too, has to be said. Because memory is powerful, but it is not the whole person. There are new encounters, new gestures, new decisions, new ways of breathing in the world. There are moments that do not yet fit the old story. There are relationships that slowly show the organism other possibilities. There is the capacity to learn, even if sometimes very slowly. If memory were an absolute sentence, change would not be possible. And yet people change. Not magically. Not without cost. But really.

Perhaps this is precisely why memory should be treated with respect, but not with worship. It is not worth dismissing, because without it we will not understand the human being. But neither is it worth taking its first version as the final truth. A memory can be true and incomplete. It can be sincere and distorted. It can protect and limit at the same time. It can speak about what was, but also about what the system did not have the strength to see then. It can return not because it wants to destroy us, but because something in it still demands a place, language, or soothing.

In this sense, memory is one of the most human functions: imperfect, creative, painful, protective, and necessary. Thanks to it, we are not only a reaction to the current stimulus. We have a history. We recognize people, places, ourselves. We know what we feared, what we loved, what we regret, what we long for. But precisely because of it, we are also never entirely “here and now.” We always arrive with something. With a map. With weight. With learning. With a wound. With a rhythm. With an expectation. With something that has already been marked as important.

A person, then, does not live only in the world they see. They also live in the world they remember.

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And this remembered world constantly mixes with the present one. When we enter a new relationship, the memory of old relationships comes with us. When we try something new, the memory of old failures and successes sets the tension in the body. When someone touches us, looks at us, evaluates us, invites us, or leaves, memory suggests what this may mean. Sometimes well. Sometimes too quickly. Sometimes too sharply. Sometimes with great wisdom.

The point, then, is not to get rid of memory. The point is to see that it is working. That when you say “this is just how I am,” perhaps sometimes you are saying: this is how I have long remembered myself in similar situations. When you say “this is how it always ends,” perhaps sometimes you are saying: this is how it ended back then, when my system learned to predict pain. When you say “I don’t know how to do otherwise,” perhaps sometimes you are saying: my memory does not yet have enough experiences to build another road. These are not simple consolations. They are rather a way of recovering movement where definition pretends to be destiny.

And perhaps this is where memory meets hope.

Not naïve hope that everything can be forgotten. Not the brutal demand to “move on” without grief. Rather, a quieter hope that what was can be included in life differently. That one can be the same person, but not imprisoned in the same way. That the continuity of “I” does not have to mean repeating the same reaction. That history can be true and still not finished.

We might put it this way: memory is the process through which the organism preserves traces of experience and arranges them into a sense of continuity. It does not store the past as a dead record. Rather, it allows the past to participate in the present — sometimes as knowledge, sometimes as a wound, sometimes as protection, sometimes as weight, sometimes as a source of meaning. Thanks to memory, a person can say: all of this was my life.

But only language allows them to ask: what does this life mean?

Because memory can preserve images, tensions, smells, gestures, and scenes. It can bind time. It can give a sense of continuity. But in order for concepts, stories, categories, explanations, and sentences about oneself to arise from these traces, we need another layer. We need to name what has been lived.

And that is why the next step must be language.

The answer is simple, but enormous: the system learns.

Not only at school. Not only when someone explains rules to us, corrects an exercise, checks an assignment, or passes on knowledge. The organism learns all the time. It learns through touch, pain, relief, repetition, consequence, lack of consequence, presence, abandonment, rhythm, shame, safety, failure, success, a gaze, a tone, hunger, sleep, overload, and rest. It learns through what happened, but also through what did not happen, though it could have. Through help that came. Through help that did not come. Through danger that passed. Through danger that returned. Through thousands of tiny corrections, many of which will never be named as “learning,” and yet it is precisely they that gradually shape the way a person lives in the world.

Learning, then, is not an addition to life. It is one of the ways life attunes itself to the world.

This matters, because we very often think about learning too narrowly. We associate it with information, memory, evaluation, intelligence, school, a textbook. Someone does not know something, so they have to learn it. Someone cannot do something, so they have to practice. Someone has forgotten, so they have to repeat. But at a deeper level, learning is something much more basic. It is a change in the system under the influence of experience. It means that after passing through something, the organism is no longer exactly the same as it was before. Sometimes this change is small, almost invisible. Sometimes it lasts a moment. Sometimes a whole lifetime. But it happens constantly.

When you touch hot metal, the body learns faster than words. When someone responds with tenderness to your helplessness, the system may remember that exposing yourself does not always end in humiliation. When you are laughed at once again for making a mistake, the system may learn that trying is dangerous. When you practice a movement thousands of times, it begins to pass through the body with less and less effort. When you live in tension for years, tension may become the default setting of the world. When you experience predictable care for a long time, trust may become easier than suspicion.

This is what plasticity means. Not that a person is endlessly malleable. Not that they can be shaped into anything if only they try hard enough. Plasticity is not a magical promise of infinite change. It is rather the capacity of a living system to reorganize itself under the influence of what happens to it and what repeats. The organism is not a stone, but neither is it shapeless water. It is something in between: a structure that can change, but changes under certain conditions, at a certain cost, and within certain limits.

This is very important, because the language of “change” can be cruel. We often say: just learn differently, stop reacting like that, change the habit, trust, let go, don’t be afraid. As if the system could be reset by a single conscious command. But if a reaction was formed through thousands of repetitions, through years of experience, or through situations of great emotional force, it will not disappear simply because someone decides it is irrational. The system does not learn only through arguments. It learns through experience.

And that is why unlearning also requires experience.

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A person who has learned that closeness ends in pain may intellectually know that not every relationship is like that. But their body may still respond with distance, control, or escape. Someone who has learned that a mistake means shame may understand that mistakes are part of learning, and still freeze at every evaluation. Someone who has learned that they must earn other people’s presence may hear the words “you don’t have to prove anything,” but not yet have a place inside that knows how to believe them. New information is not enough. It still has to become a new experience.

Learning is therefore an embodied process. It does not take place only in the head. It changes breath, muscle tension, readiness for movement, the threshold of alarm, the way one looks, the range of attention, the availability of words, the imagination of the future. When you learn to ride a bicycle, you do not merely store instructions. The whole system of balance, vision, movement, and prediction begins to work differently. When you learn to talk without attacking, it is not only a sentence in the head that changes. What changes is the tolerance of tension, the rhythm of response, the ability to pause, the sense that conflict does not have to mean catastrophe right away. When you learn to rest, the body has to gradually discover that inactivity is not a threat.

That is why many of the most important things in life are not simply “understood.” They are practiced by the system.

Trust is practiced. Boundaries are practiced. Rest is practiced. Closeness is practiced. Courage is practiced. Honesty is practiced. The ability to endure uncertainty is practiced. Not in the sense of artificial character training, but in the sense of repeated experiences that show the organism: this can be survived, this is possible, this does not always end the way it used to.

A single revelation is rarely enough. It may be important, it may open a door, it may name something that had remained nameless for years. But the system usually needs repetitions. It needs time. It needs to test the new possibility in different situations. It needs to see that it was not an exception. If someone responds well to your honesty once, that may move something deeply. But if honesty was punished for years, the system may still wait for proof that this time things are truly different. Not because it is stubborn. Because its task is to protect continuity and safety.

In this sense, old reactions are often former forms of learning. What looks like a problem today may once have been a solution. Avoidance may have protected against overload. Control may have provided a minimum of predictability. Freezing may have been the only way to survive a situation with no way out. Perfectionism may have reduced the risk of humiliation. Pleasing others may have protected against rejection. Distrust may have been wisdom in an environment where trust was dangerous. The system learned what made sense under those conditions.

The problem begins when old learning governs a new world.

When the organism reacts to today’s conversation as if it were still in the old family. When it responds to a calm remark as if humiliation were about to come. When it treats closeness as a trap because closeness was once unpredictable. When it reads rest as guilt because value once depended on usefulness. When silence sounds like abandonment because once it really was. The system is not stupid. It is simply using a map it once had to build.

Learning creates maps. Plasticity allows them to change. But no map disappears simply because a new road appears.

The new road has to be walked. This sentence is very important. We can speak about changing beliefs, therapy, education, development, spirituality, relationships, but very often the core is similar: the system needs to pass through a new experience enough times for it to begin competing with the old prediction. It is not enough to say: I am safe. Sometimes one has to experience hundreds of times that the body can relax and nothing bad happens. It is not enough to say: I can ask. Sometimes one has to ask many times and live through the response. It is not enough to say: a mistake will not destroy me. One has to make a mistake and see that life continues.

Action is one of the most important ways of learning. Not because action is always easy or possible, but because only in action does the system receive a kind of proof that thinking cannot fully replace. You can imagine a conversation for a long time, but the conversation truly changes the arrangement only when it happens. You can know that a walk helps, but the body learns this differently when it comes back from fifteen minutes of air. You can understand that a boundary is necessary, but the system learns it only when you say “no” and live through the consequences. You can read about trust, but trust grows through encounters.

This connects this text with the previous one. If the world is a field of possible action, then learning is the process through which the system discovers which actions are possible, what effects they have, and whether they are worth repeating. Every experience calibrates the field a little. Something becomes easier. Something becomes harder. Something begins to shine as available. Something goes dim. Something is marked as dangerous. Something as safe. Something as “for me.” Something as “not for me.”

But learning is not only the strengthening of simple associations. A human being is not a machine that receives reward or punishment and automatically updates a table of behaviors. Of course, consequences matter. Relief reinforces. Pain teaches. Repetition creates pathways. But human learning is also connected with meaning, relationship, story, with whether we understand what happened. With whether someone was there. With whether we had agency. With whether the experience was integrated into the whole of life, or remained a foreign fragment that returns like an alarm.

That is why two similar events can teach entirely different things. Failure in a safe environment may teach humility, patience, and correction. Failure in an environment full of humiliation may teach hiding. Criticism from someone kind may help develop a skill. Criticism from someone contemptuous may teach fear of visibility. Chosen solitude may teach rest. Imposed solitude may teach that no one will come. Pain in the context of care may be difficult, but possible to pass through. Pain without meaning and without support may become a wound that organizes the future.

The system learns not only events. It learns the context of events.

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This is crucial. Not only “what happened?” but: with whom, where, could I do anything, did anyone respond, was I helpless, did it repeat, was I given language, could my body calm down, did someone recognize my experience as real? All of this determines what trace remains. The same word can teach closeness or shame. The same touch can teach safety or threat. The same change can teach flexibility or chaos.

Learning is always situated. That is why the environment matters so deeply. We do not learn in a vacuum. We learn in families, schools, cities, languages, social classes, cultures, technologies, rhythms of work, systems of reward and punishment. We learn what it is worth noticing. What is better left unsaid. How quickly one must respond. Whether rest is allowed. Whether a mistake is information or disgrace. Whether the body is something to be listened to, or something to be forced. Whether emotion is a signal or an obstacle. Whether another person is a resource or a threat.

In this sense, a human being is a history of learning. Not only a history of events, but a history of system updates. A history of what became easy, difficult, automatic, impossible, desired, repulsive, safe, forbidden, obvious. Sometimes the question “why am I like this?” can be translated into something more precise: what has my system learned about the world? What predictions have been written into me? What possibilities have gone dim? What reactions were rewarded? Which were punished? What did I have to repeat for so long that it began to look like character?

This last point is especially important, because many things we call personality may partly be histories of learning so deeply embedded that they look like nature. Someone says: I am just closed off, but perhaps for years they learned that openness costs too much. Someone says: I am lazy, but perhaps their system learned helplessness after many attempts without influence. Someone says: I am controlling, but perhaps control was the only way to feel a piece of ground in a chaotic world. Someone says: I don’t know how to be close, but perhaps closeness was never safe enough to become a skill.

This is not about explaining everything through the past and taking responsibility away from the person. It is about seeing that responsibility does not begin with contempt toward one’s own reactions. It begins with understanding what the system has learned and what it may need in order to learn differently. If an old reaction was once a form of adaptation, it is not enough to condemn it. Conditions must be created in which it stops being the only available road. Then change is not a war against oneself. It is an expansion of the repertoire.

This fits very well with the notion of plasticity. Plasticity does not say: you can be anyone, immediately. Rather, it says: the system can reorganize itself through new experiences, repetitions, corrections, and relationships. It can strengthen certain pathways, weaken others, create new connections, learn new predictions. But it needs material. It needs conditions. It needs time. It needs energy. It needs sleep, body, safety, attention, practice. It does not change in a vacuum.

And here the body returns. Because plasticity is biological. Every learning process has its bodily cost. The brain and nervous system are not a mist of meanings, but living tissue. Change requires metabolism, rest, regulation, repetition. That is why an overloaded person learns differently from a safe person. Stress can sometimes sharpen attention and accelerate the memory of threat, but chronic overload narrows the field of learning. When the organism is fighting for survival, curiosity, experimentation, and flexibility become harder. A system in alarm learns, above all, alarm.

This sentence is also important: a system in alarm learns alarm.

If you live for a long time in an environment that demands constant readiness, your organism does not only “have stress.” It is training. It trains vigilance. It trains scanning. It trains the quick reading of tone, face, and tension. It trains postponing needs. It trains difficulty falling asleep. It trains living without a full breath. Later, when conditions change, the body may still operate according to the old training. Not because it wants to suffer. Because it has truly learned.

But another kind of learning is also possible. A system in safety learns safety. In a repeated relationship, it learns predictability. In contact without shaming, it learns to speak. In a space where mistakes are allowed, it learns to try. In a rhythm of rest, it learns that it does not have to fight constantly. In good effort, it learns agency. In a boundary that does not destroy the relationship, it learns that “no” does not have to mean the end of the bond. In a conflict that gets repaired, it learns that tension does not have to mean catastrophe.

These are very concrete lessons. Not spectacular, not always visible from the outside. Sometimes as small as one calmer sentence, one breath before answering, one step outside the house, one conversation without escape, one “no” without collapse, one request without shame. But it is precisely from such small repetitions that the system builds new predictions. Great changes very often begin with small corrections repeated enough times for the body to begin believing them.

Here something very important appears: learning requires error. Not in the sense of moral failure, but in the sense of a difference between prediction and what actually happened. The system updates when the world does not entirely confirm the old map. I expected rejection, and someone stayed. I expected catastrophe, and there was difficulty, but it could be survived. I expected shame, and I received correction without humiliation. I expected that I would not manage, and I took one small step. Such moments matter because they show the system: the old map does not describe everything.

But for error to teach, it has to be survivable. If the difference between expectation and reality is too violent, the system may close down. If someone has feared closeness their whole life, throwing them immediately into a very intense relationship does not have to teach safety. It may only confirm alarm. If someone fears mistakes, public shaming will not teach courage. It will teach avoidance. If someone is overloaded, too great a change may not widen the world, but narrow it even further. Good learning often requires gradation. A movement new enough to change something, but not so large that the system has to defend itself.

This is visible in every practice. In rehabilitation, education, therapy, training, relationships, parenting, art. Too little challenge — the system does not have to change. Too much challenge — the system enters defense. Between these extremes there is a space in which development is possible. Not always comfortable, often a little difficult. But still bearable. It is there that the organism can say: I do not know this, but perhaps I can try. It is there that learning appears as a living process, not as violence against the system.

That is why patience is not a luxury of development. It is its condition.

Not everything can be accelerated without cost. You can force a person into a behavior. It is harder to force a system to integrate an experience. You can push someone into a situation, but you cannot order their nervous system to recognize it as safe. You can speak a true sentence, but you cannot make it become body immediately. Learning has its own rhythm, because the organism must not only hear what is new, but also find a place for it.

Here we begin to understand why memory is the next necessary topic. If experience reorganizes the system, then something from experience must remain. Not only as a story. As a trace. As a facilitation or an obstacle. As readiness. As prediction. As a changed threshold of reaction. As a new possibility. As an old caution. Learning without memory would make no sense. Every situation would be the first. Every danger would have to be discovered anew. Every closeness would have no history. Every skill would fall apart after being performed.

Memory, then, is not only a storehouse of what was. It is the condition for learning to have continuity at all.

But before we move on to memory, one more thing has to be completed: learning is not always good. The fact that the system learns does not mean that it learns truth in its pure form. It learns what was adaptive, repeatable, strong, emotionally significant, or necessary in a given environment. One can learn trust. One can learn fear. One can learn language. One can learn silence. One can learn agency. One can learn helplessness. One can learn rest. One can learn to ignore the body. One can learn to love, and one can learn to protect oneself from love.

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This is both dramatic and beautiful. Dramatic, because it shows that a person can be shaped by conditions they did not choose. Beautiful, because it shows that the system is not dead. It can receive new experiences. It can update the map. It can recover movement that was once unavailable. It can learn the world differently, although often more slowly than we would like. A person is not condemned to the first version of their reactions, but neither are they obliged to change immediately just because someone already understands the problem.

We might put it this way: learning is the process through which experience leaves a trace in the system and changes its future possibilities. Plasticity is this system’s capacity for reorganization: sometimes through repetition, sometimes through prediction error, sometimes through relationship, sometimes through practice, sometimes through safety, sometimes through necessity. Thanks to it, a human being is not only what happened to them, but also what their organism learned from what happened to them.

And now we can ask the question that leads us further.

What exactly remains after experience?

If the world appears as a field of possible action, and the organism learns through what it tries, what it avoids, and what happens to it, then there must be some way of binding these traces together. Something must maintain continuity between past pain and today’s caution, between past relief and today’s longing, between a thousand repetitions and a skill that today seems natural.

That way is memory. Not as a dead archive, but as a living trace of learning. Not only as a recollection that can be told, but as a changed system that sees differently, reacts differently, and predicts differently. That is why the next text must move toward memory — toward how continuity arises out of experiences, and how, from that continuity, a sense of being the same person begins to emerge.

But a living organism rarely works this way.

For the organism, the world is not, from the beginning, merely an image. It is a field of possible action. You do not see a chair only as an object of a certain shape, color, and position. You see something one can sit on, something one can move, something one can lean against, something that may get in the way or offer rest. You do not see a door only as a rectangle in a wall. You see a passage, a closure, a possibility of leaving, a boundary, an invitation, or a blockage. You do not see a cup only as an object. You see something to grasp, lift, fill, warm your hands around, or hand to someone else. You do not see a face only as an arrangement of muscles. You see a possible conversation, judgment, closeness, threat, indifference, question, agreement, or refusal.

The world appears before us as “something-to.” Something to grasp. Something to avoid. Something to eat. Something to escape. Something to say. Something to repair. Something to hide. Something to accept. Something to leave. Something to defend. Something to investigate. Something to love. Something to mourn. Perhaps this sounds strange only because we are used to thinking of the world as a collection of things to which we later assign functions. A thing first “is,” and only afterward turns out to be useful, dangerous, beautiful, uncomfortable, or indifferent. But for an organism living in time, need, and risk, function is not an addition. Very often, it is the first way in which a thing is recognized at all.

We do not first calmly ask: what are the objective properties of this physical arrangement? We ask faster, more quietly, with the whole body: what does this make possible for me? What does it do to me? Can I pass through it? Can I stand on it? Will it hold me? Does it threaten me? Does it call to me? Can I ignore it?

This is where the concept of affordance appears.

Put most simply, an affordance is a possibility for action that emerges in the relationship between an organism and its environment. It is not simply a feature of the thing in itself, and it is not merely an invention of the mind. It arises in between. A step has one affordance for an adult, another for a small child, another for someone after an injury, another for a cat, and another for someone carrying a heavy suitcase. The same wall may be an obstacle, a support, a shield, a place to climb, or a boundary that cannot be crossed. The same stone may be something to kick, something to throw, something to sit on, something to trip over, or something completely irrelevant.

The environment, then, is not a neutral stage, and the organism is not a neutral spectator. Together, they form a system.

This fits very well with everything we have been building so far. We said that a human being is a system, not a thing. That the body is a process, not a casing. That the nervous system does not record the world like a camera, but selects signals and prepares responses. That perception is not a recording, but a construction. Now we need to add this: from the beginning, this construction has a practical direction. The world is assembled not only so that it can be “understood,” but so that one can position oneself toward it in some way.

Because life requires positioning.

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One has to approach or move away. Grasp or let go. Stay or leave. Answer or remain silent. Sit, walk, eat, flee, embrace, sleep, hide, ask, refuse, wait. Every organism, even a very simple one, must relate to its environment somehow. It is not enough that it “knows” something. It has to act, or at least be ready to act. In this sense, perception without the possibility of action would be incomplete for life. An image of the world with which nothing can be done would be a luxury evolution could rarely afford.

That is why seeing is connected with movement from the very beginning. When you look at a cup, the hand almost knows how it might wrap around it. When you see a narrow passage, the body assesses whether it will fit. When you approach the edge of a platform, your legs, stomach, and balance know something before you put it into words. When someone makes a sudden movement toward you, the body may pull back before you manage to say: I was frightened. The world is full of small invitations and warnings that do not first have to pass through calm reflection.

This does not mean that a human being is only a collection of reflexes. Rather, it means that reflection grows out of a much older layer of orientation. First, the world has to become available as something one can respond to. Only later can it become the object of longer reflection, story, philosophy, or theory. A child does not begin with the definition of a table. First, the child learns that one can hide under it, lean against it, hit oneself on its edge, receive food from it, climb onto it, be scolded for climbing onto it. The meaning of things is born in use, touch, prohibition, pain, pleasure, repetition, and relationship.

In this sense, the world is, from the beginning, a world of possibilities. But not all possibilities are visible to everyone.

This is very important. An affordance depends not only on the object, but also on the organism’s abilities, state, history, and situation. A ladder may offer ascent to someone who has strength and physical ability, but to someone with vertigo it may offer, above all, danger. A crowded room may offer conversation to one person, exposure and judgment to another, and the chance to disappear into the crowd to a third. An empty hour in the calendar may be rest for one person, and fear of idleness for another. A message from someone close may be an invitation, an obligation, a promise of closeness, or the beginning of tension.

This is not arbitrariness. It is relationality.

The world does not magically change simply because someone looks at it. A chair still has structure, height, stability, and weight. But what the chair makes possible depends on the body, goal, situation, and history of the person using it. The same applies in relationships. Someone’s silence is objectively an absence of words, but for a particular person it may open different possible actions: ask, withdraw, attack, wait, apologize, pretend indifference, freeze. Silence, then, is not merely “given.” It is read as a certain arrangement of possible movements.

Sometimes this is what most determines our experience: not what is, but what seems possible.

A person in depression often does not live only in a sad world. They live in a world that has lost its affordances. Things stop calling. The bed is no longer only a place of rest, but a place of being stuck. The phone is not a tool of contact, but a burden. A walk is not a possibility of breathing, but an effort beyond one’s strength. The future is not a space of possible movements, but a wall. From the outside, someone may say: but you can get up, call, go out, try. But from the inside, these possibilities are not simply available. They do not light up as possible. They have no handle.

The same can be seen in anxiety. The world does not so much disappear as change its arrangement of affordances. A door becomes an escape route. Another person’s face becomes a possible judgment. The phone becomes a source of bad news. One’s own body becomes something that has to be monitored. Public space becomes a field of risk. Anxiety organizes the world as a set of things that have to be predicted, checked, avoided, or controlled. Not because a person is “making up” the world, but because their system positions the environment in terms of safety.

A sense of safety, by contrast, expands the world. When the organism does not have to look for danger all the time, more possible actions appear. One can ask instead of immediately defending oneself. One can try instead of instantly withdrawing. One can rest without guilt. One can make a mistake and not fall apart. One can talk with someone without treating every tone as a test. One can see in a room not only obstacles, but also places, directions, tools, chances. Safety, then, is not only a pleasant state. It is a condition for a richer perception of possibility.

This is both very practical and very deep, because if the world is for us a field of action, suffering can sometimes be understood as a narrowing of that field. I do not see a way out. I do not see meaning. I do not see what I can do. I do not see where I can lean. I do not see whom I can trust. I do not see how to begin. This does not always mean that no possibility exists. Sometimes it means that the system is not able to grasp it as available. There is an enormous difference between “a possibility exists objectively” and “a possibility is lived as possible.”

A person does not act according to a map of objective options. A person acts according to the world that appears to them as possible.

That is why good support often does not consist in giving advice such as: do this. To someone on the outside, a given path may seem obvious. To the system on the inside, it may be invisible, too costly, or threatening. Sometimes one must first reduce tension, offer companionship, divide the movement into a smaller step, create conditions in which something begins to look not like a wall, but like a passage. Only then does a real affordance appear: something that can actually be done, not only theoretically.

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This also applies to learning and development. When you learn to play an instrument, at first you see keys, strings, fingers, instructions, mistakes. Over time, the instrument begins to offer different things. This arrangement of sounds becomes a path. This movement of the hand becomes a possibility. What was previously chaos begins to become a field of action. It is similar with driving a car. A beginner driver sees too many separate elements: mirror, clutch, lane, sign, pedestrian, lights. An experienced driver sees the traffic situation as an arrangement of possible movements: I can enter, I need to slow down, that person may turn, space has to be left here.

Skill changes the world. Not metaphorically, but practically. What you cannot do often does not exist for you as a possibility. Someone who cannot swim sees water differently from a swimmer. Someone who does not know the language sees a city differently from someone who can ask, read, answer, joke. Someone who has learned to talk about emotions sees conflict differently from someone who knows only attack or withdrawal. Competence, then, is not only something “inside a person.” It transforms the landscape of the possible world.

It is worth pausing here, because affordances show something important about the relationship between human beings and the world. We are immersed in the environment not only as knowing beings, but as beings capable or incapable of certain movements. My body, my experience, my fear, my skills, my social class, my health, my relationships, my tools — all of this influences what possibilities the world opens before me. The same space is not the same world for everyone.

Stairs are different for a wheelchair user. An office is different for someone who knows formal language and for someone who fears it. School is different for a child who feels safe and for a child who has learned to expect humiliation. The internet is different for someone with access to knowledge and support, and different for someone pulled in by algorithms of fear, comparison, and anger. The city is different for a strong, young, healthy body, and different for a body that is tired, ill, old, or threatened.

This is not about saying that everyone lives in a completely separate reality. It is about recognizing that reality is always lived through an arrangement of possibilities. And here a very important social dimension begins, although we do not yet have to enter it deeply. It is enough to notice that society also designs affordances. A bench may invite rest or deliberately prevent sleeping. A form may allow someone to ask for help, or complicate the process so much that help becomes inaccessible. A workspace may offer focus or constant distraction. A relationship may offer honesty or only caution. A family may offer return, or only tension. Language may offer a way to name oneself, or force silence.

In this sense, possibilities for action are not only a matter of individual psychology. They are also built into the environment. This matters, because otherwise it becomes very easy to moralize. Someone does not do something, so we say: they do not want to. They are not trying. They have no discipline. They are not taking the opportunity. But sometimes it would be more accurate to ask: is this possibility really available to them? Do they have the body, resources, safety, knowledge, support, history, and conditions to see it as a possibility? Does the world really give them a handle, or does it only look from a distance as if it does?

Affordances teach humility toward simple advice. Because “you can” does not always mean the same thing. You can theoretically. You can legally. You can physically. You can emotionally. You can socially. You can without losing safety. You can without paying a price no one outside can see. You can today, but not yesterday. You can with someone, but not alone. You can after rest, but not in overload. You can if someone shows the first step. You can if the world stops being only a wall.

This is not an excuse for passivity. It is a more accurate description of action. A person acts where their system finds a possible movement. Sometimes that movement is very small: writing one sentence, getting out of bed, saying “I don’t know,” asking, going out for five minutes, not responding with aggression, noticing one’s breath, admitting fatigue. From the outside, it may look banal. From the inside, it may be an enormous change in the landscape, because where previously there had been no passage at all, a crack has appeared.

It is also worth seeing that affordances do not concern only physical things. Words have affordances. One sentence can open a conversation; another can close it. “Tell me more” offers a different world than “don’t exaggerate.” “You are allowed to make a mistake” offers a different world than “you did it again.” “I am here” offers a different world than “deal with it.” In relationships, we often respond not only to the content of a statement, but to what movements become possible after it. Can I tell the truth? Do I have to defend myself? Can I cry? Do I have to pretend? Can I stay? Should I disappear?

The same applies to gaze, tone, silence, the rhythm of the body. Communication is full of affordances. Sometimes someone gives the possibility of closeness with a single gesture. Sometimes someone removes the possibility of honesty with a single tone. Sometimes silence is space, and sometimes it is punishment. Sometimes a question is an invitation, and sometimes it is an interrogation. A person very often knows this before they can name it. The body senses whether, in a given arrangement, one can relax or has to be careful. Whether the relationship offers safety, or only an exchange of arguments.

Here we can see how affordances prepare the later texts on emotions and relationships. Emotions will speak about value and safety. Relationships will speak about co-regulation and mutual influence. But already here we see the first version of this problem: the world is not only in front of us. The world offers us something or refuses us something. Some arrangements give life more movement. Others narrow it. Some places, people, and languages expand the field of the possible. Others reduce it to defense.

And now we can return to perception.

If perception is a construction, then it is not only about the construction of an image. It is about the construction of a field of action. The organism does not build the world in order to have an accurate photograph. It builds a world in which something can be done: survive, find food, avoid harm, maintain a bond, rest, learn, predict, choose. That is why perception, action, and meaning are intertwined from the beginning. To see something is often already to be positioned toward it. Not always consciously. Not always accurately. But really.

We might therefore say that a person does not first look at the world and only then decide whether to do something with it. Very often, a person sees the world already through the prism of possible movements. What is graspable, near, threatening, available, forbidden, promising, too difficult, too costly, or worth the effort appears in experience as such before a full sentence has even formed.

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That is why changing life sometimes requires changing affordances, not only beliefs. If you want a person to rest, rest has to become genuinely available, not merely morally recommended. If you want a child to learn, the world has to offer curiosity, safety, and the possibility of trying, not only evaluation. If you want someone to tell the truth, the relationship has to offer room for truth. If you want someone to come out of isolation, contact has to become something more than a risk of humiliation. If you want the system to make a new movement, that movement has to find some support in the world.

Sometimes that support is an object. Sometimes a rhythm. Sometimes a person. Sometimes a sentence. Sometimes a space. Sometimes repetition. Sometimes one small proof that another way is also possible. Development, then, does not only mean that a person “inside” understands something. It also means that their world begins to offer new possibilities, and that their system begins to be able to notice and use them. Sometimes the body changes first. Sometimes the environment. Sometimes the relationship. Sometimes language. Sometimes skill. Sometimes everything at once, very slowly.

And when a new possibility is noticed and enacted, something in the system may change. Because action is not only the result of cognition. Action teaches cognition. Once you pass through something that previously looked like a wall, the world is no longer exactly the same. When you tell the truth and the relationship does not fall apart, honesty may become a little more possible. When you rest and nothing terrible happens, rest may stop being only guilt. When you make a mistake and are accepted, a mistake may slowly lose the status of catastrophe. When you ask for help and someone responds, the social world begins to offer a different movement.

And this is where learning begins.

Not as a school activity. Not as the memorization of information. But as a restructuring of what the organism recognizes as possible, safe, threatening, reachable, worth trying. Experience does not merely add itself to history. It calibrates the system. It changes the map of handles. It shows what can be touched, where one can stand, whom one can trust, how far one can go, what must be avoided, what can be survived.

This text, then, completes the step after perception. The world is not only constructed as an image. It is constructed as a field of possible action. Only now will the question of memory become fuller, because before we ask what remains after experience, we have to understand that experience is not only what we saw. It is also what we did, what we could not do, what we tried, what we avoided, what turned out to be possible, and what remained closed.

We might put it this way: a human being lives not only in a world of things and not only in a world of meanings. A human being lives in a world of possibilities. And their system is constantly asking: what can be done here, what must be done, what must not be done, what is not yet possible but may one day become so?

And that is why the next step must be learning.

Because if the world appears as a field of possible action, then the whole of life becomes a process of learning that field: its boundaries, passages, dangers, supports, shortcuts, false promises, and new roads.

What kind of figures should actually stand on this board?

At first, this may sound like a purely mechanical problem. A strategy game needs pieces. Pieces need movement. Movement needs limits. Limits create tactics. But I did not want the pieces to appear only as abstract functions with decorative names attached at the end.

The game already had a certain direction. It was built around a hexagonal board, a central Throne, and a Knyaz trying to turn a position into a claim. The board was not designed only for a two-sided duel, but also for three, four, and six-sided conflicts. That meant the figures had to work in several different densities and political situations: direct confrontation, triangular pressure, team play, unstable fronts, and full multi-sided rivalry.

So the pieces had to do several things at once.

They had to be readable.
They had to be tactically distinct.
They had to carry some cultural weight.
They had to leave enough space for movement.
And they had to feel like a group, not a random list of fantasy classes.

The image that helped me most was the warband.

Not a modern army. Not a fully formed kingdom. Not a bureaucratic military structure. More like a compact group gathered around a leader: fighters, shield-bearers, archers, raiders, and one figure whose claim gives the whole formation its purpose.

In Slavic contexts, the word druzhina is often used for a retinue or warband in the service of a chieftain or knyaz. The historical reality changed across time and region, but as a design image it was useful: a group close enough to feel personal, organized enough to fight, but not yet absorbed into the machinery of a fully developed state.

That was the scale I wanted.

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Between the Hunt and the Battlefield

Before the current set of pieces took shape, I considered a different direction: the hunt.

That idea had some strength. Before crowns, thrones, and formal claims of rule, there is the group moving together through the world. A hunting party already contains roles. Someone tracks. Someone waits. Someone drives the animal forward. Someone gives a signal, maybe with a horn. Someone strikes at the right moment.

There is coordination, tension, risk, and shared purpose.

For a while, this felt close to what I wanted. The center of the board could have been prey, treasure, a sacred animal, or some kind of prize. The group would not be fighting for a Throne, but pursuing something older and more immediate.

But the more I thought about it, the more that image felt too small for this game.

The hunt gave me movement and teamwork, but not enough symbolic pressure. It was practical, maybe even more fundamental to human life than the idea of a crown, but it did not create the same sense of ambition, visibility, danger, and transformation.

The game needed something between survival and sovereignty.

That is why the hunting party gradually turned into a warband. The traces of the hunt are still there: pursuit, spacing, timing, surrounding, reading the field. But those skills are now redirected toward human rivalry. The animal in the center becomes a Throne. The prize becomes authority. The group becomes political.

This shift also helped me avoid making the pieces too literal.

I did not want a “horn-blower” piece just because someone might have used a horn. I did not want a “beater” or “driver” piece just because hunting parties can include such roles. Those figures might be historically or anthropologically interesting, but on the board they risked becoming too narrow. They belonged more to a scene than to a system.

The figures had to be broader than that.

They had to express roles that could survive abstraction.

History, Pop Culture, and the Problem of Weapons

Another problem was weapons.

If this game were trying to be strictly historical, the sword would not automatically be the obvious weapon of the ordinary fighter. In many early medieval contexts, weapons such as spears, axes, bows, knives, and shields were central to practical warfare. Swords existed, of course, but they carried cost, prestige, and status in ways that make them different from the generic “default weapon” often seen in modern fantasy.

At the same time, modern players bring their own visual expectations. For many people, the word “warrior” immediately calls up the image of a sword. It may not be historically balanced, but it is culturally readable.

The spear creates an even more interesting problem.

On one hand, it is one of the most practical and common weapons across human history. It is simple in principle, efficient, and widely usable. On the other hand, the spear can also become highly symbolic. It can be associated with status, command, ritual, or elevated meaning. Recent finds from Lake Lednica in Poland, for example, include early medieval spearheads, one of them richly decorated and interpreted by archaeologists as possibly connected to elite status, ritual, or power; the same site has yielded far more axes and spearheads than swords.

This creates a useful design lesson: historical accuracy does not translate directly into good game identity.

A piece cannot simply be “the spear” because the spear can mean too many things. It can be ordinary and elite. Practical and symbolic. Infantry weapon and sign of authority. If treated too literally, it becomes unclear what role it should play.

So the question had to change.

Not: which weapon was most historically correct?
But: what kind of role does the game need, and what image makes that role understandable?

That is why the final pieces are not equipment cards. They are tactical identities.

How Many Roles Can the Board Carry?

The number of pieces also had to come from the board itself.

The board is large enough to create meaningful movement, but not so large that each side can simply expand without consequence. It has to support different forms of play: a direct duel, three-sided pressure, four-sided confrontation, and potentially six competing forces on the same field. That creates a very practical design problem.

A set that feels rich in a two-player game can become overcrowded when multiplied by six.
A set that feels open with six players can feel empty or underdeveloped in a duel.

So before deciding the exact number of pieces, I had to think about something more basic: how many roles the game actually needs.

There cannot be too many. If every player brings a large formation onto the board, the game quickly loses air. Pieces stop moving freely. Lines close too early. The center becomes congested before meaningful decisions have time to develop. At that point, the game risks becoming less about strategy and more about traffic.

But there also cannot be too few. If the warband is too small or too uniform, then every piece starts to solve the same problem. The game becomes flatter. The player no longer has to think in terms of protection, pressure, distance, breakthrough, or sacrifice. Everything becomes merely “a piece that moves and captures.”

That would miss the point.

Neither an army nor a society works as a group of identical functions. Even a small band needs differentiation. Someone leads. Someone protects. Someone holds the line. Someone strikes quickly. Someone controls distance. Someone creates the exceptional moment of breakthrough.

This was the real design question:

Not how many pieces can I add, but how many distinct responsibilities the board can meaningfully support.

The answer had to be limited, but broad enough to create contrast.

The warband needs a central figure, because the game is built around claim and survival.
It needs common bodies, because power requires protection and presence.
It needs contact fighters, because the center must be contested directly.
It needs faster raiding pieces, because the board should allow sudden pressure and line-breaking.
It needs ranged control, because open space should matter.
And it needs one more prestigious or exceptional role, because not every act of force should feel ordinary.

This is where the set of figures begins to emerge.

Not yet as exact numbers.
Not yet as final movement rules.
But as a spectrum of roles.

The point is to create enough difference that each figure has a reason to exist, while keeping the group small enough that the board can still breathe. The pieces should not overwhelm the hexagon. They should activate it.

The count, eventually, will be a matter of balance.
But the roles come first.

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The Knyaz: The Claim

(Kniaź / Knez / Chieftain / Pretendent / Leader)

The Knyaz is the most important figure in the game, but not the strongest fighter.

This was essential from the beginning. If the leader were also the most powerful combat piece, the whole design would become too simple. The player would just push the strongest figure toward the center and use force to justify authority.

Instead, the Knyaz is slow, exposed, and dependent on the group around him.

He matters because he is the one who can claim the Throne. The first among the equals that choose him. He turns movement into ambition. He gives the warband its direction. Without him, the other pieces are only a force. With him, they become a claim.

This makes the Knyaz a political piece more than a combat piece.

He is necessary, but vulnerable.
Prestigious, but not self-sufficient.
Central, but unable to reach the center safely without support.

That is the first principle of the set: the most important piece should need the others.

The Footman / Shield-Bearer: The Body

(Piechur / Tarczownik)

The Footman is the most numerous piece because every claim needs bodies around it.

He is simple by design. He moves slowly, fights directly, blocks space, and protects more valuable figures. His strength does not come from individual brilliance. It comes from presence.

This is why I often think of him as a Shield-Bearer.

The shield gives the piece a clear visual and tactical identity. It stands between danger and value. It protects against distance. It makes the board harder to pass through. It reminds the player that power does not survive only because someone claims it. It survives because others stand around it.

The Footman is not glamorous, but he is structurally important.

He holds space.
He blocks shots.
He protects the Knyaz.
He slows down enemy pressure.
He gives the warband mass.

In many games, the simplest piece is treated as disposable. Here, I want the player to feel that the Footman is basic, but not meaningless.

The Warrior: Contact

(Woj / Wojownik / Miecznik / Drużynnik / Zbrojny)

The Warrior is the main fighting piece.

If the Footman holds space, the Warrior contests it. He is the figure that enters the crowded center and makes direct contact dangerous. He should be easy to understand: a reliable combat unit, flexible enough to maneuver in tight formations, but not filled with special exceptions.

This piece exists because the game needs a stable contact fighter.

Not every piece can be strange. Not every piece can be elite. Some part of the warband has to carry the ordinary work of fighting: removing threats, protecting the center, opening space, and punishing overextension.

The Warrior is not necessarily the most historically literal figure. He may suggest the sword-bearing fighter in modern imagination, but his real function is broader than that. He is the close-combat core of the warband.

He represents pressure.

The Skirmisher: The Raid

(Harcownik / Siekiernik / Topornik / Rajdowiec )

The Skirmisher exists to create a different rhythm.

Where the Warrior bends and adapts in the center, the Skirmisher commits to a line. He is faster, sharper, and less stable. His identity comes from the raid: sudden movement, a clean path, a strike through an opening.

This piece keeps something of the hunting instinct inside the warband.

He reads the line.
He uses timing.
He punishes exposure.
He does not fight like the Warrior.

This distinction is important. The Warrior and Skirmisher may both be combat pieces, but they should not ask the same question.

The Warrior asks: how do I fight inside the crowd?
The Skirmisher asks: where is the line I can break?

That gives the set more texture. The player is not choosing between stronger and weaker versions of the same idea. The player is choosing between different geometries of aggression.

The Archer: Distance

(Strzelec / Łucznik)

The Archer changes how the board feels.

Without ranged pressure, danger is mostly local. You fear what stands next to you, or what can reach you in the next move. With the Archer, open space becomes meaningful. A clear line is no longer empty. It is a threat waiting to happen.

The Archer should not dominate the game, but he should make players cautious.

He controls distance.
He punishes careless placement.
He makes shields matter.
He forces players to think about lines, not only clusters.

This is also why his power must be conditional. If every shot were easy, the Archer would become oppressive. He needs a clean line. He needs protection. He should be dangerous when placed well and limited when the board closes around him.

The Archer gives the game a second layer of pressure: not only who can reach you, but who can see you.

The Banner: Breakthrough and Prestige

(Chorągiew / Chorąży / Włócznik / Oszczepnik)

The Banner is the most exceptional piece below the Knyaz.

Mechanically, it is a breakthrough figure. It moves in a line, jumps, strikes, and can change the shape of the board when used at the right moment. Symbolically, it gives the warband a point of prestige that is not identical to rulership.

I like the word “Banner” because it is not only a weapon-image.

A banner gathers attention. It marks identity. It shows where force is concentrating. It belongs to movement, morale, and visibility. It is something the group can orient around.

That makes the figure feel different from simply “elite swordsman” or “heavy warrior.”

The Banner should feel dramatic, but not universal. Its power comes from direction. It needs an axis. It can break through a position, but it cannot solve every problem. This keeps it special without letting it replace the other figures.

There is only one Banner per player because this kind of force should feel rare.

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The Set as a Warband

At this point, the pieces begin to form a small social structure.

The Knyaz claims.
The Footman protects.
The Warrior contests.
The Skirmisher raids.
The Archer controls distance.
The Banner breaks through.

That is the whole warband in miniature.

Each piece has a role before it has a detailed rule. This is important to me. The rules should be simple enough to learn, but the role should be strong enough that the player remembers why the piece exists.

The game does not need every figure to have a long list of special abilities. The depth should come from how they interact: who blocks whom, who opens the path, who protects the Knyaz, who threatens the center, who benefits when two other players weaken each other.

This is especially important because the same set must work across different player counts.

In a duel, the pieces create a focused confrontation.
With three players, every attack risks helping the third.
With four players, geography starts to create natural neighbors and fronts.
With six players, the board becomes a field of constant pressure, opportunity, and consequence.

The pieces therefore cannot be too complicated individually. The situation around them will already become complex.

That is one of the main lessons of the design so far: if the board creates enough tension, the pieces do not need to carry all the complexity by themselves.

The Warrior may carry some of the modern sword-image, but he is not only a swordsman.
The Skirmisher may suggest an axe, spear, or raiding weapon, but he is not only an axeman.
The Footman is defined more by shield and position than by personal glory.
The Archer is defined by distance.
The Banner is defined by prestige and breakthrough.
The Knyaz is defined by claim.

This approach gives the game room to breathe. It can acknowledge history without becoming trapped by reconstruction. It can use familiar images without becoming flat fantasy.

From Roles to Rules

This article is not yet the full ruleset.

The goal here is to show how the figures emerged: not as historical reconstructions, not as fantasy classes, and not as pure geometry, but as roles inside a symbolic warband.

The next step is more practical.

How far does each figure move?
Can it turn?
Can it jump?
Can it shoot?
Can it capture after moving?
Can it protect the Knyaz?
Can it clear the path to the Throne?

Those questions lead directly into the actual mechanics of the game.

But before the exact movement rules, I needed this layer: a reason for the figures to exist at all.

The Knyaz needed a warband.
The warband needed contrast.
The board needed space.
The Throne needed pressure.
And the player needed pieces that were simple enough to move, but meaningful enough to remember.

That is where the current set begins.

Unlike Domovik, this figure does not come with a stable, well-documented body of sources. Bzionek, in the materials that exist, appears only briefly and inconsistently—sometimes described as a small protective spirit, sometimes as a forest demon associated with the household and, more specifically, with the elder tree. The references are scattered, often secondary, sometimes reinterpreted in modern regional projects. But that instability turned out to be useful rather than limiting. When a figure is not visually fixed, what becomes visible instead is its function. And in this case, that function is surprisingly consistent: protection, proximity to the home, a bond with the elder, and a role in warding off illness, misfortune, or harmful forces.

At some point it became clear to me that this was not a figure built around threat. And that mattered, because in folk demonology “demon” is not a simple moral category. Alongside harmful beings, there are also protective ones—domestic, boundary-bound, responsive rather than aggressive. Bzionek belongs to that group. And that made the figure immediately relevant for Uboże, which until now had begun to accumulate weight on the side of tension and unease. What was missing was not softness exactly, but a different kind of force—one that protects without becoming harmless, one that stabilizes without disappearing into sentiment.

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That was also the moment when Bzionek stopped being Bzionek. The shift toward a female figure did not come from a need to artificially balance the collection, even if that balance was indeed lacking. It came from the material itself. The elder tree is not neutral in folk belief. It carries a dense symbolic field: healing, protection, but also death, transition, and contact with what lies beyond. It stands very close to the house, yet is never entirely safe to disturb. It protects, but it demands respect. It is medicinal, but also liminal. That combination suggested a different kind of presence—not fully domestic like Domovik, not fully external like Polevik, but something in between, closer to the body, closer to illness and recovery, closer to the fragile boundary between life and death. Translating that into a feminine form felt less like a design decision and more like a consequence of that logic. That intuition was reinforced by the fact that herbal knowledge among the Slavs was often associated with women, making the feminine turn feel culturally resonant as well as symbolically coherent. And, on a more personal note, there was also a quieter impulse behind it: my partner loves elder—especially its scent—so this figure became, in some small way, a gesture in her direction too.

From the beginning, I wanted to avoid turning the elder into a decorative motif. In many contemporary interpretations, plants are reduced to visual accessories—something added on top of a character rather than something that defines it. Here that would completely miss the point. The elder is not an addition; it is the condition of the figure’s existence. In folk practice it was treated with a kind of cautious reverence. It was planted near homes, used in healing, approached with ritual gestures, associated with both protection and passage. So Bzionka could not simply wear the elder. She had to emerge from it. That is why the leaves began to function as something between a covering and a shelter, the flower became central, almost like a mark or seal, and the darker berry tones introduced a second layer—something less immediately readable as purely alive, something closer to depth, shadow, and weight.

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The early visual attempts were mostly about avoiding the obvious. It would have been easy to push the design too far in either direction—toward something overtly dark and supernatural, or toward something soft and decorative. Neither felt right. Instead, the form gradually moved toward stillness and weight. Bzionka does not need to act in a dramatic way. She does not chase anything away. She remains. That decision shaped the entire silhouette. The proportions became more compact, more grounded, less expressive in a conventional sense. Her presence comes from position rather than movement. She sits at the edge of the cultivated space—near the garden, near the boundary, near the place where the human order thins out. That position carries meaning on its own. She is not inside, but she is not outside either. She watches the place where things cross.

What I find most interesting about her is that her character does not emerge from narrative action but from that placement. She is not aggressive, but she is not passive. Not warm in the domestic sense, but not hostile. She is attentive, and in this context attention itself becomes a form of power. That is also why I did not want to over-define her expression or exaggerate her features. The figure works best when it feels stable, grounded, almost quiet—something that does not need to announce itself in order to be effective.

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As with the other figures in this series, I am not trying to reconstruct a historically fixed being. Bzionka is not a direct ethnographic recovery. She is built from a small, unstable cluster of references: a regional spirit, a connection to the elder tree, a protective function, and a presence near the household. Everything beyond that—the form, the gender, the tone—is interpretation. But it is an interpretation that tries to remain answerable to the underlying structure rather than to any single visual description.

With her, something in the world of Uboże finally settles into place. She introduces a kind of protection that is neither internal nor external, but tied to the boundary itself. She brings in associations that were not fully present before: illness, care, restraint, respect for what grows close to the home but does not belong entirely to it. And she shifts the balance of the collection—not by softening it, but by deepening it. Because not every force in this world needs to move, confront, or demand attention. Some of them simply remain where they are, holding the line in ways that are not immediately visible.

But a human being does not experience a recording of the world. A human being experiences a world assembled by their own system.

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This is not about saying that everything is invented. That would be too quick, and ultimately not very honest. The world really exists, the body really comes into contact with it, stimuli really reach us, words can really wound, light really falls onto the retina, and another person’s presence can really change our tension, our breathing, and the way we move. The point lies elsewhere: between stimulus and experience, work is always taking place. The organism does not merely receive data. It orders it, completes it, compares it with previous experience, predicts, and assembles it into something that can be lived as a meaningful situation.

The world does not appear within us as raw material. It appears already as some version of the world.

This can be seen in very simple examples. You look at a table, and usually you do not see patches of light, shadows, lines, edges, breaks in color, and shifts in perspective. You see a table. Something stable, familiar, useful. Something you can sit at, put a cup on, rest your hands against. If someone partly covers one leg of the table, you do not conclude that the table has lost a piece of its existence. Your system fills in the continuity. When, in half-light, you see the face of someone you know, you do not analyze separately every refraction of light on the skin. You recognize a person. When you hear a sentence in noise, you often understand a word you did not physically hear in full, because the context suggests what was most likely there.

All of this happens so quickly that it seems obvious. But obvious does not mean simple. Perception is a construction that usually manages to appear direct. And that, in fact, is its strength. If we had to consciously assemble every image from separate data, we would not be able to live. We would not be able to cross the street, catch a falling object, recognize a face, sense a tone of voice, or notice danger. The system has to create wholes quickly, practically, and accurately enough. It is not about an ideal representation of the world, but about a version of reality with which something can be done.

That is why perception is connected with action from the very beginning. We do not see merely in order to have an image. We see in order to orient ourselves. We hear in order to respond. We feel the body in order to regulate movement, safety, distance, effort, rest, and contact. The brain does not receive the world as a ready-made scene that it then calmly observes. Rather, it is constantly building a working model of the situation: where am I, what is happening, what may happen in a moment, what is stable, what is changing, what is mine, what is foreign, what requires a response.

This word — model — may sound too technical, but it refers to something very ordinary. A model does not have to be a theory in the head. It can be the organism’s practical positioning toward the world. When you walk up stairs, you do not consciously calculate the height of every step. The body builds a prediction of movement. When someone hands you a cup, your hand prepares for its weight before you have truly felt it. When you hear a familiar tone of voice, you may immediately sense tension, tenderness, irony, or impatience. The system does not wait passively for complete data. It is always reaching a little ahead.

In this sense, perception is a meeting between what comes from outside and what the organism already expects. When everything goes according to expectation, we hardly notice this work. The door is where it was supposed to be. The floor supports the body. Words arrange themselves into meaning. The face of a familiar person remains the face of a familiar person. The world seems stable because the system is constantly stabilizing it for us. Only when something does not fit does the construction become visible. When a step is lower than the foot expected. When someone speaks in a tone that does not match the words. When something has been moved in a familiar room. When an image that was supposed to be unambiguous can suddenly be seen in two ways.

In such moments, it becomes clear that perception is not a simple reflection. It is the active solving of a puzzle. The system asks: what is this most likely to be? What fits this arrangement of stimuli? What do I already know? What does this kind of shape, this kind of sound, this kind of movement, this kind of facial expression usually mean? What could be the cause of what is reaching me? The answer often appears so quickly that we take it for reality itself. We do not say: “my system has assembled an interpretation of this situation.” We simply say: “this is obvious.”

And it is precisely obviousness that can be the most deceptive, because what seems obvious is often simply well matched to our expectations. If you expect criticism, a neutral comment may sound harsh. If you expect rejection, a brief silence may become evidence of distance. If you are in a hurry, someone else’s slowness may look like an obstacle. If you are in defensive mode, another person’s movement may look like an attack. The stimulus really exists: someone said something, fell silent, looked, turned their head, arrived late, wrote a short message. But the meaning of that stimulus does not lie inside it ready-made, like a label. It arises in the encounter between the stimulus and a system that already has its own dispositions.

The same applies to the physical world. Color is not simply a property of things in the way we directly have it in our heads. It is the result of a relationship between light, surface, eye, nervous system, and context. The size of an object, distance, depth, movement — all of this is assembled from signals, comparisons, and predictions. That is why illusions are possible. Not because perception is stupid, but because it uses shortcuts that, most of the time, work very well. An illusion shows not so much the weakness of the system as its method. It shows that the brain does not reproduce the world pixel by pixel, but assembles the best available whole on the basis of incomplete clues.

The word “guesses” may sound dangerous, but in life it is necessary. The organism does not have time for absolute certainty. It has to act on incomplete data. It has to recognize a face before checking every detail. It has to assess a tone of voice before the conversation is over. It has to jump away before it consciously analyzes the movement of a car. It has to take something as stable even though the eyes receive only fragments of the world. Life does not happen in a laboratory of perfect information. It happens under conditions of pressure, lack, change, and the necessity of response.

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That is why perception is always somewhat risky. Usually it lands accurately enough, but sometimes it lands too quickly. Sometimes it fills in too much. Sometimes it leans too heavily on past experience. Sometimes it sees the present through a history that was once needed, but now distorts the situation. A person who has learned that a raised voice means danger may hear danger even where there is only intensity. Someone who has been shamed many times may immediately see judgment in another person’s gaze. Someone who had to control their surroundings for a long time may see chaos more quickly than possibility. The system does not lie deliberately. The system tries to predict on the basis of what it has learned.

And here an important boundary begins between perception and story. Perception is not yet a full narrative. It does not yet say: “I am like this,” “they always,” “the world never,” “this definitely means.” But it provides the material from which narrative will soon arise. If a situation is assembled from the very beginning as threat, thought will follow one path. If it is assembled as an invitation, it will follow another. If it is assembled as failure, the body and language will begin preparing a response appropriate to failure. If it is assembled as uncertainty, curiosity may appear. This does not mean that interpretation alone can freely change everything. It only means that the way the world is first assembled matters enormously.

You can see this in relationships. Someone does not reply for several hours. That is a fact. But the experience of that fact can be entirely different. For one person, it is simply a pause. For another, a sign that someone is busy. For a third, the beginning of anxiety. For a fourth, proof that they have once again been disregarded. The stimulus is similar, but the model of the situation is different. The organism does not wait for a full explanation. It assembles the lack of response together with previous experiences, the current state of the body, the need for safety, and a prediction of what may happen. And suddenly you are no longer responding to the fact itself. You are responding to the world your system has built out of that fact.

This is one reason why people so often miss each other in conversation. Each person is convinced that they are reacting to what really happened. But very often, they are reacting to how their system has assembled the event. A single sentence may be heard as care, control, criticism, indifference, or attack. One silence may mean calm, contempt, exhaustion, reflection, or punishment. Of course, real behaviors exist, real violence exists, real tenderness exists, real neglect exists. This is not about invalidating the world. It is about recognizing that access to the world always passes through construction.

This distinction is delicate, but very necessary. Because if we only say, “it is all in your head,” we cause harm. The world really acts upon a person. Words really hurt. Living conditions really overload. Relationships really shape the nervous system. The body really reacts. But if we only say, “you see things exactly as they are,” we also miss the truth. Because a person does not have access to the world directly, without their own body, memory, language, expectations, and fears. We are not locked inside an arbitrary fantasy, but neither are we a transparent mirror. We are a living system trying to assemble the world well enough to survive, act, and preserve continuity.

That is why perception is so closely tied to prediction. We usually think that first we see something, and only then do we predict what will happen. But often, prediction is already part of seeing. When you look at a ball flying toward you, you do not experience only its current position. Your body prepares for its further movement. When you see someone’s face arranging itself toward crying, laughter, or anger, you do not see only facial muscles. You see the possibility of the next moment. When you walk down a dark street and hear footsteps behind you, the sound is immediately woven into a scenario: who could it be, are they close, are they speeding up, should I turn around, should I walk faster.

Perception, then, is not only about what is. It is also about what may be in a moment. That is why it is so difficult to separate seeing from tension, hearing from expectation, touch from meaning. The same touch may be soothing or threatening. The same sound may be irrelevant or alarming. The same facial expression may be neutral or painful. The organism does not ask only: what is this? It also asks: what does this announce? What should I do with it? Does it increase safety or reduce it? Can I stay, or do I need to prepare?

Seen this way, perception becomes something much more human than the simple reception of stimuli. It is the place where the physical world meets the history of the organism. It is the first version of reality with which we begin to live, before we have even managed to name it. Before you say, “I am afraid,” the body may already be seeing danger. Before you say, “this is kind,” the system may already have assembled someone’s presence as safe. Before you say, “I do not trust this,” perception may already have sharpened the details that fit distrust. Before you say, “this is beautiful,” something in you may already have organized the world as a place worth staying in a little longer.

None of this happens outside reality. It happens within it. But it is not its mechanical reflection.

It is worth returning here to the body, because it is easy to think of the construction of perception as something purely mental, as if the brain were sitting in a dark room creating images. Meanwhile, perception is embodied. It depends on whether you are rested, hungry, aroused, ill, tense, calm, safe, overloaded. The body is not merely the carrier of cognitive equipment. It is part of that equipment. A person with a clenched stomach reads a situation differently from someone who can breathe freely. Someone in pain has less room for nuance. Someone chronically tired may live in a world that feels sharper, heavier, and more demanding.

This is not a weakness of character. This is perception through the state of the organism. That is precisely why it is sometimes not enough to tell someone: “look at it differently.” Because they are not looking only with an opinion. They are looking with an entire system. In order to see differently, sometimes one must first recover a little safety, sleep, breath, distance, relationship, regulation. Another interpretation may be impossible as long as the body is convinced that an alarm is underway. A system in threat mode does not want to philosophize. It wants to survive. And that is why its perception will simplify, sharpen, suspect, accelerate. Not because it is bad, but because it operates according to the priority of protection.

But it also works the other way. Safety widens perception. When the organism does not have to defend its boundaries all the time, the world can become richer. More shades become visible. It becomes easier to notice another person’s intention, not only their tone. Easier to distinguish a mistake from an attack. Easier to see possibility where before there was only an obstacle. Easier to allow ambiguity. And ambiguity is one of the luxuries of a regulated nervous system. A person in alarm needs quick categories. A person who is a little safer can afford to ask: what if this is not only one thing?

This is very important for our entire story about the human being. Because if perception is a construction, then our experience of the world is co-created from the beginning by the state of the system. There is no pure world first, then pure reception, and only later psychology. Psychology begins earlier. Already in what is recognized as figure. Already in what is omitted. Already in what seems obvious. Already in what the organism takes as a signal of safety or threat.

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This does not mean that we should constantly distrust our senses. Without trust in perception, life is impossible. We have to cross the street, recognize people, respond to words, use things, orient ourselves in space. Perception is one of the greatest achievements of a living system. Most of the time, it works so well that we forget it is working. The problem begins only when we confuse its practical effectiveness with absolute certainty.

So perhaps it is worth learning something in between: to trust perception enough to act, but not so unconditionally that we cannot examine it. This is especially important where relationships, identity, and meaning are at stake. If I see that someone is angry with me, I can treat this as information, but I do not have to immediately take it as a verdict. If I feel that everything is falling apart, I can treat this as a real experience, but I do not have to immediately assume that it covers all of reality. If my system assembles a situation as threat, I can ask: what exactly am I seeing, what am I adding, what am I expecting, what do I know from the past, and what is actually happening now?

This question does not have to be cold analysis. It can be a form of gentleness toward one’s own system. Because the system that constructs the world does not do so on a whim. It does it in order to carry us through something. Sometimes very wisely. Sometimes too quickly. Sometimes according to old maps. Sometimes under the influence of fatigue. Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of desire. Sometimes out of hope. Perception is therefore not only cognition, but also a trace of a life’s history. It shows what the organism has learned to expect from the world.

And perhaps this is precisely why changing the way we see is so difficult. It is not enough to receive new information. New information still has to break through the old model. It has to be recognized as important enough, safe enough, and repeatable enough. A person who has long lived in a world of distrust will not immediately begin to see trust simply because someone behaves well once. A person who has long seen themselves as a burden will not immediately begin to see their own worth because someone names it for them. Perception needs experiences, not only arguments. It needs repetition. It needs a body that gradually learns that the new version of the world is not a trap.

Here we can see how closely the second segment connects with the first. We have not left the body behind by moving toward the mind. On the contrary: the deeper we enter cognition, the more clearly we see that the mind does not hover above the body. Attention, perception, memory, language, and thought grow out of a living organism that must maintain itself in the world. Perception is one of its ways of keeping contact with reality — not by copying it, but by continually assembling it into a form that can guide action.

That is why a human being does not simply live in the world as it is “in itself.” A human being lives in the world their system is able to grasp, predict, and organize. In a world stable enough to keep moving through, and flexible enough to respond to change. In a world woven from stimuli, memory, expectations, body, language, and situation.

This may sound unsettling, but it is also liberating. Because if perception were a pure recording, there would be nothing to do with it. We could only play back the world as it had been recorded. But if perception is a construction, then it means that sometimes we can see its seams. We can notice where we are filling things in. Where we are predicting. Where an old map is being laid over a new road. Where the body says “danger,” although the situation may call more for curiosity. Where we take something as obvious only because it has been assembled that way many times before.

The point is not to dismantle the whole world. The point is to recover a little space between stimulus and certainty. That space is the beginning of mature cognition. It does not remove automatisms, but it sometimes allows us to see them. It does not grant absolute objectivity, but it allows us to be a little less imprisoned in the first version of an event. It does not make a person cease to have a history, but it gives a chance that history will not always write the present without being questioned.

We might put it this way: perception is not a window through which we passively look at a ready-made world. It is a living construction in which the external world, the body, memory, and prediction meet in order to create something we can experience as reality.

And only from this reality do we begin to remember.

Because if the world does not enter us whole, and what does enter is already assembled in some way, then the next question is: what remains of it? What does the system record as “my experience”? How does a sense of continuity arise out of thousands of moments? Why do we remember some things so strongly, while others dissolve without a trace?

In other words: if perception builds the first version of the world, memory begins to build the first version of ourselves.

At first, this may sound like a strange order of work. In an abstract strategy game, one might expect the pieces to come first: movement, capture, range, balance, then maybe a theme added on top. But for this project, the board itself had already suggested something more specific.

A hexagonal board is not neutral. It does not naturally point toward two armies facing each other across a single front. It suggests several directions at once. It suggests pressure from the side, unstable alliances, shared centers, and conflicts that are not always reducible to one clean opposition.

That mattered to me from the beginning.

I did not want to simply design “chess on hexes.” Chess is one of the great abstract games, and its clarity is part of its power. But it is also built around a very particular symbolic structure: two sides, two kings, two armies, one direct opposition. That structure creates enormous intellectual depth, but it also narrows the world into a duel.

I wanted something slightly different.

I wanted a game that could still contain the intensity of a duel, but not be limited by it. A game where two players could face each other directly, but where the same system could also expand into three, four, or six competing powers. A game where conflict would not only mean destroying the enemy, but also knowing when another player’s war creates an opening for you.

In that sense, the hexagonal board was not just a geometric choice. It was a philosophical one.

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The problem with two kings

There is something beautiful about the simplicity of two kings.

It gives the game a clean emotional frame. One side against another. One mind against another. One order against another. But real political and historical life rarely works in such a clean way.

Even when wars are fought between two powers, the consequences are almost never limited to those two powers. Neighbors watch. Rivals wait. Allies calculate. A weakening enemy may become useful. A costly victory may make the winner vulnerable. A war between two sides may create the best conditions for a third.

This is one of the things I wanted the game to express abstractly.

Not through diplomacy rules, hidden cards, negotiation phases, or narrative events, but through the board itself. Through the number of possible players. Through spatial pressure. Through the fact that every move may open or close possibilities for someone who is not directly involved in the immediate exchange.

With three players, every capture has a shadow.
With four, geography begins to create natural fronts.
With six, every local conflict risks becoming an invitation.

This does not make the game more “realistic” in a simulationist sense. That was never the goal. It makes the game feel closer to the instability of human conflict: not one line, but several forces pulling at once.

Why the center matters

Once the game moved away from a simple two-sided structure, it needed a different kind of objective.

If the goal were only to eliminate the enemy leader, the game would remain too close to a classical duel. It would still be about removing the opposite king. But on a board with several possible powers, I wanted the objective to be something more public, more exposed, and more symbolically charged.

That is how the Throne became central.

The Throne is not owned at the beginning. It does not belong to any player by default. It is not the private property of one royal line. It sits in the middle as a claim, a temptation, and a danger.

To stand on the Throne is to say: I am no longer only defending my group. I am trying to rise above the others.

That creates a different kind of tension. The player who moves toward the center becomes visible. The leader who reaches the Throne becomes powerful, but also vulnerable. Victory requires not only arrival, but endurance. The claim must be held long enough for the rest of the board to react.

This was important to me because I did not want power to feel automatic.

A ruler does not exist in isolation. A ruler exists because others accept him, fear him, need him, follow him, fail to stop him, or are too divided to resist him. The Throne in the game is a simplified version of that idea. It is not enough to want authority. You have to survive the moment when that desire becomes visible.

Why the leader is a Knyaz

The central figure of the game became the Knyaz.

The word itself was part of the attraction. In English, it is usually rendered somewhere around “prince,” “duke,” or sometimes “king,” depending on historical context. Historically, the Slavic title changed meaning over time: it could refer to a tribal chieftain, a ruler, or later a noble title within more developed state structures.

That ambiguity is exactly what I like about it.

“Knyaz” does not feel identical to “king.” It carries royalty, but not necessarily the full weight of an already completed monarchy. It suggests someone on the edge between leadership and sovereignty. Someone who may command a warband, rule a people, or aspire to something greater — but who is still not simply born into unquestioned sacred authority.

For this game, that distinction matters.

The Knyaz is not a divine king placed above the world. He is a claimant. A leader. A figure whose importance comes from what he might become. He is not powerful because heaven has already settled the matter. He is powerful because the board has not.

That makes him ideal for a game about competing claims.

Each player does not begin as the rightful monarch of the world. Each begins with a group, a position, and a possibility. The Throne is the thing they are moving toward. Authority is not assumed; it is contested.

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Slavic influence without turning the game into a history lesson

The Slavic influence in the game is not meant to turn it into a direct historical reconstruction.

This is not a simulation of one tribe, one century, one war, or one political system. It is still an abstract strategy game. But abstract games can carry cultural memory in their structure, names, and metaphors.

What interested me was the tension between community and leadership.

Early Slavic societies are often described as decentralized tribal societies, with gradual consolidation, chiefdoms, and later more centralized political forms developing over time. The historical picture is complex and varies by region, but the general movement from looser tribal structures toward stronger centers of power is important.

There is also the tradition of assemblies. The veche, for example, was a popular assembly known especially from medieval Rus’ contexts. Britannica describes it as a characteristic institution from roughly the 10th to 15th centuries, probably rooted in earlier deliberative bodies among Slavic tribes, and in some towns sharing power with princes and aristocratic councils.

I do not want to overstate this or romanticize it. No early society was a modern democracy. No culture was purely egalitarian. Power, hierarchy, violence, prestige, wealth, and family position existed everywhere in different forms.

But there is a useful design idea here: leadership does not always begin as permanent monarchy. Sometimes it emerges from need. War requires coordination. Defense requires command. A group may choose or tolerate a leader in crisis, then resist the same leader if he tries to turn temporary command into lasting superiority.

That tension became one of the hidden foundations of the game.

The Knyaz is necessary.
The Knyaz is dangerous.
The Knyaz protects the group.
The Knyaz also tries to rise above it.

This is much more interesting to me than a king who is simply king because the game says so.

This is not meant to be a historical reconstruction of Slavic warfare or society. It is a symbolic design language. The game takes inspiration from certain historical tensions — leadership, community, prestige, claim, and conflict — and translates them into abstract pieces on a board.

The warband before the kingdom

This is also why I think of the player’s forces less as a formal army and more as a warband. There is no place on eartg where we could find kingdom before the people.

A kingdom feels complete. A warband feels like something still forming. It has hierarchy, but not yet bureaucracy. It has loyalty, but not yet the full machinery of state. It is personal, dangerous, unstable.

That scale fits the game better.

The pieces are not anonymous soldiers of a fully established empire. They are the people around a claimant: fighters, shield-bearers, archers, raiders, elite figures, and the leader at the center of their loyalty. They do not represent an entire civilization. They represent the moment before authority hardens into institution.

This also helps explain the tone I want. The game should feel elevated, but not detached from human struggle. It should have the symbolic weight of crowns, thrones, and sovereignty, but still remain close to the ground: movement, protection, ambush, sacrifice, pressure.

The Throne gives the game height.
The warband keeps it human.

Why not a hunt?

At an earlier stage, I considered a different center for the board.

Instead of a Throne, the middle could have represented prey, treasure, a sacred animal, or something closer to a hunt. That would also make sense in a more primal or communal vision of the game. A group moving toward the center to secure food, glory, or survival has its own strength as an image.

But eventually that felt too low for the kind of tension I wanted.

The hunt is older than the crown. In practical terms, it may even be more important. A human group needs food before it needs royal symbols. But games do not work only through practical importance. They also work through myth, prestige, and the emotional charge of a goal.

The Throne does something that prey does not.

It transforms the center into an idea.

The player is not only trying to take something valuable. He is trying to claim a position above the others. That makes the act more dangerous and more ironic. Everyone may need leadership, but everyone may also fear the one who succeeds too much.

That is why the Throne stayed.

A different answer to chess

Chess entered Europe through a long transformation from earlier games such as chaturanga and shatranj; chaturanga is generally treated as an early Indian ancestor of chess and related Asian chess traditions, with pieces connected to military divisions such as infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots.

In that tradition, the board is a battlefield and the king is the decisive figure. My game obviously stands in conversation with that lineage. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But I am trying to answer a slightly different question.

Not: how can two royal armies destroy each other?

Rather: what happens when several leaders, each backed by their own group, attempt to turn a shared center into personal authority?

That shift changes the meaning of the board.

The game can still be played one against one. In that mode, it keeps something of the classical duel. But it is not limited to that form. The same board can become a triangle of suspicion, a four-sided struggle, or a six-sided field of unstable pressure.

That is why the hexagon matters. It allows the game to preserve the elegance of abstraction while opening the political imagination beyond the binary.

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The design principle underneath it all

The practical design principle is simple:

The game should be abstract, but not empty.

I do not want to cover the rules with lore. I do not want every piece to require a paragraph of mythology before the player understands it. But I also do not want the game to feel like pure geometry with decorative names attached at the end.

The names, the board, the Throne, and the pieces should all point in the same direction.

The Knyaz is slow because authority must be carried and protected.
The Throne is central because legitimacy is public.
The hexagon matters because conflict has more than one front.
The warband matters because power begins among people before it becomes a state.
The rules must remain simple because the complexity should emerge from position, not from exception.

That is the foundation I needed before designing the pieces themselves.

Only after that could I ask what each figure should do.

Who protects the Knyaz?
Who breaks the line?
Who controls distance?
Who holds space?
Who creates sudden pressure?
Who makes the center survivable?

Those questions lead naturally into the next layer of the project: the pieces, their movement, and their roles inside the warband.

But before the pieces, there had to be a claim.

And before the claim, there had to be a Throne.

With that foundation in place, the next question became much more practical: if the game is about a Knyaz, a Throne, and a warband moving through contested space, what kinds of figures should this warband actually contain?

That changes everything.

A figure of the house can feel protective. A figure of the bathhouse can feel enclosed. But a figure of the field has to carry something else: distance, exposure, heat, and labor. Britannica links Polevik to Poludnitsa, the noon spirit of the field, which already says a lot about the atmosphere around him. This is not just cultivated land. It is land under the sun, under effort, and under a certain kind of tension.

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What I liked most while working on him was that he does not come down to us as one perfectly fixed image. In some descriptions he is black like the earth, with grass for hair. In others he appears in white. He is seldom seen, which makes him less like a stable portrait and more like a presence tied to the field itself. In some places, offerings were left to him for fertility, which places him close not only to the land, but to its yield.

That gave me a lot of freedom, but also a very clear direction.

I did not want him to feel like another domestic spirit moved outdoors. I wanted him to feel as if he had risen from the crop itself. That is why the design began leaning toward a sheaf-like shape — something simpler, more vertical, more bound to harvest than to architecture. The early sketch already pushed me in that direction. Once the sickle appeared beside him, the whole figure became easier to place. He stopped feeling like a generic creature and started feeling field-born.

That was really the point of this one.

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Not to make him complicated, and not to over-explain him, but to let the character carry the field in a direct way. Grain, cutting, season, exposure. Something a little dry, a little watchful, and a little strange, but still readable enough to belong inside Uboże.

I also liked that Polevik naturally shifts the mood of the whole series.

He is less interior than the others. Less domestic. Less tied to corners, thresholds, or enclosed rooms. He stands in a wider space, and because of that he brings a different rhythm with him. More air around the figure. More distance. Less shelter.

So in this case, a lot of the work was simply about reducing him until only the essential things were left.

Not adding more detail, but finding the shortest visual route to the idea. A spirit of the field does not need much before he starts to make sense. A shape close to grain. A hint of harvest. A body that feels more like part of the crop than a visitor standing in it.

This sounds banal, but its consequences are enormous. At every moment, more is happening than we are able to take in. There is light on the wall, a sound outside the window, the pressure of clothing against the skin, the weight of the body on the chair, the temperature of the air, the smell of the room, tension in the stomach, the memory of a conversation, a word someone has just spoken, a notification on the phone, someone’s face, one’s own fear, hunger, fatigue, hope, a plan for later. All of this is present in some way, but not all of it becomes equally important. Not all of it is carried onward into thinking, memory, and the story of what has just happened. The organism cannot treat this entire stream in the same way, because if every stimulus had the same weight, life would very quickly turn into noise.

And this is where attention appears.

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In everyday life, we speak about it as if it were something simple. “Focus.” “Pay attention.” “Don’t get distracted.” It sounds as though there were a little spotlight operator sitting inside us, freely moving the beam from one place to another. As though wanting were enough. As though attention were only a matter of discipline, character, or good will. But this is a very poor image, because before a person consciously tells themselves, “I am looking at this,” their organism has already done an enormous part of the work. Something has been brought to the foreground, something has been dimmed, something has begun to demand a response, and something else, although still present, has slipped into the background.

It is not that the world disappears. Rather, the world arranges itself into figure and ground. Something comes forward, something remains behind. Something becomes sharp, something blurs at the edges. Something seems obvious, while something else, though it was right beside it, later turns out to have been almost absent. You can walk down the street and suddenly hear your name in the middle of the noise. You can read a book and, after a few minutes, realize that your eyes have been moving over the sentences, but you were somewhere else. You can talk to someone close to you and remember one tone of voice, one hesitation, one movement of the hand, while completely losing the rest of the conversation. You can look for your keys, stare straight at them, and not see them, because your system is looking for something of a different shape, in a different place, according to a different map. These are not minor malfunctions. This is the normal way an organism works when it must constantly choose.

Attention is therefore necessary not because human beings lack willpower, but because a living system cannot process everything at once. It has to amplify some signals, quiet others, maintain some kind of direction, and answer the question of what, at a given moment, may matter. And this answer is never purely neutral. What attracts attention depends on the body, history, fear, goals, fatigue, hunger, culture, relationships, and the situation. The same room looks different when you are calm than when you are waiting for difficult news. Someone’s silence sounds different when you feel safe than when you fear rejection. You move through a city differently when you have time than when you are late. You look at another person’s face differently when you trust them than when you expect an attack.

In this sense, attention is not a transparent window. It is more like editing. It does not create all the material from scratch, but it decides which fragments enter the scene, how long they remain there, what appears at the center, and what gets cut out. And just as editing in film can change the meaning of an event, attention in experience can change the meaning of the world before we even begin to explain it in words. This becomes very clear in overload. When there are too many stimuli, you do not simply become “less focused.” The world begins to tear. It becomes harder to keep a goal in mind, harder to separate the important from the unimportant, harder to hear one sentence among many sentences. It becomes harder not to react to every signal trying to catch you. An overloaded person does not simply have weaker cognitive morality. They have less space for selection.

That is why fatigue changes reality so profoundly. Not only mood, not only patience, but reality itself — the lived, everyday, most tangible reality. When you are exhausted, the world becomes more intrusive and less ordered. Sounds irritate more. Requests more often sound like demands. Small problems become large more quickly. The body does not have as much strength to absorb the excess, so attention begins to work more defensively. It searches for threats, shortens perspective, chooses what is urgent, though not necessarily what is important. And then it becomes very easy to mistake the state of the system for the truth about the world. “Everything is pointless,” “no one understands me,” “I can’t handle this” — sometimes this is not a deep diagnosis of reality, but a signal from an organism that no longer has the resources to assemble the world into a calmer whole.

This matters because attention is one of the places where biology turns into experience. You do not simply see a street. You see a street through the state of your system. You do not simply hear words. You hear words through your current readiness to defend, approach, withdraw, or act. You do not encounter a “pure situation,” because the organism is constantly asking, even if it does not do so in language: is this for me, does this threaten me, does this concern me, does this help me maintain direction, can I ignore this? An enormous part of this question happens faster than conscious reflection.

You can feel this in a very ordinary way. You are sitting in a café. For a long time, the conversations at other tables are only background. Suddenly someone says a word connected to you: your name, the name of a place you know, a subject you fear, something you are currently going through. What a moment ago was noise jumps into the foreground. Not because the sound has objectively become louder, but because its value has changed for your system. Something has been marked as worth further processing. Fear works in a similar way. Fear does not only feel bad. Fear organizes attention. A frightened person notices signs of possible threat more quickly, returns to them more easily in thought, and finds it harder to detach from details that might confirm danger. The world becomes narrower, more bristling, more suspicious. Not because the whole world is objectively that way, but because the system has entered protective mode.

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Desire, too, makes choices. A hungry person sees food more quickly. A lonely person more quickly picks up signs of closeness or rejection. Someone who badly wants recognition may remember only one moment from an entire conversation: the moment when someone did not respond warmly enough. Someone who feels guilty may see confirmations of accusation everywhere. Attention, then, is not merely a cognitive mechanism detached from needs. It is intertwined with what the organism demands, what it fears, what it lacks, and what it is trying to protect. It shows us not the whole world, but the world according to what in us currently requires a response.

And here the uncomfortable part begins: very often, we confuse attention with reality. We say: “that’s how it was,” “that’s what it looked like,” “that’s what he is like,” “that’s what I am like.” But often it would be more accurate to say: this is what I picked out. This is what my system recognized as significant. This is what received the light. This is what entered memory. This is what became material for the story. The rest was not necessarily untrue. It simply did not receive the same access to the inside. The point is not to say that everything is subjective and nothing really exists. That would be too easy, and ultimately not very helpful. The point is something more concrete: between the world and our experience of the world, selection is always at work. And this selection is alive. It has a body, a history, limitations, automatisms, and goals.

That is why two people can be in the same situation and later tell two different versions of it. Not because one of them must be lying, but because their systems cut out different fragments of the situation as meaningful. The same person in the morning and in the evening may also live in slightly different worlds. Rested, they see possibilities; tired, they see obstacles. Feeling safe, they hear a remark; wounded, they hear an attack. Interested, they see details; bored, they see only the surface. This does not mean that every version is equally accurate. It only means that access to accuracy also depends on the state of the system.

It is therefore worth stopping thinking about attention solely as a tool of productivity. Of course, thanks to it, we can work, read, learn, drive a car, and not lose the thread of a conversation. But this is only one layer. At a deeper level, attention is the way life arranges the world for itself in order to live it. It says: look here, guard this, skip that, return to this, this may be important, do not let this go, this is safe, this is dangerous, this is yours. That is why things that capture attention have such great power. A phone does not need to physically stop you in order to change your experience. It is enough for it to interrupt continuity again and again. A notification is not just a small signal. It is a competing proposal of a world. An advertisement, an algorithm, a shout, a red badge, a sudden sound, someone’s emotional reaction — all of these are fighting not only for a second of looking, but for priority within your system of meaning.

And since attention chooses, it also chooses the material from which memory will later be built. What you did not notice has a much harder time becoming part of your story. What you return to with your attention again and again gains weight, even if objectively it was small. That is why one remark heard in childhood can remain in a person for years, while hundreds of neutral days dissolve without a trace. Not because only that one moment existed, but because it was marked, illuminated, recorded in a particular tension. Attention is therefore one of the entrances into memory, and memory later influences what will attract attention again. The system begins to circle: what is important is easier to notice; what is noticed is easier to recognize as important.

At this point, we can see how carefully we need to approach our own sense of obviousness. Sometimes something feels true not because it has been calmly checked, but because it has repeatedly returned to the foreground. A person who often feels overlooked will notice being overlooked more quickly. A person who fears mistakes will see risk more quickly. A person who has learned that the world is unpredictable may constantly scan the environment for changes in mood, tone of voice, and small signals. From the outside, someone may say: “you’re exaggerating.” But from the inside, this may be a once-learned way of maintaining safety.

Attention, then, has its own history. We are not born as neutral cameras. From the beginning, we learn what is worth tracking: the caregiver’s face, the sound of footsteps, a change in tone, the availability of food, signs of approval, signs of danger. Later, school, family, work, culture, and technology continue teaching us what to look at, what to be ashamed of, what to keep watch over, what to get excited about, what not to notice. Attention is biological, but it is also trained. Sometimes by care, sometimes by fear, sometimes by violence, sometimes by the market, which knows very well that whoever controls attention partially controls the world in which a person lives.

But attention is not only a trap. It is also a possibility for reclaiming the world. Not in the naïve sense that all you need to do is think positively, but in a more grounded sense: sometimes you can notice that something has been lit up too strongly. You can ask: what else is here? What do I not see when I am frightened? What disappears when I am tired? What do I look at automatically because I once had to? What do I keep treating as important, even though perhaps it no longer has to govern my life? This does not always change emotions immediately, but it can gently widen the field. And the widening of the field can be the beginning of a different response.

Because when attention changes, it is not only the point of view that changes. The possible world of action changes. If I see only threat, I will defend myself. If I also see fatigue, I can rest. If I see only guilt, I will punish myself. If I also see the need for repair, I can do something. If I see only another person’s hostility, I will respond with tension. If I also see my own fear, the situation may not become easy, but it will become a little less automatic.

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This is why attention is the first truly cognitive topic in this part. Not because it is a dry function of the mind. On the contrary: because it stands at the border of body, world, and meaning. On the one hand, it is rooted in the nervous system, in resources, arousal, threat, and needs. On the other hand, it is where what we will later call thinking, memory, language, interpretation, and the story of the self begins. Attention decides what will enter further work at all.

We might put it this way: a person does not experience the world simply because the world acts upon them. A person experiences the world because, out of an enormous number of possible signals, their organism constantly selects some fragment, gives it priority, and allows it to become the beginning of meaning. This is not yet full perception. Rather, it is its gate. Attention does not yet say what the world is. It does not explain it. It does not assemble the whole image. But it decides which piece of the world will get the chance to be assembled into an image at all.

And that is why the next step is inevitable. Because if we already know that not everything gets inside, we must ask something even more difficult: is what does get inside simply a recording of reality, or is it, from the very beginning, some kind of construction of it?

In my case, this is not a side issue. It directly affects everything: piece movement, balance, interface, future application design, debugging, and whether the whole system ends up elegant or starts collapsing under unnecessary complexity. Because of that, the coordinate system is not a technical choice sitting somewhere on the edge of the project. It is one of its structural foundations.

There was also a deeper ambition behind the board from the start. I was not trying to recreate chess in another geometric costume. The goal was larger than that. I wanted to see whether it was possible to design an abstract strategy system that retained the intensity of a duel between two minds, while also allowing that structure to expand into larger confrontations.

That is why the number of potential players matters so much here. The board was imagined not only for 2-player play, but for 3, 4, and 6 as well. Those numbers preserve the internal symmetry of the space. Five players, on the other hand, would break that balance: two players positioned at the extremes would inherit more space and therefore an unfair structural advantage.

Once that becomes part of the design goal, the board stops being just a visual choice. It becomes an engine of fairness. From that point on, the problem of coordinates is no longer a secondary technical question, but part of the core architecture of the game.

1. The starting point: not a modern board game, but an abstract strategy game

This project is not heading toward a contemporary board game in the modern hobby sense. It is not a eurogame, not an event-driven system, not a card engine, and not a narrative framework. It is much closer to the tradition of abstract strategy games: games in which the central relationship is between space, movement, and positional advantage. In that sense, it sits much closer to chess, go, and other games built around transparent rules and deep strategic possibility than to what people usually mean today when they say “board game.”

That distinction matters a great deal. In a modern board game, certain imperfections in the spatial system can sometimes be hidden beneath other layers: economy, cards, faction asymmetry, or narrative structure. In an abstract game, there is nowhere to hide. If the movement and spatial logic are not clean, the player will feel it immediately. And the computer, which will eventually have to operate the system, will feel it even faster.

2. The board shape: why this particular board forces certain decisions

The chosen board is a regular hexagon with side length 9 cells. This means that from the center to any corner there are 8 steps, and the whole board contains 217 cells.

That number can be derived quite simply. The board consists of a central cell and then successive rings around it. The first ring has 6 cells, the second 12, the third 18, and so on. For radius 8, that gives:

Since

the total number of cells is:

The same result can be expressed through the standard large-hexagon formula:

where n is the side length in cells. For n = 9:

This is not mathematical trivia for its own sake. That number immediately tells us the scale of the state space we are dealing with. 217 cells is large enough to support meaningful strategic depth, but still compact enough to make neighborhood logic, movement lines, center control, and entry zones manageable and analyzable.

On this board, seven cells are special:

• one central cell, which acts as the axis of the board and the key point of contention,

• six corner cells, which function as starting positions.

That structure is crucial. This is not a board designed for a classical two-sided game with one axis pointing “forward” and another “backward.” It is a board built on six-directional symmetry, which means that any coordinate system that privileges one direction over the others will, by definition, work against the design.

3. What hexagonal chess teaches us — and what should not be copied directly

Hexagonal chess is a useful reference point because it shows that games on hex grids have long had to deal with the same core problem: how to preserve meaningful movement and notation when each cell has six neighbors instead of four, and when the board itself may be oriented in different ways. In classical hexagonal chess variants, important factors include six-adjacency, three-color cell patterns, the altered behavior of linear pieces, and the fact that board orientation changes even the idea of “forward” movement, especially for pawns. Some variants use file-and-rank notation, and some also use numerical notation.

That context is valuable for two reasons. First, it shows that hexagonal notation is never neutral: it always emerges from the geometry of the board and the nature of the game. Second, it demonstrates that what works for a hexagonal version of orthodox chess does not automatically work for a different game built on a different core.

My board does not present the problem of translating classical chess into hexagonal form. The real problem is to build a clean coordinate model for a board symmetrical around a central objective, with six corner starting points and a movement system that is still being refined. So instead of asking “how do hexagonal chess variants name their cells?”, the better question becomes: which system interferes least with what this board already is?

4. The three main approaches: offset, cube, and axial

In practice, there are three main ways to think about hex grids.

4.1. Offset: superficially simple, practically awkward

The first approach is to think in terms of rows and columns with shifts — essentially treating the board as a modified 2D table. This is tempting because it feels familiar. At first glance, the board looks like something close to a rectangular grid, just slightly staggered.

The problem is that this simplicity is deceptive.

In offset systems, neighbors are not described uniformly. Their positions depend on whether a row or column is even or odd. That means special-case logic in code, separate lookup patterns, and generally less elegant geometry. For a board whose actual shape is a true hexagon rather than a rectangle, that becomes an unnecessary source of friction.

This matters greatly here. Our board is not rectangular. It is hexagonal. So choosing offset would mean building the game’s core logic around a structure that the board itself does not naturally have.

4.2. Cube: mathematically ideal, somewhat heavier in practice

The second option is the cube system, using three coordinates (q,r,s), bound by the condition:

This model is mathematically very elegant. Every movement direction becomes a simple vector, distance calculations are natural, rotations are clean, and the six-directional symmetry of the board becomes explicit.

The weakness of cube is not that it is bad. On the contrary, it is excellent. The issue is that, for storage, it keeps one number more than necessary. Since q+r+s = 0 is always true, one coordinate is always redundant.

4.3. Axial: the best compromise between rigor and usability

This is why the best solution ends up being the axial system. In axial coordinates we store only two values, usually (q,r), and compute the third only when needed:

This is not a poorer version of cube. It is a practical implementation of the same geometry. It keeps the computational advantages of cube — easy vector arithmetic, simple neighbors, straightforward distance, clean rotation logic — without storing unnecessary data.

This is the point where the project stops being an abstract debate about possible notations and starts becoming a concrete system.

5. The design decision: the center as (0,0)

Because the board is organized around one most important cell, the cleanest possible decision is to place the origin of the coordinate system exactly there. So:

becomes the central objective cell.

This has several advantages at once.

First, the most important point in the entire game also becomes the zero point of the mathematical system. That is elegant, but also highly practical.

Second, all distances from the center become natural. Nothing needs to be shifted or translated.

Third, the six corner positions form a perfectly symmetrical arrangement:

Each of these cells lies exactly eight steps from the center. This means the starting conditions are geometrically fair from the outset. If the game is meant to treat all six directions equally, it is hard to imagine a cleaner foundation.

6. When a cell “exists”: the key board rule

One of the greatest advantages of axial/cube over offset is the simplicity of determining whether a coordinate belongs to the board at all. For a board of radius 8, we define:

Then a cell belongs to the board if and only if:

or, equivalently:

This is one of those formulas that changes everything. Instead of manually describing how many cells each row has, where each row begins, and where it ends, we have one clean condition. It is easy to write in code, easy to understand, and it removes an entire class of boundary errors.

7. Neighbors: the six fundamental movement directions

On hex grids, the fundamental spatial relation has six directions rather than four. For axial (q,r) in a pointy-top orientation — exactly the orientation used by this board — we can define the six neighbor vectors as:

That means from any cell (q,r), the six adjacent cells are:

This is precisely where the superiority of axial over offset becomes obvious. There is no “if the row is even, do this; if odd, do that.” Neighbor logic is the same everywhere on the board.

From the perspective of movement design, that is invaluable. If later a piece moves one cell, two cells, along a line, into a ring of control, or through a special directional rule, the entire movement system rests on a consistent geometric base.

8. Distance: the most important strategic function

In any abstract strategy game, distance is one of the key ideas. It defines tempo to the center, effective control, mobility, and the positional value of a location.

For axial coordinates, the most convenient way to compute distance is through cube logic. Since:

for two cells For two cells A = (q₁, r₁) and B = (q₂, r₂), we define:

Then the hex distance is:

which becomes:

In practical terms, that means something very important: distance on the board stops being a vague visual intuition and becomes a function.

That function can then be used everywhere:

• to define movement range,

• to measure access to the center,

• to build AI heuristics,

• to evaluate positions,

• to design victory conditions,

• to create mechanics based on “the closer to the center, the more…”

For visual or animation purposes, one may also use Euclidean distance in axial space. That can be useful for screen effects or measuring purely geometric closeness independent of legal step count, but it does not replace hex distance as the metric for actual movement.

9. Why we rejected letter-based notation

In some forms of hexagonal chess, notation resembles standard chess: letters for files, numbers for ranks, sometimes accompanied by an additional numerical system. This works well for games that remain deeply rooted in chess tradition: two sides, clearly distinguished forward directions, established notation habits, and so on.

But this board functions differently. Here, the center matters more than “top” and “bottom,” and the six corners matter more than two opposing fronts. Because of that, letter-number notation, while readable, would introduce an unnecessary conceptual pull toward a classical two-sided board.

A pure numerical notation (q,r) is more austere, but also more honest. It reflects the actual geometry of the project without pretending to be more chess-like than it needs to be.

That was one of the more important decisions: not to stylize the game as chess any more than necessary.

10. How to name cells for humans and for software

In the end, the system separates into two layers.

Layer 1: program logic

The program operates only on:

The third coordinate remains implicit:

This is the true system. All operations, movements, distances, neighbors, boundary checks, lines, and any future board transformations should be handled here.

Layer 2: presentation

For the human-facing layer, the exact same notation can be shown directly:

with no letters added. That keeps everything consistent between the board, the code, and the design process. If a player or designer sees the cell “3,-2,” that is exactly the same cell the engine knows as “3,-2.”

It may not be the most “chess-like” solution, but it has one major advantage: there is no translation layer between the language of the board and the language of the implementation.

11. How to label the axes on a physical board

For a digital working board, it makes perfect sense to print (q,r) directly on every cell. This speeds up testing, improves design discussions, and prevents ambiguity.

For a physical board — especially if a wooden version is envisioned later — a cleaner solution may be preferable: label only the axes along the edges.

That way:

• the cells remain visually clean,

• the board feels more elegant,

• and yet it is still easy to locate a line of constant q or constant r.

This is both aesthetically stronger and fully compatible with the axial system. In practice, it means that values from −8 to 8 are marked along the board edges for the two visible axes, while full (q,r) notation remains available in design materials, test diagrams, and the digital interface.

12. How the math becomes an application

The greatest strength of this whole approach is that it moves seamlessly from paper to code.

In the application, there is no need to draw a board image and then guess where each cell is. The board can be generated directly from the coordinate logic:

• iterate through all (q,r) pairs in the range −8 to 8,

• keep only those that satisfy

• compute screen positions for every valid cell.

For a pointy-top orientation, the screen mapping can be expressed as:

This matters because the interactive version of the board is not a visual trick. It is already the first real embodiment of the system. The hexagons are not just shapes in an image; they are objects generated from their own coordinates. Once that is true, adding the next layers becomes straightforward:

• hover behavior,

• click selection,

• highlighting,

• pieces,

• legal move previews,

• turn logic,

• save states,

• even future position analysis.

13. What this system gives the project as a whole

Choosing axial (q,r) is not just mathematically elegant. It produces very concrete design advantages.

First, it guarantees symmetry. All six directions are treated equally. That is vital on a board with six corner starting positions.

Second, it creates clarity. When testing movement mechanics, every piece can be described either as a set of vectors or as a rule operating along lines.

Third, it offers scalability. If the board size ever changes, many rules remain identical; only the radius parameter changes.

Fourth, it creates a clear bridge between design and code. This is especially important when the designer is not yet a programmer. A good spatial model makes it much easier to work with AI, collaborate with a developer, or gradually learn implementation without drowning in special cases.

Fifth, it provides a natural basis for AI and heuristics. Everything the computer will later need to evaluate can be reduced to clean questions:

• how far is this cell from the center?

• how many neighbors does it have?

• is a piece standing on a line leading toward the central objective?

• how many steps separate it from an opponent’s corner?

• does a move preserve control over a sector of the board?

Without a coherent coordinate system, those questions would turn into a pile of exceptions. With axial, they become ordinary calculations.

14. The central conclusion

The main conclusion of the entire process is simple: this board chooses axial by itself.

Not because axial is fashionable. Not because tutorials recommend it. Not because someone else used it elsewhere. But because:

• the board is a regular hexagon,

• the center is the most important cell,

• the six corners carry equal structural weight,

• the design requires full directional symmetry,

• and the future program will need to calculate movement, distance, adjacency, and position without unnecessary exceptions.

Hexagonal chess as a broader tradition shows how different notational systems can emerge depending on board shape and design assumptions. It also shows how strongly geometry affects movement logic. But this particular project leads to its own conclusion.

The final set of design assumptions is therefore:

It is a stable foundation on which the next stages of the project can be built: movement rules, victory conditions, interface logic, game-state representation, and the first real fragments of the application.

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Below I am attaching the HTML code which, when opened in a browser, will display an interactive version of the board with visible coordinates.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
  <title>Interactive Hexagonal Board</title>
  <style>
    :root {
      --bg: #111111;
      --panel: rgba(20, 20, 20, 0.88);
      --panel-border: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.12);
      --text: #f3eadf;
      --muted: #d2c3b4;
      --outline: #5f3a18;
      --light: #caa57f;
      --mid: #9a744a;
      --dark: #805428;
      --accent: #5c2d08;
      --hover: #e6d0b6;
    }

    * { box-sizing: border-box; }

    body {
      margin: 0;
      background: var(--bg);
      color: var(--text);
      font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
      overflow: hidden;
    }

    #app {
      width: 100vw;
      height: 100vh;
      position: relative;
    }

    svg {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100%;
      display: block;
    }

    .hex {
      stroke: var(--outline);
      stroke-width: 1.8;
      cursor: pointer;
      transition: filter 0.12s ease, stroke-width 0.12s ease;
    }

    .hex:hover {
      filter: brightness(1.12);
      stroke-width: 2.4;
    }

    .hex.is-hovered {
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And this is exactly where the basic loop begins — the one without which it is hard to describe a human being honestly. Something reaches us. Something is picked up. Something among it is treated as important. Something begins to mean something. And then a response appears: a movement, a tightening, a pause, a gesture, a word, an action. Only then does the system close the loop. And only then does it become clear that a human being is neither a passive screen onto which the world is projected, nor a solitary mind floating above the body. A human being is much closer to a living system moving in a constant circuit: receiving, organizing and responding. Work on active sensing and perception–action loops increasingly points in exactly this direction: organisms do not simply take in information from the world, but actively help shape it through orientation, movement and selection.

In everyday life we think about it much more simply. We say: I saw something, I heard something, I understood something, and then I reacted. It sounds as if everything happened in a neat line. First reception, then analysis, then response. The problem is that a living organism does not actually work in such an elegant order. Reception itself is already selective. The whole world does not arrive in us at once; only some fragment of it does. Even at that stage, something is already being singled out and something else is fading into the background. The organism does not register everything equally, because it cannot. It has to work economically. It has to pull out whatever, in that moment, may matter for life, movement, safety or purpose. Sensorimotor approaches describe perception not as passive copying of reality, but as an active extraction of what is useful for further action.

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You can see this in very ordinary situations. You are sitting in a noisy place and suddenly you hear your own name. You are walking down the street, lost in thought, and with one quick movement you avoid someone stepping into your path. You enter a room and before anyone says a word, you already feel that “something is off.” These are not grand acts of conscious analysis. They are much more like fast, working assemblies of a situation: something stands out, something is registered as relevant, something triggers a readiness to respond. The world does not come to us as a pure recording. It comes more like material that must be organized immediately.

And this is where cognition appears. Not as an abstract luxury, but as the middle layer of the whole loop. Cognition is the moment when an incoming signal stops being merely a signal and begins to occupy some place in a working model of the situation. This is not yet deep reflection or philosophy. It is a simpler but more fundamental operation: this matters, this does not; this is familiar, this is not; this is threat, this is opportunity; this can be ignored, this requires an answer now. Contemporary frameworks such as predictive coding and active inference try to describe exactly this kind of process: the organism does not wait for the world to explain itself, but constantly compares what arrives with expectations, bodily state and possible action. At the same time, newer reviews also stress that these frameworks are still being developed and tested, rather than standing as a final and complete theory of mind.

This matters because it makes it easier to see that meaning does not fall onto us like a ready-made label. What something means depends on the whole situation of the organism. The same sound can be irrelevant when you are calm and alarming when you are tense. The same silence can feel like relief or threat. The same touch can be support or violation. What reaches us as a stimulus does not become meaningful in a vacuum. Meaning emerges at the meeting point of signal, bodily state, situational memory, expectation and readiness to respond. That is why separating “pure perception” from the rest of psychic life is so artificial. From the very beginning, the organism receives the world as something toward which it must somehow position itself.

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And once it must position itself, reaction appears. This is the moment when the whole process becomes much more visible. Because reaction does not begin only when a person has fully “understood” what is happening. Very often it begins earlier. In a glance. In the tightening of the neck. In the withdrawal of a hand. In the turn of the torso. In the held breath. In moving closer to something or away from it. The organism is constantly responding, even when it has not yet formed a clear story about what is going on. Research on perception–action loops and sensorimotor control shows exactly this: effective behavior depends not only on incoming signals, but also on internal feedback and the ongoing correction of the relation between perception and action.

This means that expression is not something added at the end, like decoration attached to the “real” process of cognition. It is its natural continuation. The body does not merely go through a situation — it shows it. Through posture, gesture, the setting of the shoulders, the direction of the gaze, the pace of movement, the way it touches, the tension of the face, the loudness of the voice. Very often we answer with the body before we answer with words. And other people, in turn, receive us in exactly that way: not as pure content, but as a whole field of signals. Research on emotional body language and gesture has long suggested that signals from the whole body are automatically read and matter for decision-making, communication and action. Gesture is now often described not as an ornament of speech, but as part of communication and cognition itself.

At this point it is worth pausing for a moment with language, but only as much as this article needs. Because language is not yet the large separate subject here — that will come later. For now, it is enough to see it as a special case of expression. A human being does not only respond through movement or facial expression, but can also respond through meaning carried outward. A person can name a situation, warn, ask, calm, invite, coordinate action with others. In that sense, speech is not something detached from the body, but a more complex form of the organism’s response to the world. Contemporary work on gesture and language argues precisely this: human communication is embodied from the outset, and gesture and speech work together rather than belonging to two separate worlds.

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When we look at all of this together, it becomes clearer that perception, cognition and expression are not three separate boxes. They are much closer to three aspects of one movement. Something reaches me. Something in it is picked out as relevant. Something is organized into a working sense. And then something comes back out of me into the world. That movement can be very simple: a sound, an orientation, a step to the side. Or it can be much more complex: tension, interpretation, decision, a sentence spoken to another person. But the logic remains similar. The organism does not merely have contact with the world. It is constantly doing something with that contact.

And that is exactly why this article closes the first large segment of the whole series. We began with matter. Then we saw that matter organizing itself into life becomes a living process. Then we saw that the body not only persists, but receives signals. And now it becomes visible more fully that from all of this there emerges a system capable of a loop: receiving, processing and responding. We have not yet reached attention, memory, language and narrative in their fuller sense. But we already have the foundation. We have a living organism that is neither a dead block of matter, nor merely a chemical reaction, nor a passive receiver of the world. It is a system that stays alive partly because it can turn contact into sense, and sense into response.

So perhaps the most honest way to put it would be this: a human being does not simply live “in the world” the way a piece of furniture sits in a room. A human being lives in a loop with the world. Something touches it, moves it, passes through it — and it, in turn, gives back movement, gesture, tension, voice and action. From this perspective, perception is no longer a quiet viewing of reality, cognition is no longer a cold computer in the head, and expression is no longer an optional extra added to some “real interior.” They are three moments of one process through which life becomes contact.

And perhaps this is where we have to begin before moving any further.
Not with grand concepts.
Not with identity.
Not with the meaning of life.

But with this simple, fundamental fact:

that a human being is the kind of being that is constantly receiving something, doing something with it, and answering it in some way.

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Strictly speaking, older source traditions do not always treat these as perfect one-to-one synonyms. In Britannica’s overview of Slavic religion, the ovinnik is tied to the drying-house, while the gumenik is linked to the storehouse. At the same time, both belong to the same broader logic: each important part of the household economy had its own spirit, attached not to abstraction, but to a very specific place. For the purposes of Uboże, that closeness is exactly why I am comfortable bringing them together around one grain-bound figure.

That distinction matters to me because Ovinnik does not belong to the center of the house in the same way Domovik does, and he does not belong to the intimate heat of the bathhouse in the way Bannik does. He belongs to the space of harvest, storage, drying, and waiting — to the place where grain becomes security, but also where one accident can turn a season’s work into loss. Older descriptions of Slavic place spirits repeatedly connect them to specific structures and even to the very timber from which those structures were built.

Even the word gumno helps set that tone. In Polish historical usage, it referred not only to a farmyard with buildings, but earlier to harvested grain laid up for threshing. That older meaning is especially useful to me here, because it keeps the figure close not just to architecture, but to the material reality of grain itself.

That is what drew me to this character.

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Ovinnik/Gumiennik feels less like a domestic companion and more like a keeper of reserves — a figure tied to what has already been gathered, what must be protected, and what remains exposed to fire, weather, neglect, or simple human carelessness. Britannica even notes a nineteenth-century Russian sacrifice made to the ovinnik in the drying house, which says a lot on its own: this was not treated as a decorative superstition, but as a spirit whose place had to be acknowledged.

When I started drawing him, I wanted that to stay visible.

I did not want him to feel like just another small creature with a different hat. I wanted him to carry something of the barn, the threshing floor, the stored crop, and the rougher edge of farm life. That is why the design kept moving toward something simpler and sturdier: a compact silhouette, a worn cap, a piece of grain in the mouth, and a presence that feels a little more rural, a little more practical, and a little less “inside the home” than the other figures.

For me, that is where this character began to work.

Not as a perfect reconstruction, and not as an attempt to pin down one final folkloric image, but as a way of giving shape to a place and its mood. If Domovik is closer to the house itself, then Ovinnik belongs to the stored harvest just beyond it — to the part of the world where survival has already been gathered, but still has to be guarded.

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And, as with the earlier figures, part of the work here was simply spending enough time with him for that logic to become visible. Sketching, simplifying, adjusting proportions, stripping things back, and trying to find the point where the character starts to feel less invented and more placed.

For now, this feels like the right direction.

Not final, not closed, but clear enough to move forward.

This is where the nervous system enters the picture in a more explicit way. Not yet as the grand seat of thought, language or identity, but as something more fundamental and more immediate: the medium through which the organism begins to register that there is anything at all to respond to. Before there is interpretation, before there is meaning, before there is a story about what is happening, there has to be contact. Not philosophical contact, but biological contact. Something changes. Something is detected. Something is transmitted. Something begins.

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On the surface this may sound obvious. Of course we see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Of course the world reaches us through the senses. But the moment we look at that process a little more carefully, it stops being obvious in the ordinary sense and becomes strange again. Because the world does not simply arrive in us already translated. Light does not enter the eye as “a tree,” “a face,” or “the sky before rain.” Sound does not arrive in the ear as “music,” “danger,” or “someone calling my name.” At the beginning, there are only differences: wavelengths, vibrations, pressure, temperature, chemical molecules, stretch, acceleration, changes in internal state. For a living organism, the world begins not as ready-made meaning, but as biologically relevant differences that may need to be detected. Sensory systems do exactly that: specialized receptors detect physical or chemical changes and convert them into signals the nervous system can use.

That is why receptors matter so much. They are not just technical details hidden somewhere in biology textbooks. They are the first threshold between world and organism. Photoreceptors in the retina respond to light. Hair cells in the inner ear respond to mechanical movement and sound. Receptors in the skin respond to pressure, stretch, vibration, temperature and potentially damaging stimuli. Chemosensory receptors respond to molecules in the air and in food. And the body has other systems too, less visible in everyday language but just as important: systems that track balance, limb position, internal tension, fullness, breath, heartbeat, the state of the gut, the chemistry of blood. In other words, the organism does not only sense the world “out there.” It also senses itself from within.

This matters because it changes the whole image of what perception begins as. We usually imagine sensing as something almost transparent: there is a world, I open my eyes, and there it is. But biologically speaking, there is always a translation happening. A photon has to trigger a photochemical cascade in the retina. A vibration has to bend structures in the inner ear and open mechanically sensitive channels. A touch on the skin has to deform tissue enough for mechanoreceptors to fire. An odorant has to bind and start a chemical sequence in olfactory cells before a neural signal appears. A stretch in the stomach or a change in blood chemistry has to be detected by internal sensory systems before the body can register hunger, fullness or distress. The nervous system does not receive “the world itself.” It receives transduced signals: the world turned into nervous activity.

And this translation is already selective. Every organism lives inside a certain sensory window. There are things it can detect and things it cannot. There are patterns that matter to its survival and patterns that simply do not exist for it in any usable way. Even for us, what becomes available depends on the biological equipment we have. We do not see all wavelengths. We do not hear all frequencies. We do not consciously notice most of what our internal organs are doing unless something intensifies or goes wrong. So from the very beginning, contact with reality is shaped by the structure of the receiver. The nervous system is not a neutral mirror. It is a living filter.

You can feel this more directly if you leave the grand senses for a moment and return to very ordinary experiences. Think of how quickly you withdraw your hand from a hot surface. Think of the way your whole body tenses before you have fully identified a sudden sound in the dark. Think of how your stomach can drop before your mind has formed a sentence about fear. Think of how you can raise your arm and know roughly where it is even with your eyes closed. Or how, after spinning around, the world keeps moving for a moment although the room itself is still. All of that points to the same thing: the organism is not waiting passively for conscious thought to begin before it does anything. It is already sensing, orienting and adjusting.

This is one of the most important things the nervous system teaches us about ourselves: not everything begins with thought. Some things begin with reaction. In the withdrawal reflex, for example, the body can respond to a harmful stimulus through spinal pathways before the signal has completed the longer journey involved in reflective awareness. You touch something painfully hot, and your hand is already moving away before you have properly said to yourself, “this is hot.” The reflex arc is one of the clearest reminders that the organism is built to protect itself with speed, not elegance. First the body avoids damage. Only afterwards does the mind catch up and explain what happened.

This should make us a little more careful with the language we use about awareness. We often talk as if the body were waiting politely in the background for the mind to issue instructions. But in fact the body is already in motion long before that. The nervous system is continuously receiving input, routing signals, amplifying some, dampening others, integrating information from different sources, and preparing or triggering responses. This is true at the level of basic survival, but it is also true in quieter and more ordinary situations. A shift in posture changes muscle feedback. A sudden drop in blood sugar affects attention and mood. Internal discomfort changes what stands out in the environment. A racing heart changes how the next sound is received. What we call “experience” begins to form much earlier than our conscious commentary on it. Interoceptive frameworks now describe this as a broad system for sensing internal signals and regulating physiological, behavioral and cognitive functions, rather than as a minor side-channel of bodily noise.

At this point, another simplification becomes impossible to maintain: the idea that there are only the classic five senses and then “everything else.” In real life, the organism is held together by a much wider field of sensing. There is exteroception, which tracks what comes from outside: light, sound, touch, smell, temperature. There is interoception, which tracks what comes from within: breathing, heartbeat, hunger, gut signals, visceral tension, inflammation, fatigue. And there is proprioception, which tells the organism about the position and movement of its own body. Without that last one, even the most basic action would become strangely difficult. You would not only struggle to move smoothly; you would struggle to feel where your body ends and how it is arranged in space. The body is not simply in contact with the world. It is also in constant contact with itself.

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This is also why the nervous system should not be imagined as a bundle of cables carrying messages in one straight direction. It is much closer to a dynamic network of selection and coordination. Signals come in from many sources at once. They are not all treated equally. Some demand immediate action. Some stay in the background. Some become part of posture, muscle tone or autonomic adjustment without ever becoming a clear conscious event. Some are combined with others and only then become salient. Even what we call a single experience is often already a synthesis: a sound in the distance, a turn of the head, a rise in tension, a visual orientation, an internal sense of uncertainty, a readiness to move. By the time we say “I heard something,” the organism has often already done much more than hearing.

And here we arrive at something especially important for the logic of your whole series: the nervous system does not simply connect us to the world; it begins to shape what a world can be for us at all. Not yet in the full sense of interpretation or meaning — that comes later. But already at the level of availability. What can be picked up. What can be distinguished. What can trigger orientation. What can alter the body. What can become a priority. In that sense, the nervous system is not yet the storyteller, but it is the first editor of contact.

There is also a quieter side to this. We usually think of sensation in dramatic moments: pain, noise, sudden movement, bright light. But most of nervous life is not dramatic. Most of it is subtle. Tiny changes in pressure as you sit in a chair. The background sense of your feet touching the floor. The unnoticed balancing work of the vestibular system as you walk. The slight shift in breathing when someone enters the room and you become alert without yet knowing why. The fact that your eyes are never actually still, but move in small ways that keep visual input alive. In this sense, contact with the world is less like opening a window once and more like an ongoing negotiation. The organism keeps sampling, adjusting, checking, recalibrating. It does not simply receive a finished reality; it keeps working to stay in touch with one. Sensory systems are increasingly described not just as passive receivers but as parts of active sensing loops, where movement and orientation shape the incoming signal itself.

If we gather all of this together, the picture becomes clearer. The body we described in the previous article as a living process is also a receiving process. A system exposed to change, equipped to detect it, and built to translate it into signals that can guide regulation and action. Before there is recognition, there is registration. Before there is interpretation, there is transduction. Before there is narrative, there is nervous activity linking organism and world.

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And perhaps that is the first truly concrete meaning of having a nervous system: it is the way a living body stops being sealed inside itself. It becomes reachable. It becomes interruptible. It becomes orientable. The world can touch it, move it, alarm it, nourish it, destabilize it, and call it into action. The nervous system is the first great opening.

So the next time we say that a human being “perceives the world,” it may be worth remembering that perception does not begin with a finished image in the mind. It begins much lower and much earlier. With cells that can register a difference. With receptors that can turn change into signal. With pathways that can carry that signal onward. With reflexes that can protect life before thought has time to arrive. With a living system that is, before anything else, exposed and responsive.

The body, then, is not only a process that keeps itself alive.

It is also a process through which the world first becomes able to enter.

Unlike a household spirit tied to the hearth or the everyday rhythm of the home, Bannik belongs to the banya— to a place that is still close to domestic life, but already carries a very different mood. In traditional Rus culture, the bathhouse was not only a place for washing. It was also connected with healing, divination, and other moments of transition, which made it both useful and unsettling at the same time.

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That is exactly what interested me about him.

Bannik is not simply another domestic creature. He belongs to a room shaped by steam, heat, silence, privacy, and a certain kind of tension. Folk belief treated the bathhouse as a place with its own rules, and the spirit tied to it had to be respected accordingly. Traditions recorded around the bathhouse include gestures of caution, offerings, and ritual behavior directed toward spirits understood as “masters” of a specific place.

When I started drawing him, that difference became the most important thing to hold onto.

I did not want Bannik to feel like Domovik with a different prop. I wanted him to feel more local to his own space — more shaped by the bathhouse itself. That is why I kept returning to objects and forms associated with bathing: the bucket-like hat, the beard-wrapped towel around his body, the sleepy but slightly watchful expression, the sense that he belongs somewhere warm, enclosed, and a little uncomfortable.

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What helped me most in thinking about the design was the idea that these beings are often defined less by one fixed appearance and more by the place they inhabit. Research on bathhouse-spirit traditions also points in that direction: what matters first is the connection to the bathhouse itself, and only then the visual form that grows out of it.

Because of that, drawing Bannik became less about illustrating folklore literally and more about trying to condense a place into a character.

I wanted him to feel old, compact, and slightly severe, but not overly dramatic. A figure that could still fit the broader tone of Ubože, while carrying a different atmosphere than the beings connected more directly to the house. Less familiar, perhaps, and a little more awkward. Not necessarily hostile, but not fully comforting either.

That balance was important to me.

Part of the work here was simply spending time with the figure long enough for that tone to become visible — sketching, simplifying, adjusting shapes, and trying to understand what should stay and what should be reduced. So this was not only a matter of “designing a character,” but of trying to give proper form to something that already had a cultural and symbolic weight behind it.

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For now, this is the direction that feels right.

Not as a final answer, and not as a perfect reconstruction, but as a version that begins to place Bannik where he belongs: not in the center of the home, but just beside it, in a room with its own heat, its own rules, and its own spirit.

And this sounds simple, almost too simple. We all know what a body is. We wake up in one, drag it through the day, feed it, wash it, get annoyed with it, compare it to other bodies, sometimes punish it, sometimes try to improve it. It is probably the most familiar thing we have. And that familiarity is precisely the problem. The body is so close to us that we often stop seeing it clearly. We talk about it as if it were a piece of equipment. My back. My stomach. My heart. My skin. It sounds natural enough, but hidden inside that language there is a very particular image: the body as an object. A thing with a certain shape, certain parts, certain functions. Something you can point at, describe, maybe fix, maybe decorate, maybe dislike — but still, at the end of the day, a thing.

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The trouble starts when we look at it a little more closely. Because from the inside, the body does not behave like a thing at all. A thing can sit there and remain what it is. A chair does not have to reassemble itself every moment in order to keep being a chair. A stone does not need to monitor its own temperature, water balance, fuel supply and internal damage just to stay there for another hour. The body does. The body only remains “itself” because it is constantly doing something. Blood keeps moving. Cells keep dying and being replaced. Hormones rise and fall. The immune system keeps patrolling. Muscles tighten and release. Temperature is being corrected, fluids redistributed, nutrients stored or burned. Even when you are doing apparently nothing, the body is busy with the enormous labor of not falling apart. Research on cellular turnover makes this point in a very concrete way: different tissues renew at very different rates, and the human body sustains itself through ongoing replacement and repair rather than material stillness.

So the body is not best understood as a stable object, but as a continuity achieved through change. It lasts not because nothing changes, but because enough things keep changing in the right direction. That may sound abstract, but in everyday life you can feel it very directly. Hunger, for example, is not just an inconvenience interrupting your plans. It is the body informing you that the current state cannot continue indefinitely without new fuel. Fatigue is not simply “weakness” in the moral sense we so often project onto it. It is often a message about energetic cost, depletion, overextension, the price of holding everything together. Thirst, shivering, sweating, tension, drowsiness — these are not footnotes to life. They are part of the body’s running commentary on the conditions of its own existence.

This is why the language of “balance” can be misleading if we imagine it as stillness. Biological balance is not a calm pond. It is much closer to a tightrope walker making constant corrections. Classical physiology called this homeostasis: the maintenance of viable internal conditions despite outer change. More recent work has pushed that picture further and argued that the body does not only react after something has gone wrong, but often anticipates what is coming and prepares for it in advance. That is what the concept of allostasis tries to capture: regulation not as passive repair, but as active, predictive adjustment. In other words, the body is not just trying to return to normal after disturbance. Much of the time it is trying to stay ahead of the disturbance altogether.

You can notice this in very simple situations. If you step outside into cold air, you begin to shiver before your body simply “fails” from cold. If you spend the day under strain, your appetite, tension, breathing and sleep will often begin to shift long before you have fully formed thoughts about being overwhelmed. If you stay awake too long, the body does not wait politely until your schedule is finished. It starts collecting its debt. And sleep itself is not some passive interruption of real life. Sleep is one of the ways the body keeps the whole system workable. Hormonal rhythms, glucose regulation, appetite signals and metabolic function are all closely tied to sleep and circadian timing, which means that sleep is not just “rest” in the poetic sense, but part of the deeper regulatory architecture of the organism.

At this point something important becomes visible: the body is not only regulating itself, it is also sensing itself. It is not blind on the inside. There is a whole layer of life made of internal signals: the subtle emptiness of hunger, the heaviness of exhaustion, the warmth of relief, the pressure in the chest before panic has found words, the strange floaty feeling of low blood sugar, the dense quiet after a good meal, the loosening that comes after finally exhaling. Science calls part of this interoception — the processes through which the nervous system senses, interprets and integrates signals coming from inside the body. And this matters because interoception is not only about survival in the narrow sense. It is connected to affect, memory, motivation and even the feeling of self. Before we build a polished narrative about who we are, something in us is already registering: I am tense, I am safe, I am depleted, I need, I hurt, I can rest now.

This also changes the way we think about pain. We usually imagine pain as a simple alarm bell: tissue damage happens, pain appears, problem solved. But pain is much more complicated than that. It is not a neat photograph of injury. It is an experience — sensory, emotional, interpretive — through which the organism tries to protect itself. Sometimes pain corresponds closely to tissue damage. Sometimes it lingers long after the damage has healed. Sometimes it becomes intense in the absence of obvious injury. So when we say “my body hurts,” we are not always naming a mechanical defect in the same way we would name a crack in a wall. We are describing a protective experience generated by a living system trying to manage threat, limit cost, and force a change in behavior.

The same is true, in a different way, of illness. We often think of illness as the moment the body stops doing its job. But many features of illness are not simply signs of a body giving up. They are part of a reorganization. When you are sick and want to lie down, withdraw, sleep, stop talking, stop moving, lose appetite, become strangely indifferent to things that usually matter — that is not always mere “failure.” Very often it is the body shifting priorities. Energy that would normally go into exploration, performance, sociality and outward engagement is being reallocated. The world shrinks because the system is trying to defend and repair itself. Research on sickness behavior describes exactly this kind of coordinated change: the organism becomes less outward-facing and more protective, not randomly, but as part of an adaptive response to inflammation or infection.

And if illness can reorganize the body around protection, then health should probably not be imagined as some flawless, permanently comfortable state. Health may be closer to a certain flexibility — the capacity to recover, to absorb stress without collapsing completely, to return from perturbation, to reorganize without losing all coherence. In that sense, the body is less like a machine that is either “working” or “broken,” and more like an ecosystem that can remain alive across fluctuations, damage, weather and repair. This is one reason why our modern habit of seeing the body mainly as a visual project can be so distorting. If we treat it only as appearance, we miss the fact that its real work is not to look finished, but to stay viable.

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That matters especially because we usually pay attention to the body only when it hurts, malfunctions or embarrasses us. When it wants something urgently. When it interrupts our plans. When it betrays us by being tired, anxious, sick, aging or limited. But that is only half the picture. The body does not only signal danger and deficit. It also signals safety. There is a whole biology of relief. Warmth after cold. The deep exhale when something frightening is over. The heaviness of the body sinking into bed after a day of strain. The regulation that comes from being held, from soft pressure, from a familiar voice, from touch that tells the nervous system it does not have to remain on guard. Recent work on affective touch suggests that comforting, affiliative touch can regulate affect through homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms, which is a more technical way of saying something most people already know with their skin: sometimes the body calms not because it has thought its way into safety, but because it has been brought there.

Seen from this angle, pleasure also becomes harder to dismiss as a luxury. Pleasure is not always excess, distraction or indulgence. Sometimes it is part of regulation. Eating when you are truly hungry. Resting when you are deeply tired. Warming up when you are cold. Stretching when you are locked in tension. Feeling your body soften after being braced for too long. Of course pleasure can be chased compulsively and turned against us — that is a different story. But at its root, pleasure is often the organism’s way of marking that some need has been met, some burden lifted, some costly tension reduced. The body does not only punish. It also releases.

This is also why the body cannot be treated as a secondary layer beneath the “real” human being. It is not the packaging for a mind, nor the vehicle of a soul waiting to get on with more important things. It is the first place where human life becomes concrete. Not in a mystical sense, but in the plainest one possible. Before you interpret the world, your body is already orienting in it. Before you explain yourself, your body is already trying to keep you warm, fed, hydrated, rested and safe enough to continue. Before you tell the story of who you are, your body is already writing a quieter story underneath it: about thresholds, rhythms, depletion, repair, effort, relief, pain, and the endless labor of staying alive.

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Maybe that is why the body can feel so humbling. It keeps reminding us that we are not detached observers floating above life, but living beings dependent on timing, resources, conditions and limits. You can ignore it for a while, override it, numb it, discipline it, decorate it, train it, shame it, praise it, compare it, even hate it. But underneath all of that, the body keeps doing the same patient work: checking, adjusting, compensating, enduring, warning, restoring. It keeps trying to make one more hour of coherence possible.

So perhaps the body is not best understood as something we have, but as something we are continuously happening through. Not a thing standing in the world, but a process negotiating with the world from moment to moment. A process through which hunger becomes thought, tension becomes mood, fatigue becomes limitation, pain becomes protection, touch becomes safety, and rest becomes repair. If the previous text asked us to stop seeing the human being as a static object, this one asks us to go one step further: to stop seeing the body as static too.

Because the body is not the shell around the story.

Not simply what it should look like, but what kind of logic it should carry. What kind of weight. What kind of relationship it should have to the house, to the people inside it, and to the atmosphere of the world around it.

Because once a figure like that appears, it is never only a design problem. It is also a question of tone.

And in a world like Ubože, tone matters from the very beginning.

If I wanted to approach this in the strictest possible ethnographic way, I probably would have begun elsewhere. Domovik, as such, belongs most clearly to the East Slavic sphere: to the figure more commonly described in scholarship as the domovoy or domovyk, a house spirit tied to the household itself. In standard reference and ethnographic accounts, this being is associated with the stove, the hearth, the threshold, the inner life of the home, and even with older layers of ancestor worship. Polish materials do preserve related household-spirit traditions, especially in eastern borderland contexts, but the domowoj/domovik type enters that space through a recognizably Eastern Slavic background rather than as a universally stable Polish household figure.

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That distinction mattered to me from the start, because I did not want to pretend I was reconstructing something purely “original” or purely “national” in a neat and uncomplicated sense. I am not doing reconstruction here. I am building a world. And worldbuilding, at least for me, becomes more honest when it admits the distance between source and form instead of trying to hide it.

This is also why I kept Ubože as the main name of the project.

There is a specifically Polish history of naming domestic spirits, and historical research shows that these names did not remain stable over time. Terms that once referred to protective household beings later drifted, in early modern usage, toward meanings closer to a genie or even a devil. That semantic instability is part of what makes this terrain so interesting to me. It means that the old domestic figure was never fully fixed. It moved. It was reinterpreted. It became heavier in some contexts and gentler in others. And that gives me room to treat Ubože not as a museum label, but as the tonal center of the world itself.

Within that world, however, I wanted one figure to be more directly bound to the house.

That is where Domovik begins to make sense for me.

Not as a perfect equivalent to every Polish domestic spirit, and not as a claim that all these traditions are interchangeable, but as a more precise household presence: a being tied to the interior, to habitation, to order, to proximity, to the moral and emotional weather of a home. That is an inference I am making from the overlap of the sources rather than a one-to-one historical equation, and I think it is better to say that openly.

What I find especially useful in the scholarship is that it does not really give us one single, final image of Domovik.

It gives us something better than that.

It gives us a field of recurring functions.

Across sources, the house spirit is less a fixed illustration and more a stable cluster of relations: it belongs to the house, it guards the family and its wealth, it reacts to disorder, it marks the threshold between safety and disturbance, and it often appears not as a fully visible creature but as a presence signaled by knocks, sounds, moods, warnings, or small disturbances in domestic life. Regional studies from Ukraine also show that the image is not uniform; the domovyk can be described differently from place to place, with different emphases placed on appearance, function, ritual practice, and moral character.

That, to me, is the crucial point.

The figure is not strong because it is visually standardized.

It is strong because it holds together a set of meanings: house, warmth, continuity, vigilance, memory, habit, protection, mood. Even the more familiar descriptions of the domovyk as a small, hairy man living near the stove are less important to me as literal instructions than as traces of a deeper pattern: this is a being that belongs where the house is most alive, most inhabited, most shared.

And once I understood that, the visual decisions became easier.

It meant I did not need to chase a falsely “correct” reconstruction of a folkloric creature.

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I did not need to produce an illustration that merely says: old man, beard, hut, folklore. I could instead ask a different question: what visual language makes a figure feel truly domestic, slightly uncanny, protective, old, compact, and memorable all at once? What kind of silhouette belongs to a being that is small enough to disappear into a corner, but strong enough to define the feeling of a house?

This is where my own version begins to separate itself from the archive while still remaining answerable to it.

The Domovik I am building for Ubože does not need to look like a direct ethnographic recovery. He needs to retain the house-bound logic of the older figure. He needs to feel as though he comes from the interior of a home rather than from the outside world. He should carry warmth, secrecy, and a slightly stubborn dignity. He should feel ancient, but not monumental. Familiar, but not entirely harmless. Not evil, but not empty of force either.

That ambiguity is important, because the sources themselves do not give us a purely sentimental creature. The domovoy/domovyk protects, but he also judges. He rewards proper order and can react badly to neglect or offense. In some regional material, the image even becomes more ambivalent or openly dark under later Christian reinterpretations. So the figure is never just “cute.” It is intimate, but intimacy is not the same thing as softness.

There is another reason I do not want to over-literalize him.

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The broader Slavic and Balkan material shows just how fluid the role of household guardian can become. In some Balkan traditions, that domestic protector is not imagined primarily as a small old man at all, but as a serpent bound to the house and the family line. For me that is a very useful reminder: the deepest layer of the figure is not one single body shape. The deepest layer is the bond between spirit and dwelling. The house comes first. The visible form comes later.

So in Ubože, Domovik becomes the principal household being not because I need him to stand in for every Slavic domestic spirit, but because he gives me the clearest way to hold several things together at once.

He allows the house to become a living place rather than a neutral setting.

He allows domestic space to have its own psychology.

He allows humor and strangeness to coexist.

And he allows me to place one figure exactly where I want him: close to the home itself, close to its rhythm, close to the things that gather around everyday life without ever fully becoming visible inside it.

That is also why I kept the world’s title as Ubože while letting Domovik settle more specifically into the role of the house-bound being within it. Ubože remains, for me, the broader tone: the wider field, the name that holds the atmosphere of the project. Domovik, by contrast, becomes more local, more interior, more precise. Less the name of the whole world than one of its key domestic intelligences.

The images throughout this post follow that process from sketch toward a more resolved figure. Not because the final answer has already been found, but because each stage makes the next decision slightly more visible.

That is usually how these things reveal themselves anyway.

Not all at once, and not in a straight line.

First as a tone.

Then as a relation.

And only after that, as a character.