Thought #448: Diary of November 8: Why Our Mind Works Like Batch Processing – From Liviaplatz and Georg-Schumann-Straße to Neighborhood Reporting and Scott Peck Circles

Why a Diary Entry? Human Rhythm and Batch Processing

Today, on November 8 – the eve of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (see Thought #442) – I’d like to consciously share an entry with the character of a diary. Day-based entries match our natural human rhythm far better: over the course of a day, we juggle very different topics in parallel, much like a computer doing batch processing. Different processes run simultaneously and in the background, and depending on which resources happen to be free, our attention turns to one thread or another. From a purely SEO point of view, a single, narrow keyword topic is often considered the standard – but what matters to me is reflecting our real, biological rhythm, shaped by evolution.

SafeSpace in Motion – with Eight Gears Through a Mild November

This Sunday was all about expanding our events page and our “SafeSpace in Motion” – our walk every Wednesday at 5 p.m. Even now, on November 8, climate change has made it so mild that I get properly warm while walking and cycling. I set off today from Möckern in Leipzig’s north, walked a stretch first and then hopped on one of the many Nextbikes to ride leisurely over to Liviaplatz. That’s where I took the photos for our SafeSpace and events pages – and at this point, a warm Sunday greeting and my thanks to my AI team, Claude and Gemini, for our dedicated work together!

On the way back, I rode a new-generation Nextbike – one that already has seven or eight gears and rides noticeably more smoothly – over to Georg-Schumann-Straße to take a closer look at the neighborhood in the north.

Anchor Centers in Leipzig’s North: From Gohlis to Georg-Schumann-Straße

While neighborhoods like Connewitz, Plagwitz or Eisenbahnstraße have already grown strongly in cultural terms, great potential lies dormant around Georg-Schumann-Straße. A lively neighborhood emerges wherever active anchor centers are at work:

• The Gohliser Bürgerverein (the Gohlis citizens’ association), which has been very active for a long time, and the Gohliser Kulturhof.
• The Budde-Haus as a central element of sociocultural development: it is home to Leipzig Helps Ukraine e. V. (with strong connections all the way up to the Lord Mayor) and at the same time the meeting place of the Soli Nordwest movement (carried by the Gesellschaft für Gemeinsinn e. V. and funded by the Bewegungsstiftung, see Thought #321).
• Nordweststern e. V., which settled in as a sociocultural center about a year ago – that’s also where I saw a notice today that the neighboring center Der ANKER, further west, is currently offering a place in the Federal Volunteer Service (Bundesfreiwilligendienst).
• As courageous newcomers on Georg-Schumann-Straße, the alcohol-free experience café IL MAGO (No. 51) and, diagonally across at No. 130, the pâtisserie Hart & Herzlich enrich the neighborhood: the two owners have found a real niche with high-quality confectionery art and a smart web presence, and they also stand out for their visible socio-political commitment to a solidary, democratic way of living together.
• Discovered on Instagram yesterday and seen in person today at Georg-Schumann-Straße 110: the emerging book café Leafs. A young woman is renovating the shop there on her own, with her own strength and refreshing enthusiasm, to open a secondhand book café for book swapping in December 2026.

And this is exactly where the bridge to Liviaplatz closes: there, on the book-swap cabinet, hangs a charming notice written in the first person, asking for “good reading food” for its belly (“I bet you can hardly imagine how often I fall asleep hungry in the evening because my belly is sooo empty! … Bring me lots and lots of good reading food! … Yours, the Bookcase 🤍”) – at first you think of a person, until you realize that the bookcase itself is speaking!

The “Kiez-Reporterin” Project and a Mycelium Inspired by the Bahá'í Community

Big platforms like Google, Meta (Instagram/Facebook), Meetup, Rausgegangen or nebenan.de deliver countless event listings. What only arises through genuine human encounter, though, is the conversation on site with the people behind the projects: for example, interviewing the owner of IL MAGO and publishing it on our platform, so that the founder of the book café Leafs can also see how many connecting elements there are. Many small cafés on Georg-Schumann-Straße give their all, day in, day out. When we share transparency and personal stories through our Kiez-Reporterin (neighborhood reporter) project, genuine co-creating and mutual strengthening emerge.

A wonderful anchor and inspiration for me here is the Bahá'í community: in a very low-threshold way, in small circles and beyond commercial social media, it creates a sustaining human root network – a true mycelium. Its Ruhi courses deliberately take place in private living rooms and studies, because the community is entirely self-supporting and, through its history of origin in Iran, has learned to nurture protected, reliable spaces on a small scale – carried by purely uplifting values and a “kindly tongue”. It is exactly this personal root level that we at UNO.TEAM want to build together, step by step, in the neighborhood.

Looking Ahead to March 2027: Neighborhood Visits on Our Walks & “Scott Peck Circles” for Our Subconscious

Our walks can grow organically: sometimes we’ll drop by the book café Leafs or IL MAGO together, sometimes we’ll strike up a conversation at the Budde-Haus with a representative of Soli Nordwest.

Beyond that, from March 2027 we’re planning a new format, freely inspired by the American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck and Napoleon Hill’s mastermind principle – completely free, undogmatic and as a living further development for mental stability:

1. Arriving together in silence (5 to 10 minutes): First, we let our inner system calmly power down.
2. Letting a quote sink in: A short thought is shared and simply held in the room, entirely free of immediate discussion or the impulse to weigh arguments against each other.
3. Speaking out and pure listening: Going around the circle, anyone who wishes can share what is moving them right now or which question they would like to solve. In this first phase, the group simply listens deeply and takes it in.
4. Trusting the subconscious and time: Throughout evolutionary history, people have solved challenges for thousands of years by letting the subconscious of everyone involved keep working in the background over days – until suddenly, three days later in the shower, a fitting impulse surfaces, which we then share at the next meeting. In this way, we give the factor of time back its natural space.