When the lights went out
When the world pauses for a moment – A day in the blackout
I'm sitting in a café.
In front of me is my laptop.
A cup of coffee.
My beloved Sudoku book.
Lunch is routine: writing, preparing posts, reviewing applications, working on my novel.
Later, I want to drink my favorite hot chocolate (even though it's quite warm today).
A day like any other—until suddenly the power goes out.
At first, everyone smiles.
A brief outage. A technical glitch?
People remain seated.
They continue drinking.
They trust that things will soon return to normal.
But the minutes drag on.
The coffee machine is silent.
The conversations fall quiet.
New guests arrive and are put off.
The café empties.
The streets fill up.
Some people bring out chairs and sit outside on the asphalt, as if the sun could save what the internet has lost.
People wait.
But what are they waiting for?
No internet.
No cell service.
No news.
Just rumors whispered on street corners:
"All of Spain affected."
"Maybe an attack."
"Maybe... something else?"
A friend says:
"Aliens!"
But whatever it is, suddenly I find myself in the midst of this silence.
In the middle of a world that is constantly buzzing—and now simply stops.
Blackouts as a reflection of our dependence
I realize how deeply entangled we are.
In power outlets.
In screens.
In signals that flow through us like invisible nerve pathways.
What remains when these connections break?
An empty Sudoku puzzle.
A black laptop.
A city looking out onto the asphalt...
and waiting.
What remains when everything falls silent?
Perhaps exactly that:
Silence.
Time.
A moment that cannot be filled—but must be endured.
Sometimes a power outage is not a disaster, but a moment of genuine silence.
Perhaps in moments like these, it's not about finding solutions right away.
Instead, it's about asking questions:
How much control do we really need?
How much connection do we really need?
How much of it is real—and how much is just a power cable away?
A future that breathes differently
The power came back on later.
Not everywhere.
Only partially.
Carefully.
Some traffic lights remained dark, as did some houses.
Mobile internet? No chance.
It no longer felt normal when a screen lit up or a cell phone vibrated.
Perhaps we need moments like these.
Not as a disaster, but as a reminder.
That real connection does not run via radio masts.
That resilience is not stored in cloud services.
And that the true heartbeat of a city does not pulsate in Wi-Fi,
but in waiting, in endurance, and in togetherness.
Perhaps the real blackout is not the loss of electricity.
But rather the imperceptible fading of our ability to truly connect,
to inner strength and human interaction –
long before the first screen goes black.
You may also be interested in these thoughts:
➔ About the quiet seconds in which life breathes.
➔ About the question of whether chance really exists—or whether something else is at work.