The Nomad is a series of stories, fascinations, encounters, observations, experiences, joy of the moments by me, Ulrike Reinhard – all around my travels. Stay tuned!
I recently watched the documentary FreiSein. FreiSein is a quiet but insistent invitation to stop functioning and start living. In the documentary, brain researcher Gerald Hüther explores how many of us unknowingly sacrifice our inner freedom by adapting to expectations, roles, and fears that were never truly ours. He asks what happens when we dare to question these invisible constraints and reconnect with what genuinely matters to us — curiosity, connection, meaning, and responsibility for our own lives. FreiSein is not about escape or rebellion, but about remembering who we are beneath conditioning, and having the courage to live accordingly.
Hüther repeatedly points back to childhood as the state in which we naturally knew what freedom felt like: curiosity-driven, playful, open, intrinsically motivated, unafraid of failure. In FreiSein, childhood isn’t nostalgia, but a reference point — a reminder that freedom is our original condition and that many of our limitations are learned later through obedience, evaluation, and adaptation. His core argument is that becoming “free” as adults often means unlearning what separated us from that early sense of aliveness, trust, and self-directed learning.
Watching this documentary sent me straight back into my own early childhood — and then gently nudged me to write about it. I added several new passages in my new book to the chapter in which I reflect on my early years, and somehow they unlocked something that had been there all along. Reading them now, I feel they finally lay the groundwork for who I am today. 🙂
Here we go:
“We lived in Rohrbach, a working-class suburb of Heidelberg, Germany. The kind of place where kids still belonged to the street and not to schedules. Our apartment was in one of three apartment houses owned by a wealthy, very strict, and profoundly know-it-all family. You know the type: correct about everything, warm about nothing.
Their grandson used to play with us when we were little. Smart kid. Quiet. Years later, when he was seventeen or eighteen, he killed himself. The story that made the rounds was that he couldn’t breathe inside his grandparents’ rigid, hyper-capitalist worldview – especially under his grandfather’s domineering presence. True or not, it shook me deeply. How does a young, intelligent person even arrive at such a thought? I couldn’t comprehend it then. Honestly, I still can’t. I never liked his grandparents much, and after that, my affection for them dropped well below freezing.
The houses themselves were from the 1920s – four stories tall, with creaky wooden staircases leading up. We started out on the ground floor. Later, when I was four or five, my parents moved us up to the third floor, which was a major life upgrade: my brother and I each got our own room. Luxury! In total, about twenty families lived in those three buildings, with somewhere between twenty and thirty children. Translation: you never had to ask, “Anyone want to play?” You just stepped outside.
And stepping outside meant stepping into a kingdom. Behind the houses stretched a massive courtyard – fifty or sixty meters long, wide open, no fences, no divisions, no adult micromanagement. Just one big square of hard-packed ground, sandy and pebbly, perfectly designed to scrape knees and produce clouds of dust. Falling hurt, yes – but somehow that was part of the deal. You got up, wiped off the blood, and carried on like a hero.
A narrow path separated the yard from a long line of vegetable gardens. Almost every apartment came with its own garden, it was simply part of the package. Some even had little lawns and garden huts where people grilled sausages in summer. Even back then, it felt like a small luxury. Today, such a featis unimaginable in rented housing where every square meter is measured by its return on investment.
And beyond the gardens – this is where childhood really exploded – were towering trees and wild, open fields. No fences. No streets. No warning signs. No “playground rules.” It wasn’t officially ours, but it might as well have been. We had free access, and more importantly, freedom. The older kids naturally looked after the younger ones. Parents were… somewhere, trusting that we returned home for supper. Nothing bad ever really happened.
So we explored. We followed our impulses. We climbed trees. We made up games, worlds, alliances, drama. We hid, ran, sat quietly, argued, invented entire universes, and abandoned them a week later. We lived inside our imagination and used the landscape as our stage. There was no boredom – because boredom requires a lack of freedom, and we had plenty of that.
Looking back, I’m convinced this kind of environment is rocket fuel for children. Space to roam, the chance to take small risks, to solve problems on your own, to learn how to deal with others without adults hovering over us every second. We didn’t just play – we grew. Confident, curious, grounded. What we had wouldn’t fit on a balance sheet, but it shaped us for life. We were rich in possibilities, and that’s the only way that really counts.
It was, without exaggeration, heaven on earth for a child.“