# What do you find when you spend three days alone in the forest?

Momo Maximilian Feichtinger · Education · planted 2026-09-03, last grown 2026-09-03 · 8 min · https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/vision-quest

**I spent three days alone in the forest with no food, no phone, nothing to read and nothing to write. On the first day I rebuilt the school system in my head. On the second day I was on the floor. I came out with three words I then wrote under my emails for years: explore, enjoy, share.**

Video: [Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto, Lightning Talks Munich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDWrHy05J6Q) · Five minutes, told on stage without preparation. The whole story the way I tell it in public.

It started with a trip. My mother booked the flight to La Palma because she did not want me sleeping outside in the snow. That one trip turned into two years on the road. I wanted to know whether I could manage without knowing anything in advance. Those years were about growth. I went into panic on purpose and into excitement on purpose, and almost treated myself as a cartoon character I could steer and shape.

![A walking stick being pushed ahead into a narrow round hole in a rock wall, with a bright opening behind it.](https://zukunftbilden.eu/assets/denken/vision-quest.webp)

*The mental model: you push the stick ahead into the narrow hole before you know where it leads.*

## Three days, only water and fire

The idea is not mine. It comes from a tradition of indigenous peoples of North America, in which young people go into nature alone for a few days as they become adults. I took it from the outside, without being part of that tradition, and that belongs in the telling. The frame: alone, no phone, nothing to read, nothing to write, no food. Water from a small waterhole and a fire.

## The frame I put those days into

A year later I wrote those days down, in a book manuscript that never came out. There they stand inside a borrowed frame. Joseph Campbell laid old myths and modern films side by side and found a pattern that sits in almost all of them, the hero journey. I sorted my own life into its stations. That is a large gesture for a twenty one year old, and I let it stand, because it explains why I walked into the forest at all: I was looking for the trial the pattern puts at that point.

### The stations, the way I sorted them back then

- The call. The mockery in primary school, and everything that followed for six years.
- The refusal. For six years I did not want to see what was actually happening.
- The departure. The evening I said enough.
- The threshold. Asking my first love and getting a no.
- The mentors. Audiobooks, courses, later a person on a beach who showed me how to let go.
- The trials. School leaving exams, a driving licence, break ups, moving out, travelling without a plan.
- The greatest challenge. Three to four days alone, the last night awake at the fire, standing.
- The elixir. One word, and what came of it.

## Day one and day two

The first day was wonderful, full of ideas. I renewed the teaching system in my head, worked out how it could be built as a system for distributing resources, and solved world hunger along the way. By the evening I had solved everything and went to sleep stressed.

> the first day was amazing, I was excited, full of ideas
>
> Momo in the talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto", Lightning Talks Munich

On the second morning my body did not move. I had slept on rock, maybe that was it. I dragged myself to the water and was too tired to get at it. So I sat on a stone. Someone very tired sits almost the way someone depressed sits: shallow breath, shoulders turned in, head down. I had nothing to do anyway, so I let myself fall into it.

Then the questions came. In front of me a water pipe came out of the rock, and I stared at it and started shouting at myself. I called myself a liar: I believe I am connected to everything, and I am not even that water pipe. My body was limited and so was my time. I wanted to solve world hunger and be a clown and an astronaut, and I could not do it all at once. Three metres in front of me was a cliff. I looked down and thought about what it would be like to jump. I would dissolve, become part of everything, finally be unlimited. I allowed myself to go into the dark. If thoughts like that visit you, talk to people about them.

## The word

Then a question arrived that tipped it, and I still ask it when I am stuck. What is good about the thing you are despairing over? A moment later a single word jumped into my head, big and bright.

> one word popped into my mind and it flooded my body
>
> Momo in the talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto", Lightning Talks Munich

The word was enjoy, and I was back immediately. I thought about my little brother, seven years old, and about my little sister. Children try everything and do not ask beforehand whether it pays off. That is how enjoying works.

> One word stood in front of me as if in glowing bold white letters. Enjoy.
>
> Momo in the manuscript "Unzerstörbares Mojo", early 2017, translated from German

## The stick and the waterfall

On the way back to the water there was a hole in the rock wall, a pipe that water normally runs through, less than a metre across. You only get in lying flat, crawling. I pushed my walking stick ahead into the hole and crawled after it, over stones, over sand, over rock. It was completely dark and hot. After forty or fifty metres I saw light. On the other side lay a large waterfall.

That is where the third word came. I wanted to tell someone. The tap I had been too tired to reach that morning became a picture of myself: take in what comes from everywhere, let it flow through, enjoy it, pass it on. If we share what we enjoy, one body and one lifetime stop being the end.

The order in which the three words arrived stands more precisely in the manuscript than in the talk. Enjoy came first. On the way back I asked myself what this enjoy actually is, and saw that it is an active one. To get there you first have to explore the way a child does. That was explore. And when I came out on the other side of the pipe and wanted to tell someone straight away, share was there. Under the waterfall I sang the three of them in the order in which they work: explore, enjoy, share.

### The motto in three sentences

- Explore openly. Try things out instead of calculating them in advance.
- Enjoy courageously. Enjoying is a skill, and it takes courage, because it takes the ups and downs with it.
- Share what you enjoy. What you pass on no longer hangs on your time and your body.

## What is left of it today

Ten years later I gave a speech in a dream and dictated it as I woke up. It is called [Three Keys](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel) and names three things: clear values, a north star, and the things you unreasonably want to keep doing yourself. The third key is the word from the forest, only sharper. The north star in the speech is education, rethought from first principles. That is what I already had on day one, in a form nobody could use.

> that is my life motto that I'm living right now: explore, enjoy, share
>
> Momo in the talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto", Lightning Talks Munich

The middle part sits in the school. At Paideia a mentor builds the world, sets a challenge, holds the consequence and does not deliver the solution. The hero story belongs to the child. I got mine because nobody helped me for three days. A child should not need a cliff, and that is where the work is.

Two things I would say differently today. I let myself fall on purpose, as if that were a technique. I would recommend it to nobody and would not set it up that way again. And what worked was the quiet. For three days nothing came in, and that can be arranged harmlessly. From the same summer comes a second find: a deeper purpose, and an exchangeable form for it. That later grew into World Modeling.

The first minutes of a crisis stand in [What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft) What an uncomfortable feeling reports stands in [What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/was-will-ein-gefuehl-sagen) The moment I first stood up for myself stands in [When do you stop living someone else's script?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/der-schalter) What became of the thought from day one stands in [How long does an idea need before it becomes a school?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wie-aus-einer-idee-eine-schule-wird)

### Sources and links

- [Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto, Lightning Talks Munich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDWrHy05J6Q) · The public talk, five minutes, in English.
- [Three Keys, the speech](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel)
- [What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft)
- [When do you stop living someone else's script?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/der-schalter)
- [How long does an idea need before it becomes a school?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wie-aus-einer-idee-eine-schule-wird)

## Margin notes

- **Randnotiz** In the talk I say three days, in the 2016 interview four, in the manuscript three to four. I have left all versions standing, because after ten years I cannot separate them cleanly.
- **Verknüpft**  [Three Keys, the speech](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/drei-schluessel), [When do you stop living someone else's script?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/der-schalter), [What do you do in the first five minutes when everything falls apart?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wenn-alles-schieflaeuft), [How long does an idea need before it becomes a school?](https://zukunftbilden.eu/en/denken/wie-aus-einer-idee-eine-schule-wird)
- **Beleg** Talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto", Lightning Talks Munich, public on YouTube, around five minutes. Interview "Eine Reise in das Selbst", 14 July 2016, 37:35 minutes, set to private. The English quotes come from the talk, the German material from that interview transcript. The hero journey as a frame, the stations, the water pipe, the word and the order of the three words stand in "Unzerstörbares Mojo", my own book manuscript, written in early 2017, unpublished.

## How this note grew

- 2026-09-03: Deepened with the manuscript "Unzerstörbares Mojo" from early 2017: the hero journey as a frame, the water pipe, and the order in which the three words arrived.
- 2026-09-03: Planted from the public talk "Spontaneous Talk: My Life Motto" and an interview from 2016.

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