Zsike Peter 🧠

For my mother

You slipped between worlds
the way dusk folds into night…
quietly, without asking permission,
as if even the air had agreed
to make room for your leaving.

The house is still full of you…
the rhythm of your care,
the remnants of your courage,
the aroma of soup that meant
we were all safe.

You were the fiercest kind of gentle,
a storm that learned tenderness,
a woman who crossed borders
with four daughters and no map…
only will, and love, and fire.

Now the sky feels closer,
and I whisper your name
into its wide, forgiving blue.
You are not gone…
you have only crossed
into another universe.

♥️🕊️

Let us cease the vulgar custom of dumbing our language down, and begin, instead, the noble pursuit of smartening it up.

If one must inhabit the digital plane, one might as well do so with verbal dignity.

Here are a few modest proposals for your consideration:

Instead of “lol” say
“That statement has rendered me most amused.”

Instead of “bruh” say
“My good fellow, I am utterly astounded by your actions.”

Instead of “wow” say
“Such marvels leave me thoroughly astonished.”

Instead of “omg” say
“Gracious heavens above, I can scarcely comprehend such happenings.”

Instead of “nah” say
“Regretfully, I must refuse your proposition.”

Instead of “huh?” say
“Pray, could you elucidate the matter once more?”

Instead of “whatever” say
“How quaint. Your opinion is duly noted and promptly discarded.”

Instead of “weird flex but ok” say
“A peculiar boast, yet one supposes it has its charms.”

Instead of “I’m here for the comments” say
“The elevated communal engagement in this buffoonery delights me to my core.”

Instead of “I feel more classy after reading this” say
“Such words do awaken a finer taste within me.”

Instead of “I don’t know” say
“I hesitate to articulate, in fear I may deviate from the highest degree of accuracy.”

Instead of “She ate and left no crumbs” say “She did consume every morsel, sparing none behind.”

Instead of “Happy Birthday!” say
“A most distinguished felicitation upon the annual circumnavigation of the sun that marks your continued existence.”

What other linguistic refinements might one introduce to restore some decorum to our collective discourse?

My mother has only just turned 61, and she’s been fighting cancer with the same elegant defiance that’s defined her whole life.

In early 1989, she escaped the Romanian Ceaușescu regime, risking her life. She kidnapped us, her three children at the time, from our father and started a new life in a country where she knew no one.

Hungary became her new beginning. She worked three jobs at times, came home to cook and clean through the night, and somehow still made room for laughter.

She built everything we had from nothing. Fierce, stubborn, brilliant. My mother never bent — not to circumstance, not to exhaustion, not to dictatorial law, not even to fear. She now has days, if not hours, left with us on Earthside.

It’s been the hardest year of my life watching her fade.

While everything on LinkedIn makes it look like I’m having my most successful year… the Thinkbait book launch, client growth, speaking invitations… behind the scenes has been heartbreak, endless trips to Hungary and back, hospitals, tears, goodbyes, and sleepless nights.

My sisters and I have been giving her palliative care in our family home, because the local hospital discharged her without a care plan in place, and there are no available hospice centres in the area.

It’s been the most traumatising experience I’ve had to endure and I feel guilty for admitting this. Because really, this is about my mother, not me.

I’ve fallen behind on things I care about.

Not seeing my kids for weeks on end.
Thinkbait book orders waiting to be posted from my UK home while my sisters and I have been here in Hungary with her.
Emails, messages and DMs I haven’t had the bandwidth to answer.
Projects I’ve had to slow down or pause entirely.
Friendships un-nurtured.

Luckily, I have the most amazing team who are brilliant at looking after our clients in my absence.

So, to my lovely LinkedIn friends here… thank you for your patience, and please bear with me a little longer.

We never really know what someone is carrying behind the highlight reel, the unspoken suffering, and the battles they don’t speak about.

If you take anything from this, let it be this: be gentler with people. That keyboard warrior comment might just be the last thing they need to read.
There’s always more to the story.

And to my mother… Thank you for teaching me what strength really looks like.


——
📸 My mother in this photo was sixteen.

She’s holding her little sister… the one who died just months later of pneumonia.
Late ’70s Romania. Two girls on a patch of wild grass, pressed against a patterned throw that passed for a photo backdrop in those days.

Write here. Write now.
A new Thinkbait challenge for those who believe writing should feel alive and not infested with beige bot talk.

Every week, I’ll give you a single prompt… something designed to make you THINK, not scroll.

Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is to write your post off the cuff.

No AI, no drafts, no “let me polish this later.”

Just you, your mind, and the page.

You can post your piece straight on your own feed (tag me + use #WriteHereWriteNow), or drop it in the comments below so we can read and discuss together.

Why this matters:

Because most people don’t realise how much of their voice they’ve outsourced.
And the only way to reclaim it is to write.

Write again, unaided by ChatGPT and the likes of.

Not think about writing. Not prompt-engineer your way to fake cleverness that doesn’t really teach you anything…

Just write.

So…

Prompt #1:

📌 Write about a moment that made you pay attention again.

You can take it anywhere:

✍🏼 The first time something broke your autopilot.
✍🏼 The moment you realised you’d been half-living for months.
✍🏼 A sound, smell, or phrase that pulled you back into presence.

My tip: Chase honesty, not perfection.
You might surprise yourself by how good you start getting at this if you do this exercise at least once a week.

Write here. Write now.


🏷️ Save this for later, if you don’t have the time right now, and come back when you’re ready to write up your piece.

#Thinkbait #WriteHereWriteNow

—-
📸 Unsplash / Diego Céspedes Cabrera

Some things are just better done the long and hard way.