“And suddenly, Bartek appeared; his great green crown blooming across the road. What a giant. So I pretended I could not see him yet. I was too shy to look at this tree”, writes Urszula Zajączkowska, a poet and biologist, describing her encounter with the arboreal colossus.

I seem to have no trouble ploughing through the sticky entrails of scientific laws for hours on end. I can draw complex dependency graphs of strange occurrences from the lives of plants, measure and count all data, conclude it all in a plump, round sentence without a comma in sight. And yet, I know what I know. And now I will say it: despite all that time spent counting and writing, I cannot stay immobile for too long. I have always been restless, and it will never change. The only way I can work is when contemplation is laced with spontaneous explosions of bending and flexing the body (nobody in the world of academia knows this, so please don’t pass it on). That’s why on some late evenings I run through empty university corridors, screaming things that don’t sound very pretty; or I gallop up and down the stairs, praying I don’t twist my knees and that the security officers don’t notice me. During the day, I dance in my laboratory; I jump in an almost normal way. Sometimes, I do push-ups near the microtome I use for dissecting plant bodies. (Between these exercises, I sometimes put my serious face on and give lectures). And when I need to achieve an extraordinary level of focus – whenever I feel I am nearing the crucial points of the most difficult cases – I pull myself up on to the partition walls in the university bathroom.