Fugue

Something about the way I perceived Reality has been fractured, broken away, eroded, shattered. Patterns I started to glimpse became more and more obvious, and yet I could rarely make sense of them no matter how hard I tried. I would become too focused on trying to make perfect sense of everything - absolutely every single detail.

It all culminated in my decision to go to Peru for a few weeks. There I became further involved in the mystery I like to call the 'kindness of strangers' - a lesson I haven't yet fully processed for myself but that involves receiving unexpected help or acts of kindness from complete strangers crossing my path seemingly only long enough to offer very specific help, guidance, or simple kindness. And so all the patterns that connect every dot within my own life are becoming this ever-interconnected cosmos of their own, somehow, where everything is nothing and nothing is everything... where chaos is order as much as order is chaos. Where the threads are the same even if the image looks different.

Beside dwelling further on the kindness of strangers I also realised I could have died but I didn't realise that fully until a doctor pointed that fact out to me. There I'd been, standing on top of mountains, worrying about altitude sickness and the nasty bout of flu I'd caught, determined as I was to reach Machu Picchu... yet all along the one thing that could have killed me in the night was the wrong medication I'd been given and to which I was allergic. Doc said: "You were very lucky to escape with only a rash..." Yes, especially in the middle of a trek in the Andes.

But all this seems to vanish into the background of existence in general when I stop for a moment to connect the dots - circumstances, lessons learned along the way through mistakes, people or strangers met on the way, words exchanged, chance encounters, missed opportunities and those that just seem to pop up out of nowhere... It's not about whether there is meaning or sense, or even some 'plan' in the endless chains of events or not, it's about the fact that as they unfold they always seem to allow for further growth - or lack thereof - as part of a continuous process that goes on for at least as long as one is alive.

Thinking about the 'kindness of strangers' makes me wonder about my own self, and how perhaps the world or 'universe' is somehow showing me through these strangers a better way of projecting myself when it comes to dealing with other people... because let's face it, I've never really been good in terms of human relations. I used to dream of Love and Friendship but all I knew was based on imagination and fantasy, and in reality I had never learned to love. It's hard to explain. I've always been so self-involved, so very focused on my inner world and thoughts that the rest of the world became a stranger I failed to relate to - but only because I let myself grow increasingly cut off from the source.

It's been a strange, eventful year... but it wasn't all the travelling that made much of a difference in the end because by the time I was on to trip number 4 or 5 I'd already grown more aware of the fact that Beauty, or what some may call a 'heightened sense of perfection', can be found anywhere in life... it just depends on the perspective or angle we take or that we choose to adopt. Perhaps the same goes for Reality itself as well as people and how they (but also our own self) manifest themselves, and perhaps if I understand the deeper ramifications of such things - namely that I am the master of a reality in which the universe I seem to experience outside of me is but a direct response to my own reflection/ways of manifesting myself - then I can hope to reach something far more meaningful than so-called happiness or fulfilment in material terms.

Maybe I'm just dreaming again. But then again maybe the universe as a whole is really like an ever-expanding elastic band we can choose to neglect, keeping it forever twisted on itself in a knot, or to stretch out with both hands to see just how much it/we can grow.