Upon leaving behind a whole chapter of my life to start a new one I know nothing about but can only embrace in all its scary uncertainties and unknown factors, this is what came to me as the only explication needed:

"All I know is that it just wasn’t for me, and I couldn’t be whatever it is they wanted me to be."

What use is reason, logic or even wisdom in a world that lacks all three most of the time? You can’t rationalise what makes no sense, and you can’t make sense of people who follow random patterns that lead them nowhere.

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” – Stephen King

Game over

She, who once was,

Now lies dead in a pool

Of her own blood, 

Killed of her own volition. 

She, who is dead,

Ripped her own heart 

Out of the golden cage 

The world had created for her. 

She died a slow, agonizing death, 

Watching the lifeblood spilled 

Onto the fertile ground, a deathly cradle

From within which she must rise anew.

Dead.

Dead.

Dead.

Ties

"What does that mean—tame?"
"It's an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."
"To establish ties?"
"Just that," said the fox. "to me, you're still nothing more than a little boy who's just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I'm nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you'll be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world …"

[...]
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…"
"Yes that is so", said the fox.
"But now you're going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes that is so" said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the colour of the wheat fields."
~ From "The Little Prince" by Antoine de St. Exupery

nox animae

I feel like… I feel like Neo when he was still trapped in the Matrix, having to go to work in an office full of drones who always knew he didn’t belong and he was the only one who seemed oblivious to it. The film may not have shown it on screen, but I wonder if Neo as a character would have lied in bed at night, eyes wide open to the ceiling in the dark as he pondered endlessly why he never seemed to fit in anywhere he went. Yet while he spent his time wondering what it was that made him feel like a leper among others, all the others always saw that he simply never belonged and they, themselves, kept him at a distance exactly because they could feel that difference and could not understand why he was acting as though he did not see it for himself. 

“Can’t you see what we see?” the people that form the matrix would probably ask in defiant wonder. “You don’t belong here and yet here you are always pretending that you do, but you can’t fool us. You can’t fool us, though you may have managed to fool yourself.”

Perhaps after another long while spent staring at the ceiling in the dark, asking himself pointless questions pertaining to his sense of alienation within the context he so desperately tried to fit into, he finally came to his senses by starting to look outside the box. By walking away from all that is mainstream and obvious to focus on the in-betweens and all that is overlooked.

In other words, instead of looking at the chair, bed, sofa and desk in the room, he started looking at the space between all these obvious objects we deem part of our reality, wondering: what if, in truth, reality was what lay in the apparent void between all that can be seen? 

But I am not Neo, and I'm falling apart.

A piece of nothing

I feel tired in general… I know I should count my blessings and be grateful for all that I do have. I know that, and I try everyday to be and feel grateful because everywhere there is a reminder of how much worse things can be for people. What kills me is this nagging lack of satisfaction, this… disease of the mind, or soul, which never finds solace in anything because nothing is ever enough, and the grass always looks greener elsewhere. It’s so bad… so wrong and misguided. I know that, and yet the feelings are there. I feel beside the point, and more and more I feel these horrible pangs of jealousy or envy…. And so long as I do I know it will only serve to stunt me.

Why can’t I let go and be at peace inside and out? It’s like… the more time I spend in society, the more infected I become with what I can only call corruption and greed. Long gone are the days when I was able to write my thoughts to a much deeper level… now… now it’s just a daily stream of rambling moans. I’m drowning in a sea of inane banalities of life and there is nothing I can do or will do about it. I don’t even write much at all anymore. The stories have come to a halt and all I do is procrastinate at best. 

It’s 22:22 and tomorrow I have to go back to work… there’s a noisy helicopter flying around… I guess we all got used to those things breaking the silence of night from time to time… it just becomes part of the background after a while and nobody questions it anymore. It’s like those white trails across the sky… most people don’t even notice them anymore, they even mistake them for a completely natural occurrence at times… that’s the essence of what we call reality right there: it’s not about what really ‘is’, it’s about how we perceive it.

It's all about perception.

Destiny

… I keep asking myself: is this what I wanted? Is this what I wanted to be, and is this what I wanted to do? Is this where I wanted to be, and is this where I want to be heading?

All I know right now  - or what I seem to have come to understand - is that we can either spend our lives ‘drifting with the flow’, passively accepting whatever is randomly thrown at us… or we can go past the fear of the unknown and possible failure to make active decisions to go after what we want rather than just make do with whatever happens to be on our way. Perhaps that’s what Plato’s allegory of the cave was all about in concrete terms?...

It is… about daring to reach for what we take responsibility to achieve (not necessarily only going for what we want), and that takes enormous strength of character. It is much easier to take a backseat as a person and be guided by others, society and random occurrences coming our way. I should know, that’s what I’ve spent my life doing so far.

It was, indeed, always easier to go along with what was already unfolding. Instead of trying to figure out what it is I really wanted to do with my life, instead of playing an active role in the steering of my life directions – instead of being the captain of my own ship – it was much easier to go with the flow and passively play along. In effect, all the crap that falls on me now is my own fault. By choosing not to choose, I chose the way things would be for me anyway. Ironic, isn’t it?

Another painful realisation dawned on me the other day, and this one was pretty shattering... I came to realise that I am not a writer, I simply fancied the idea of being one. This is what happens when we are lost in a world of illusions... it's like living life through a mirror image of life rather than life itself... or like mistaking the shadow of an object for the object itself - see where I'm going with this? I have so far only been able to experience life believing that the shadows I saw were the real deal when clearly they were always only the shadows cast by what I failed to see and yet sought all along.

Anyway, here is where I get stuck: as much as I've come to understand the vital importance of embracing a more active role in one's own life (which seems to revolve a lot around the notion of taking responsibility for oneself and one's own actions from start to finish),  I can't deny that I've been left to feel as though there are bigger forces at play... More peculiarly, perhaps, I've come to notice - and not without much growing pains in the process - that if things are meant to happen, they just will, even just due to such laws as that of continuity. It will just flow, with no need to force events. In other words, as much as we are able to take an active role in our lives, we are still caught in a continuous unfolding of processess whereby everything is bound to unfold the way they are 'meant to unfold', as seamlessly as water trickles down the mountain to join the river... we get stuck and suffer endlessly fighting against that, wishing some things would happen when they were never part of the unfolding process... and I know I'm extremely guilty of that.

I = (X * Y) / X - I

Where Y = ∞ – R

And Y ≥ X

I once saw a sky full of stars… but I was only little at the time, and though I watched the celestial parade in awe, I don’t think I knew just how rare a moment it was to witness