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

I don't recognise myself these days. I am experiencing what it feels like to live 'outside' oneself, meaning that I have been embracing the busy and social side of things for several weeks now, and the effects on my person are puzzling. It has divided me so greatly that I am at an even greater loss than ever before, it seems.

What do I mean exactly by 'living outside' myself?... It just means that I have barely spent any time alone to stare at a wall, thinking and/or dreaming for quite some time now. This means my diary writing (jotting down my thoughts) has also dried up because I'm effectively spending more time around people, filling my days with 'things to do' when I'm not already completely absorbed by work...and there it is, the end result... what feels very much like an EMPTY head.

And yet the more time I spend outside myself, the more addictive it gets. This is interesting, truly. I am getting to experience what it must be like to be, well, most people.

This is all an indulgence... it must be. But the divide within has never been greater, or bitchier. One long-lost side of myself (the social one) is fighting against the I that I have been shaped to become and neither seems ready to negotiate. But a decision must be reached - a balance must be struck... very, very soon. Because if I don't strike a balance soon, I know for a fact I will veer too much towards the empty-headed side where one loses themselves to the outside world, and if I do that I already know that I am doomed to crash and burn.

The battle within continues.

As to how I'm left feeling, well, it's like the song embedded above: though the music sounds upbeat and fun, the lyrics themselves are tragic. This, I suppose, is called the irony of Life.

O majestic Raven

Standing alone against all,

The colour of death is your burden,

But still, you rise above the crowd

Of pretty, pitiful flocks around

That jump away in fear

As your black shadow looms,

How shrewd and brave you are!

But they will never know

For all they can see

Is the colour of death

Heavy upon your shoulders.

What I know of love:

"It’s a rare thing – to meet someone, anyone, who will lose their head for you to the point of doing almost anything for you, and it shows in how much they suddenly care and pay attention to everything related to you… isn’t that rare? Of course it is, so when you come across it and you suddenly become someone’s personal sun you can’t help being drawn to it. And if you’re allowed enough time together then you’ll grow increasingly appreciative, and therefore attached… and then it doesn’t really matter whether you fancied that person from the word go or not because suddenly what you seem to be feeling goes well past that even if it can’t be described beyond that point.

But what am I talking about, here? It was all over before midnight, and like in the Cinderella story my own story morphed back into a pumpkin... I woke up the next day with a start, thinking: “None of it was real, was it? It’s all over now… I’ve woken up.” "

Life in Colours

Only in hindsight do we start to comprehend more fully what has been lost, and what can never be retrieved...

As I stood in front of an easel supporting the weight of a blank canvas, and as I mixed colours together with a thick brush in search of a perfect shade of grey, the teacher said: "Finding the right colour is about striking a balance. You don't want your shade of grey to lean too much towards black, but you also don't want it to lean too much towards white. You want to create a colour that ultimately has no name."

A colour that ultimately has no name... these words reminded me of Life in general, as a whole, beyond the safe - but illusory - conceptions of the mind resting on black and white notions in vain attempts to tame the seemingly chaotic realm in which we are immersed from the beginning.

If all of life rests on balance then where beauty blossoms that beauty must necessarily be smeared with darkness, spoiled and scarred by the ugliest of our world just to reach that balance. For instance, one who is born in the bosom of beauty or closer to perfections (the 'clever', the ' gentle' or 'innocent', the 'beautiful'...) finds himself wishing it was not so, for the path to balance is bound to be strenuous and filled with ample servings of dark omens and occurrences even just to dilute the beauty, or the intelligence - whatever extreme one was in possession of and that kept him too far off the balance. The further away from that balance, the darker the night will become to dilute the light, and vice versa.

Just like colours on a canvas. Until we reach a state that ultimately has no name.

Scattered

I took a train to Cambridge yesterday and only chose the destination based on my ability to find the cheapest possible tickets to whatever destination... I didn't care where. As I sat on the train watching the countryside pass me by, I wrote a few lines down:

"I can see the appeal of living a life with no strings attached, making the most of the company of people as they happen to cross your path... always moving forward as though soaring constantly towards the unknown. Perhaps I was a Gypsy in a past life?

Making the most of each encounter, no matter how trivial or brief, and learning from these encounters even when at first glance it all seemed pointless or meaningless - random...

I sometimes think back on my dear strangers in the night, these people who entered my life only briefly to offer a helping hand at the least expected moments... I think back on the kindness of strangers, and I wonder about the likes of Hector in Peru, of Kho in Hong Kong, and so many others before them... so many faces that waltzed into my life only too briefly like passengers on a train that only meant to stay on until the next stop. Somehow, these strangers remain etched on the side of a road less travelled - mine.

And as I think about them I wonder if they, too, sometimes wonder about me.

Watching the landscapes pass me by is like staring at an infinite blur made up of every imaginable shade of green the eye could possibly fathom. The mist of rain that weighs on the tree tops looks like a veil made of the finest gauze negligently left behind by one of the Gods above, and suddenly it all takes a profoundly haunting turn...

Yes, I have been bewitched by the hauntingly surreal aspects of the English countryside and its rolling moors bathed in a seemingly infinite fog that rarely ever shifts but for the unexpected streaks of dull sunshine piercing through the cover of glowering clouds frowning their way across the mighty horizon."

Shallow days

I’m so cut off from so-called reality as men have built it… this endless stream of complexity justified by the words “because we live in the modern world” makes no sense to me. Instead of moving towards a world we can better understand, our capacity to comprehend even the most basic things around us is increasingly challenged. I mean, nowadays even what you thought was beef turns out to really be horsemeat, for instance. And this is symptomatic of the illusion-based world we live in.

 

The same goes with this pathetic, widespread belief that we are better off today than at any other point in time – according to what or whom, exactly? History books full of constant revisionist attempts, with stories that change as often as every school year ticking by? The telly and its smartly dressed people that look like they must know what they’re talking about? What everyone else around is happy to parrot regardless of what the source may be for that parroting in the first place? All of the above?

Let’s face it. So-called modern life (as currently experienced and witnessed in the 'developed world') is an addiction. Modern life for the most part means easy ways and convenience, and since we’ve spent decades adapting to things that supposedly make our lives easier and more entertaining we’ve become terribly afraid of losing those crutches – for these are mere crutches. This… never-ending need for more comfort, or more ‘things’ in general, this endless obsession with always rising or gaining more in some way, and the incredible fear in which so many of us live of losing what we have, or the comfort we have, is all symptomatic of enslavement disguised as some twisted notion of ‘freedom’. 

 

We would not need means of escapism and therefore such things as ‘entertainment’ (and here I really mean to point at the whole grotesque 'industry' that developed just to entertain us, the mindless sheep) so much if we were content with our lives just as they are. We are in fact brought up, or conditioned, to be unhappy with our condition from the start. There is much to be gained for the fat, corrupt cats that rule on an elite level, because if they can make us believe from a young age that what we have or even what we are is not good enough they can ensure that we grow up to buy into the illusion-based reality pulled before our eyes in which we’ll spend our existence trying to escape a ‘bad’ condition, or our own selves, by using means such as escapism through entertainment and spending/consuming endlessly to fill a falsely created void that was never there to start with but was added in us through years of conditioning since birth.