Someday

One day none of this would matter. This pain would be nothing but a faint memory, covered by many days and new experiences, overwhelmed with love and growth.

You’ll look back and it’ll be just a blip in your life, lost in a myriad of milestones and transformations, irrelevant and distant.

Seek that day, prepare for it! Fill your path with valuable moments and lessons, cover the distance between now and then. Teach yourself, love yourself. Take care of yourself and others. Strive for respect and kindness.

Be patient.

Spring

Our flowers are now growing in an empty garden.

Oh well

– What are you doing?

– Trying to forgive the birds…

– But you can’t stand them! Chirping at 4am!

– Yeah, but it’s not their fault I’ve become so bitter.

So long

It’s been so long, I could barely find my own blog on the WordPress interface. My previous post was written in May, last year.

Since then, I’ve been busy living, learning, exploring. I’ve had ideas for this blog, but they were sad and not good enough. They didn’t match the life I was living, or so I thought. I dismissed them all.

I was happy. That song, stuck in a moment, no longer represented me. It no longer does.

I would often look back and realise how much I had learnt, how stronger and wiser I had become. Sometimes I fear I am still far from being wise. There’s still so much work to be done.

The end of the year had cast a shadow over all that. The lessons I’m learning now are lessons I didn’t need to learn. Yes, this is making me stronger, yet, at the same time, selfish and bitter. My life wasn’t perfect, but I was working on making it better. Now, my life has fallen into a category I do not like, with certain labels and compromises I am not fond of.

I have no answer and no outcome I can possibly imagine brings me any joy or comfort.

Still reading

I’ve been busy lately.

Perhaps you see very little link between the Charles of 1267 with all his newfangled French notions of chastity and chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of today, a computer scientist deaf to the screams of the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy. But there is a link: they all rejected or reject the notion of possession as the purpose of life, whether it be of a woman’s body, or of high profit at all costs, or of the right to dictate the speed of progress. The scientist is but one more form; and will be superseded.

Now all this is the great and timeless relevance of the New Testament myth of the Temptation in the Wilderness. All who have insight and education have automatically their own wilderness; and at some point in their life they will have their temptation. Their rejection may be foolish; but it is never evil. You have just turned down a tempting offer in commercial applied science in order to continue your academic teaching? Your last exhibition did not sell as well as the previous one, but you are determined to keep to your new style? You have just made some decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession, has not been allowed to interfere? Then do not dismiss Charles’s state of mind as a mere conditioning of futile snobbery. See him for what he is: a man struggling to overcome history. And even though he does not realize it.

Time

The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things—as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence was firmly adagio. The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted to do, but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of leisure available.

One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil boredom.

Every day is a new day

Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

 

[Later edit:] This was almost prophetic. Sometimes I can’t believe it.

Zen

Well, not really, but definitely much better. Not only do I know what I’m doing wrong, I also have a strategy to fix it.

Stressed

I’m so angry, I need to scream at somebody.

Losing hope

I know it’s not the end, I know there’s so much more left to do, I know it will be OK at some point, but I am oh so… tired.