Back in Easter I attended a conference in which the speaker cited some quotes from books his father had wrote. The ideas resonated with me, so I looked for the books. After a few days, I realised they were nowhere to be found. All that effort, those ideas, those thoughts… erased by a soft wave…
Read More
A few years ago, I decided to write a letter to my younger self, the child I was. I explained the difficulties he would face, encouraged him, gave advice… as if I actually had something to teach. Then, one day, with a very vivid image in my mind that I will remember for life, I…
Read More
I was reading an earlier post in my blog that felt as it had been written by somebody else. A ‘past me’ that exists no more, not because I no longer subscribe my own opinions, but because the language and reasoning sound… distant. I look at my hands typing. Are they mine? They belong to…
Read More
I feel I sometimes don’t write because I lack enough words, because my vocabulary is so short, so restricted. If I had more words in my medieval chest, what else would I say with them? Would I be able to describe the beauty that I see, that I hear, that I smell? Would I be…
Read More
There is always something that is not right. If only it was a little bit cooler, if only that plastic bag was not spoiling this perfect view, if only that noisy chatterbox would shut up in the table behind us. We have an eye for imperfections, a capacity to identify that which is amiss and…
Read More
Last week I came across a brilliant line in one of the major social networks*. Sometimes, when one of these messages resonates with me and I see so many people sharing, circling a common place in this search that is not a search, it feels that it is not an individual quest, but that it…
Read More
Am I to die, then? – asked the ego. I, the ego, the intelligent mind who carried myself around, walking the unfulfilled path. Am I the only source of suffering? I can see my own spiral thoughts. The categorisation of the classification… Every thought is analysed, conceptualised, labelled and stored. And that is who I…
Read More
(continues from here; begins here) To come here in the mornings to sit before this Rothkian void. A filled void that contains everything. The narrator wonders, do I care? But there is nothing to care about or not, there is nothing to feel. That seems to belong to another reality. Here is everything that is.…
Read More
(Continues from here) The narrator sits and stares into the darkness. The characters have stopped moving. He picks them up and looks at them as he holds them in his hand. He puts them back on the floor. They looked so alive… more alive than he himself. And yet, here he is. Alive. Sitting. He…
Read More
I think about those writers today. Not about their characters, but as the voice-over, the narrator recounting the inexorable succession of events. I wonder if the narrator suffers more anguish than the characters. If he knows what is going to happen, if he feels he cannot feel as his characters do. If deep down he…
Read More
Our knowledge is stored in memory, classified, at least partially interpreted and ready to be used to predict future outcomes. But how do we know that there is something we don’t know, that something is missing? I know the basics of how a car engine works, but I ignore the details. I am aware of…
Read More
Sometimes we fantasise how it would feel to live in a world full of elves, trolls, fairies, giants, hobbits, unicorns and, of course, dragons. We see ourselves drifting towards that realm of fantasy, which we idealise as a much better world than our own. More suited for our spirit. But if we had been living…
Read More
And when I will get there, will I still be me, always me? Carrying the cross, the burden, the occasional light… is it me? If we always carry ourselves with us, why do we like travelling so much? We like the change of scenery, the change of reality. Even if the inner reality remains the…
Read More
I have often wondered about Odysseus’ last words to Penelope before he left for Troy. How would the ultimate hero say farewell, how to explain the necessity to leave? It may be easier to use the excuse of duty than to explain the powerful attraction of the other side of the world, calling his name.…
Read More
I love routine because it makes me feel safe. Life should be in order, so that I can predict what is going to happen at any time. Yet, an admonitory voice inside warned me: “Stop presuming you know what life should be like, just not to be in fear.” Fear of the unknown, I guessed.…
Read More
I am looking at old pictures. I see the child I was. I look at him in the picture and I perceive him as a separate person, i.e., not me. However, when I evoke the emotions and sensations that I felt back then, stored on one of those shelves in my memory, it feels immediate,…
Read More
Prompted by this excellent post by Andrew (thank you!), I read Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The book navigates a succession of inner thoughts, feelings, states of mind in six disparate characters described with empathic but also stark accuracy, sometimes using mental images that may seem unrelated to a situation, but which provide such a precise…
Read More
Projections are my favourite psychological phenomenon. The transfer of part of our unconscious content to another being. That transfer of energy occurs from one part of our mind to another part of our mind. It is not really externalised. The external ‘hook’ does not demand projection, it mostly remains unaware. The part of our mind…
Read More
We spend our lives asking ourselves who we are while, at the same time, we try to become someone else through every single action that moves us from here to there, as if ‘there’ were any different from ‘here’. Asking myself who I am used to lead me to a brick wall that seemed to…
Read More
Ask yourself, “What is the real motive behind everything I do, think, want?” You’ll see that your real desire is to be desireless. Your real desire is peace. Jean Klein, The Ease of Being The main aim of each want is to end the want itself. To be desireless, as Klein says. Once we get…
Read More
The Introverted Tree 