Here's to you

Why is enough not enough anymore? When has happiness become a standard condition that we expect to be present at all times? When has happiness become the sole sentiment that we approve of?

A few years ago, I took a stroll through London’s Maida Vale and somebody told me that happiness was a state of exception. It made sense then. And it still does. Happiness, grief, sadness, fear. They all are states of mind, they all are exceptions to the norm. Together, they make up that funny thing called life.

We are all talking about good times and bad times. We are all talking about mindfulness, about living in the moment but when life becomes troublesome, when things get rough, we freeze and we shake - and we try to shake it off. The absence of happiness grows doubts, it nurtures expectations and disappointment. When we are happy, however, we embrace it - to the fullest, with both arms and an open heart.

It’s late February and outside it’s raining. Thunder and lightning. In February? Really? Why not? Shouldn’t it be the same with life? Shouldn’t we just take it as it comes and ride along? Don’t we all just need enough of everything, just enough so we can still stride forward and place one foot in front of the other, step by step?

Let’s take grief for example. Grief means pain. Pain can be cruel. It can eat through your flesh and burn away all of your cells. Grief can make you choke and paralyse your limbs. But then again, doesn’t grief also mean that you were blessed with something very precious, something so valuable that its absence leaves behind an empty space? So, shouldn’t we embrace it for what it is, accept it and celebrate it just as much as we savour happiness? Sometimes life has to be sad, it has to be sobering. It has to be wild, rough, gentle, joyful, funny, boring and crazy - otherwise, what would it be?

We live in a part of the world where we are blessed with enough time and prosperity to think about things like mindfulness. We have enough time to teach ourselves that emotions and thoughts don’t have to count, that it’s just our monkey minds that act and react upon feelings that we don’t need to listen to. We sit down and try to breath our emotions away. We try to separate us from ourselves and our sentiments - since the only sentiment that we accept is happiness. When we are happy, when we have positive thoughts, we don’t breath in and out, we don’t try to meditate them into something irrelevant. But why is that? I just don’t understand.

A while ago, I met someone that I won’t ever meet. And this person - although I won’t ever know him - taught me a lot. About myself, about my strenghts and weaknesses. He pushed me to my limits and he pushed me over the edge. But in the end I touched down softly because I realised that I can trust myself. And even if I won’t ever meet that very person, he has left behind more than many other people that might accompany me for the rest of my life ever will. And that’s what it is about. For me. It’s about accepting that each lesson is a good one. That each loss descends from a gift. That the sorrowful absence of something can also implicate enrichment if you look close enough. That grief means appreciation and recognition. And that person has taught me once more that all that counts is the very moment we live in, the very people we share it with and that it’s worth to stick around when it gets rough, to accept the tough times and to understand that every state of mind is the result of life’s dynamic developments. He has made me realise that I listen with my reason and act with my heart - and that that’s better than listening with your ears and acting with your reason.

So, today, I just want to sit down, listen to the rain and the thunder that fight an uphill battle outside. And I want to say thank you to that person that I’m never going to meet because he has made me feel grief in a way that I didn’t know  before and because he has taught me that sometimes enough is just enough to not give up and that we sometimes need to feel pain to appreciate the beauty of things, and that beauty doesn’t always come in shiny bright colours. And tonight I will raise a glass and drink a toast to that person.

Here’s to you, for what you were, for what you might have been, for what you brought with you, for what you took with you and for what you left behind. Here’s to you - even though I didn’t know you. 

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break." - William Shakespeare

All I need is my five wits

It’s dark. And quiet. All I can see is the pitch black silhouette of a tree against the nocturnal silence. Next to it, sitting in the sky like a foreign body, a star shining brightly. I close my eyes and lose myself within the rhythm of a song and time carries me along. The moment I open my eyes again, the star is gone. It’s now hiding behind the twigs and branches. It comes as no surprise. After all I know that the earth is turning. But sometimes I need sensual proof to realise what the facts I’ve been lugging around actually mean. Knowledge means nothing if you can’t grasp it. I need my sense to make sense of the facts. Empiricism, that’s what they call it, right? I don’t care. All I know is that facts - as meaningful and reasonable they might be - are nothing more than formulas that add up on paper if they don’t present themselves to my vision, my hearing, my touch, my smell and my taste as digestible and tangible matters. That’s when they evolve and become pieces of personal truth. So, I can read and read, and inform myself as much as I like. I can ponder and ponder. I can study and study. If I want full comprehension, however, I will need to be able to see, hear, feel, smell and taste the result of an equation. This reminds me of my dad. He wouldn’t agree. He believes that you can only fully understand something if you are able to derive the formula yourself. I couldn’t care less. I don’t need to derive and name variables and factors - if I can feel the outcome, I don’t need to understand why. Because its pure palpability to me is proof enough of its truth. It’s my truth. It’s my world. I only have my five wits to perceive it with. Sometimes, sometimes it’s simply enough to feel the accuracy of a circumstance. Sometimes, that’s all you need. When we try to get to the bottom of a formula, our conditioning, subjectivity, misinterpretation as well as missing abilities and knowledge will always get into the way. If we really feel the result of the equation, all the rest falls into place. 

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Night Shadows

Night. N.I.G.H.T. is the period of time between the sunset and the sunrise when the sun is below the horizon.

Sounds harmless.

And yet, night can be cruel, night can be kind.

Night can be your most loyal ally or your worst foe.
It can be the soft mouth that breathes life into ingenuity and it can be the iron hand that wrenches your guts. 

It can be the hand that tenderly strokes your hopes or the foot that tramps them into the ground to pave the way for your trepidations.
Night is the time when flat shadows put on three-dimensional clothes and crawl out from under the bed.

Night is your fire trench in which you can hide from the dust that you raised during the day.

Night can be short when you sink into a deep sleep. And too long if you can’t.

Night is what happens when your mind blows itself up into an uncontrollable air balloon.

Night is what happens when love is born.

Night is the time when your heart and your head finally meet and sit down at a table to negotiate mutual agreements and take joint decisions.

Night can be the black-and-white negative of reality or the magnifying glass that elicits the day’s true grace

Night is the best time to dance and revel. Night is the best time to raise a glass and send yourself into sweet oblivion.

It is the worst time to cry and the worst time to wallow in the skewed souvenirs of the past.
It is the worst time to exchange one future for another.

At night seconds shake hands a little while longer than under the sun.

At night hours can expand beyond the confines of time and facilitate fairy tales.

At night silence can be louder and more powerful than the most hurtful words.

At night silence can be more soothing than the drowsy murmur of the ocean.

Night is the fellow that is hard on your heels when you are running as fast as you can whilst tripping up on your own failures.

Night is the servant that queens your achievements and crowns your good deeds.

Night is the bride that accepts winter’s marriage proposal just before they join forces and create a darkness that tastes so frosty that it burns your tongue.

The opposite of night is day.

And every day is only as good as the night that it stems from. Unless you accept that you can’t follow the path of the sun.

“She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward.” ~ Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

An Invitation to Dance

Life is weird thing, isn’t it? It throws us into a crazy world, into crazy families and then it leaves it to us and our abilities to live it.

Finding myself in a place today that I wouldn’t have looked for on my own initiative, I have come to realise that its vital to let go of your own expectations and to trust life a little if we don’t want to miss out on its beauty.

Life is an invitation to dance. Life is an invitation to fall. An invitation to break your legs and an invitation to trust the fact that pain will subside. All you can do is to collect the lessons you have learned, put them into your backpack of experience and take them with you.

However, with the backpack getting heavier as we grow older, we should  make sure to sit down and take a break every once in a while. We should open the backpack, take out all of the funny pieces that mingle in there, examine their relevance and throw away the heaviest items.

An experience isn’t alway the most competent advisor. Experiences create a corset of anxiety that will restrict us. Fears tell us to avoid objects, people and situations that we believe to be dolorous and they make us put blinkers on. As a direct consequence anxieties create expectations. And expectations constitute an even tighter belt. When we expect and wish for something, we tend to only pick up the pens and the colours that we deem harmless and paint pipe dreams and castles in the air that are built upon fixed ideas and our interpretation of happiness. Happiness, however, isn’t an interpretation. Happiness is a decision - a decision to embrace life for what it is and enjoy the ride - even if it gets bumpy every now and then.

We force life into our ideas, into our dreams, we squeeze it into a small box that only contains every thing we know. But magic happens if we throw unknown variables into the equation. Magic happens where things hang around that we don’t know. Magic happens if we accept the invitation to dance and adapt to the rhythm and the melody of life. If we let go of the frustrations that flare up when life doesn’t follow the script that we have written for ourselves and if we accept and engage in unexpected situations. Only then can we end up in a place that we never even knew existed. A place that might be bigger, better and more colourful than any of the castles that we have built within the walls of our expectations. Only then can we come to like and love things and people that we never even knew we missed.

Doesn’t that turn life into a pretty easy business? If we decide not to listen to our expectations, if we occasionally decide to disregard our thoughts and feelings, we become fairly free creatures that are open and receptive to the unknown and as such for a beauty that can exceed our own idea of what beauty is. 

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born” ~ Anaïs Nin

Be careful when it comes to people

“It’s fairly adequate to hand out wisdoms when you are leaning against a ship rail and your hair blends in almost seamlessly with that cloudy sky’s silver lining”, he said.

“On land words of advice can easily have a pitiful flavour to them when they plunge from an old man’s withered mouth. On the high seas, however, they complete the intrinsic pathos of a sea voyage just perfectly - at least when there is no land in sight. So, listen to me, son. I want to tell you something. There is only one thing that you need to know in life. Life, life is all about people. No matter what it is, if you can’t share it with other human beings, it becomes painfully irrelevant or gains such gravity that it pulls you down into the darkest caves imaginable.”

The old man paused for a moment and I could tell from his expression that he had seen these dark places one too many times and that the mere thought of them still hurt every single one of his bones.

“But be careful with people”, he went on shaking off the gruesome memory with a smile. “They are needy creatures and if you don’t watch yourself they might drain you like leeches. There was a time in life when I thought that you needed to be sparkly and happy to gather people around you. That people turn away facing the weak and aching version of yourself. But that is not the entire truth. There are also people that are drawn to other people’s agony like moths to a flame. That’s because some people simply are parasites. They live off your state of mind, they ride in your emotional wake. Depending on their nature and polarity, they either need your happiness or your misery to keep their own hearts pumping. If you fail to deliver what they need, the only thing they can do is to look for another host - just to survive. Therefore, the first question you should try to answer is if you are a parasite or a host. Once you have found out, it gets a little easier to steer through life.” He paused again and gave me a gentle pat on the back before he continued. “With our previous conversations in mind, I don’t think you are one of those bloodsuckers. But I do have the feeling that you might be prone to misinterpreting other people’s attention just like I did it when I was young. And this will automatically exponentiate your emotional conditions - which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. When you are in a good mental state, chirpy like a bird and beaming with energy, people will come out of their holes and cling to your heels. This will add further vigour to your high. Once life’s natural sine curve will lead you downhill again, though, the same people will turn away quicker than you can notice and vanish from your ambit. Then it won’t be too long before their counterparts will show up. The people that thrive on your sorrow, that will kick you even deeper into the mud whilst allegedly holding your hand. And there is nothing you can do about it. Believe me. It’s their nature. This is the only way they know. But it doesn’t make any sense to stay away from them either. They are everywhere. And they can still be good people. Just be aware of their nature and make sure that they have no power over you. That’s all you need to do.” Before he went on, he smiled again and and turned around to look at me. “Every once in a while, though, someone will surface whose heart pumps his own blood through his veins. Someone who won’t need you to feed him with life and its ingredients. Someone who accompanies you on your journey. And this person will get really close at times but might also fall back a little occasionally or lead the way. His motor, however, will always run under its own power even if you will feed it with some extra steam sometimes without even realising. And these are the people who will add a great sense of relief to your existence. They will make it all worthwhile, believe me. You, my friend, I’m sure, are going to meet many of those people. Just make sure to open your eyes and admit to yourself that not all kinds of attention are signs of affection and that real affection can also be very silent and passive. But it’s getting windy out here. Let’s go inside, you might want to join me for a cup of hot coffee.”

"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage." ~ William S. Burroughs

Make it a double.

Today I went to an imaginary bar.

It was crowded. And loud.

It was not the prettiest of bars.

And it’s kind of loud was not the best kind of loud.

It was the kind of loud that hurts your bones and makes your brain ring in a ridiculous attempt to fight external dissonance with internal music.

But still, I managed to overhear a conversation. 

And this is how it went:

“Please make it a double. And no ice. Because ice. And hell. They are behind me. I’m ready to move. Forward. And forward only.

Crazy. Crazy is good. If it’s crazy forward. Going backwards to crazy things I already know from a crazy past, that’s a no. Moving backwards to get caught in a crossfire between soldiers that are not mine is another no. A categorical no. This is your war. A war between your own and very private dichotomies.

And, dear, we are not the elements either. If we were, fire would melt the ice. Water would extinguish fire. But we are people. Real people in a real world. And real people in a real world don’t follow the same formulas as the elements. Ice is ice and will stay ice unless you melt it from within. And fire is fire. It won’t go out unless you extinguish it under your own steam. We are people. Real people in a real world. I am real.”

And then the monologue stopped. To be flushed down by a double shot without ice. 

The answer. Silence. Because as it happened, the person wasn't real. It didn’t exist. And the person that didn’t exist talked to a counterpart that didn’t exist. Not here. Not now. Not in that bar. But maybe some place else.

In my head. Or in a book I read. 

Or maybe in your head.

Point is. We are real people. In a real world. And crazy is good as long as it's the good kind of crazy.

But never mind.

Sometimes, it’s just about having a drink in a secret bar in the very secret corners of your mind.
About making sure by looking into the mirror behind that bar that you are still you and that the demons on your shoulders are behind you. And just behind you.

"Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars." ~ Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

A letter to my daughter.

Count backwards from three when you are angry.

Count backwards from twenty before you provoke a consequence you can’t take.

Sleep on decisions,

only take them in the mornings no matter if in the rain or under the sun.

Compose your letters when the sun goes down
and send them off in broad daylight if you still mean what you felt the night before. 

Write. Write your own aphorisms.

Don’t plaster your way with the distilled paroles of strangers.

Read. Read a lot. 

Expose yourself to as many versions of the facts as you can.

Think. Chew. Chew on these facts.

Boil them down to become your opinion.

Exercise your opinion 

until it becomes your second nature.

Don’t hesitate to change your nature

to question yourself and everyone else around you.

Don't judge. 
Back up the weak and the ill-treated.

Cultivate your own values, 
they are going to brace your spine. 

Don’t accept people violating your values.

At least turn around and go.

Build your voice and feed it.

Use it with conviction, instinct and tact.

Be kind. 

To yourself. And another.

Be humble and modest

but be ready to step up for yourself.

Don’t follow rules blindly.

The world won’t go under if you break them wisely.

Laugh about yourself

and love yourself - before another.

When you love,

love truly and openly.

Express yourself.

Express what you feel and what you think.

Take care of yourself

and surround yourself with people who do the same.

Be good, be smart, 

be silly. 

Be courageous.

Be gentle and strong.

Find out who should have the final say

your heart or your brain.

Expect to be surprised.

Dance with your own temper.

Collect people and memories

and take them with you if you can.

And don’t you forget:

You can push the sun over the edge of the horizon 

just by snipping your fingers.

Love. Mum.

“What is a home without a child?” ~ Mark Twain