Is it possible not to fall in love with this woman?
Category Archives: Reflection
Time is flying
It feels like time is flying. I am stressed and can not keep up with things. It is less than seven weeks until I go and it is hard to understand what it all means and all the little things I have to take care of before I leave.
Maybe one is not supposed to be able to plan for such a trip.
I should be sleeping, there is so much I need to do tomorrow, but still my thoughts are spinning. I’m wide awake and hungry in the middle of the night. Words and sentences formulate in my head, sometimes in a beautiful way. The pieces fall into place, my words on paper. I long to write them down.
In my soul I know that there are eight hundred books waiting to come out. Words to be caught, which will be formed to sentences and paragraphs to be written. Chapters to be merged on to some form of invisible whole that I did not even know what it is when I wrote them.
For the first time, I long to find peace to write, time to get peace, the oppurtunity to get time and the strength to take the oppurtunity when it appears.
I have been my biggest critic in my life. Therefore, I have been passive, never allowed myself to go deep into the work of writing, expressing myself, to articulate how I look at myself and my surroundings. Sometimes I think that it is because I’m not finished yet, but a nagging feeling in my back of the head tells me that it is really about fear.
All my life I have shown fragments of who I am to the world. I’ve never exposed myself, but only ever showed aspects of it. Now I dream of silence, stillness and being a whole person in everything I do.
I am afraid that some people do not want to listen, that I will loose so much because of it, but I feel more and more that I can no longer hold back. To live a fragmented life is not to live any life at all.
I have a strong desire to be both the deepest part of me and the extreme end of my superficiality in everything I do. Integrating all parts of myself in every moment I live.
I know there are many people who are not interested in all these aspects of me, but it’s ok as long as I’m allowed to be there anyway. I know what the price for it might be, but I also know what the price is to continue to live my life one fragment at a time.
The people I admire most in life is the brutally honest people who refuse to adhere to someone else’s idea of how life should be lived and it is the same way I want to go. To live my life the only way possible, my way. Then I must dare also to be brutally honest with myself and to everyone else. That does not mean that I know how life should be lived, I will still feel like Bambi on thin ice. I will be scared and insecure and wonder what I’m doing, but I will allow myself to live life fully.
To fall over and hit myself, that is just a bonus.
On my own
To find myself standing with my feet on the red sand of India and realize that for the coming ten months, there are no other than “me” around. Having everything in a backpack, carrying it with me as my legs move with no musts, no stress and no direction or goal. I have no friends or family, no things or events to distract me. Just me alone in an enormous world that sometimes is very very small.
This is the ultimate fear and my deepest longing. It scares the shit out of me and makes my heart thrilled. To not have anything to do whatsoever.
The Golden hour
In photography, the golden hour is the hour just after sunrise and the hour just before sunset. This is the time of day when it is easiest to take good pictures.
Now, in November, I only get to experience that time of day on weekends, if I’m lucky!
Please give us some light!!!
The photo is the view from my office window at 10.15
Such a common bird (Ane Brun duet with Wendy McNeill)
Such a common bird (Written by Wendy McNeill)
I am a lone wolf
a beauty and a beast
both hunter and hunted
soft tounge and sharp teeth
I´m toned from my travels
yet raw from this road
as I drink from storm puddles
and the stories I´m told
Help me figure this out
help me figure you in
you´re a shadow to me
that I echo when I sing
Help me figure this out
help me figure you in
To this simple little melody
I have seen angels
they were sleeping in gutters
they were standing in bank lines
they were jumping from towers
they were calling like seagulls
but nobody heard
such a beautiful message
from such a common bird
We want freedom for ourselves
but we can´t give it to each other
We want peace between nations
yet we battle with our lovers
we´re blinded by billboards
and trying to get ahead
choking on ambition
and the words left unsaid
I am a lone wolf
a beauty and a beast
both hunter and hunted
soft tounge and sharp teeth
I´m toned from my travels
yet raw from this road
as I drink from storm puddles
and the stories I´m told
Help me figure this out
help me figure you in
you´re a shadow to me
that I echo when I sing
help me figure this out
help me figure you in
Travel blog
I have decided to put up a new blog for my upcoming trip, so that everyone I know can follow my trip. I don’t want everyone to see what I write here for the reason that, one, they wouldn’t be too interested in my philosophical side and some of the more private stuff is meant more for my closer friends and unknown people.
So, if you would like to read my travel blog, just head over to http://mandalay.se
Sunday
I do not know why. But everything just ended today. The air went out of me. I do not know why. Why?
Actually, nothing special happened. It was an ordinary party. An ordinary evening, perhaps only slightly late (or early). I forgot my glasses, did not find my shirt. Hopefully I get them back. But maybe not. I do not know. No idea. (I know now though, that I left them at the party and I can pick them up this weekend).
But it was not what made the air went out of me. Maybe it was just a catalyst. Do not know if I can call it a normal low after a party either. But today I died, or the life that I previously lived.
Something in me knows that this day can never be undone. But in a few days, I might have forgotten all about it anyway.
Scarlett Johansson and Pete Yorn got to be with me today with the song Relator. Seriously good track. I lay in bed and wept. Filled up the bathtub with water and wept. The pain was complete. There was nowhere to go. I was a slave to the pain. It took me in totally. I cried. I cried and cursed myself because I could not cry harder, suffer a bit more. But I know it would not have made any difference. This pain I will live with the rest of my life. It will always be here. Yet, somehow something was not taken in completely by the pain.
I relax and feel my body. So tense. Muscle after muscle is taken in by my attention and I feel how tense I am. How tense I’ve been all my life. The only difference today is I am aware of it. Previously, I managed to distract myself so much that I have avoided seeing it. Today I suffer.
I cry inside and relax, cry and relax. I Feel calm. Tranquility of knowing that there is no way out.
I’ve been looking all my life. The frustration in my body just want one thing. Freedom. Emancipation. My existence is crying out for relaxation.
She has such a beautiful voice. So beautiful. I have to do my laundry.
In the middle of all the pain life never stops spinning. The world is there, but it’s like a fog. A phenomenon in a dream I can not escape from. I cry and have to do my laundry simultaneously. I suffer and update my facebook status.
7 minutes left until the machine is ready. Why can not washing machines count? It is 49 minutes, but it takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before it stops. I sit on the stair and wait.
I want my neighbor to come down here now. I would tell her she is beautiful and attractive. She is. Sweet too for that matter. She would think I am weird. But it doesn’t matter. A day like this nothing matters, and then we can say that someone is beautiful and attractive. I don’t care. It is a strange freedom to live with.
I want to run this day, to escape this pain but to live with this freedom is wonderful.
I have tried to escape from my life to avoid having to feel this. From being with my suffering. Live my life with the pain in my throat. Everything I’ve done in my whole life has been an attempt to distract myself from this pain. All human’s lives has been an attempt to escape their pain.
The idea makes me joyous. Empathetic. Compassionate.
Everyone lives with the same pain, some are just better at hiding it for themselves. This day changed all that.
My neighbor is not coming down to the laundry room. I can’t tell her she is beautiful and attractive. Instead, I am thinking that I will do it. If she had come down here. She does not know what she has just missed.
But, my neighbor will not be down here. Whoever wrote the screenplay for this film missed that bit. Or so they thought that when we follow the protagonist Mathias things such as that will not happen. Not in this movie anyway.
We always want things to happen, but it doesn’t. Life is not a movie. Not even a slightly improved blog. We dream for things just like that to happen. For in dreams we can escape from the pain I feel right now. The total hopelessness that makes my tears stream down my cheek.
My journey. The journey that I so yearn for has the same purpose. A fugitive from now. Fleeing from time that always follows me closely.
I want to get away and come back as a changed man. I hope that a lot will happen during this time. But I know now. I can not escape from this pain. It follows me wherever I go. It is my me and my slave.
I know it. You can not escape. I must live with it all my life.
Why not talk about laundry? Why don’t I know what all of you are doing when you do your laundry. This activity despite pain and suffering, always shows up. You will not escape the fact that you must wash your clothes. Is it so obvious that we miss it entirely?
Whatever we do to escape it, we must still wash clothes. That’s how it works. Nothing to do about it. I may not be making out with my neighbor today. Maybe she already knows she is beautiful and attractive so she does not need to come down here and hear it from a madman who has lost his step?
You are all so many. So many that I love, who fills my life. My life is good. I have friends, enough money, a decent job. There is music. Joys. The pain I can live with. It is there all the time, I can not escape it. I can distract myself with all these joys, but in the end, I am alone. Alone with all of this and the suffering. It is there, it drives me and it has driven me all my life. I can not escape it. It was that which prompted me to search my whole life. For something else. And with something else I mean the medicine that will cure my emptiness. My pain.
I sound depressed. Maybe I am. But I know I’m no different than anyone else in this world. Everyone live with this emptiness. I have just had a hard time to ignore it. I see and feel it wherever I go in life. It is always there, and everything I’ve done has been an attempt to avoid this pain. But it doesn’t work anymore. The pain is there and it will not disappear. Not even death can take away this pain. Not even the end of my life will make a difference. I know it. I feel it in my soul. Death is no escape.
It is time to stop now. Be still. Let go. Control, stress and distraction can not make any difference. I have to live with this, and it’s useless to try to avoid it. I dream and hope that I can let go, but not even that is possible. I live in limbo, frustrated. Stuck in a trap. The head in the tiger’s mouth, waiting for the jaws to close. Hear my skull cracking when I slowly die.
Now I can just wait.
There is love in that.
A change of scenery
Some funny things has happened these past two days.
I went out for a few beers with a friend the other night and we were talking a lot about my upcoming trip, him giving me advice and tips about travelling, seeing that he has been back-packing a few times in different parts of the world (the longer trips being south-east asia and central america).
We were talking about my budget and he said that you will need more money than that to be able to actually have a life during those ten months. My budget is at the moment about $5000 which is survivable given that I’m planning to visit people and work in Australia for food and shelter, but it won’t give me that much room if stuff shows up. Anyway, the nice part is that he at the end refused to let me pay my part of the bill. He said, just save that money for the trip, you will need it. That was quite unexpected.
Another unexpected thing that happened was that a woman at work, that I haven’t really talked too much with started asking me about the trip (it’s kind of official at work that I’m going) and it turns out that she has travelled alone quite a few times.
She said that India wasn’t really her kind of place, but sent me an e-mail with links to domestic airlines that she recommended there and then she also said that she had some rupies left that she wanted to give me.
I have also had three people interested in renting my apartment while I’m gone. Don’t know if anyone will work out, but it suddenly feels easier to find someone I know that might want to rent it.
In a sense, it feels like all the pieces of this puzzle is finding it’s place in the whole picture much on it’s own.
Sure, I probably need about $2000 more than I’m about to get together, but it feels doable somehow. I don’t want to say no to everything that happens just to save a small amount of money, but I’m cutting back on all the luxuries I don’t need and think hard before I buy stuff (except for the chai latte I just discovered at “Espresso House” that is making me a bit of an addict), so we will see how it turns out.
When I look back on my life I realize that this trip started already back in february in 2007 when I visited India the first time. The person I was then is just a figment of my imagination, but all these changes since then was needed to get me to now, and I would never have been ok with doing a trip like this back then. In that sense the preparations has been long, but since a few weeks back when things got sorted at work, I can really feel the excitement and joy of it all and it is not just a trip that will start in february, but a trip that is going on right Now, and has been going on for quite some time. It just looks like there is going to be a change in scenery in a few months time. Like a movie with no beginning or end, just different scenes playing on the screen.
What are you going to do?
On an intellectual level, it is possible to know that there is no point in yelling, singing or searching for something, but I find myself constantly doing these things anyway. Before I know it, my mind is back in searching mode, trying to find something new to bring happiness or peace. Trying to find something to stop that, is just more searching, so I guess all I can do is watch it happen and let it have it’s course.
Maybe some day it will just drop away on it’s own, otherwise the search will continue. The frustration comes when I see the searching going on, and then think I should/could stop the search, which is just another search and sometimes it takes a while before I SEE what I’m doing and just relax around it, truly trying to lift myself in my own bootstraps and catching my own tail at the same time.
To an outsider I guess it can look quite funny…
Trying out the offline blogging
Seems to work just fine. Nice! 
