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.
Tag Archives: Identity
On my own
Being normal
There is a great benefit to play by the rules and hold yourself within the politically correct. The box of normality.
But there is also a price to pay to stay within those limits. Often that price can be very high.
There is often the question in the air why some people just can’t seem to be normal. I have thought about that too, why I can’t seem to be like everyone else, or why some other people seem to have the need to be different.
A while ago I started thinking about this from a new perspective; This question is asked from the point of the many. And all the normal people are per definition the bigger group that often gets to set the standards of what that normal is. But instead of asking why some people just don’t seem to be able to be normal, maybe you could ask the reverse, why do you have the need to be normal? Why do you want to be like everyone else?
It is easy to think about different people like they are slightly crazy or strange in that they don’t seem to be able to stay within what is considered normal behaviour but in this strange world we live in, isn’t it even more strange that so many can do just that?
Like I said, there is a price to pay for being normal, and whenever I have tried in order to reap the benefits of it, it more or less drives me insane (or more insane depending on how you like to see it). I have started to realize that being normal is not up to me, and trying to would be like fighting gravity.
Maybe it rather is so that a minority of all the people in this world just don’t seem to be able to hide the pain and suffering. Or maybe they are willing to live in that pain because the price of closing up is to high? Maybe it is the “normal” people who has an abnormal ability to suppress that pain deep inside them and just look the other way?
However things are, two questions are important to keep in mind: Do you really have a choice to be normal or different, and what exactly is normal anyway?
Old habits
For some it takes time to make the transition from the old to the new. Leaving old habits, reasons and beliefs behind and embracing the present moment with open arms whatever it is.
It is impossible to force these things to happen, rather they will eventually just drop away. Fading into precious memories of things of the past. Things that has served their purpose, yet did it well.
I notice at times how my mind like to kick in and present these old ideas and habits like new ones. Afterwards I notice that it was just a flashback from times that has long been over. But meeting the future holding on to the past is no way to live in the present.
I see no reasons for what is happening at the moment. No cause and effect as far as I can see, just change. Even though my mind likes to fill in the blanks and come up with a cause and a reason after the event has occured, I see that life has no cause, it is just a continueous movement right now.
To be or not to be, and what?
I don’t know why, but I have decided to stop calling myself a vegetarian.
I have been thinking and I can’t come up with a reason to be vegetarian, allthough I can’t come up with a reason not to be one either. It’s not like I have missed eating meat the past 13 years of my life. For some reason I feel that this wasn’t up to me anyway, it was just something that dropped from me like rain on a goose.
So, who knows, I will still eat a lot of vegetarian food, because I really love it, but why put a concept around it? There are no rules to this game…
Fear of being open
This weekend has been very hot. A great summer day, but so hot that we started complaining. Better stop that straight away! When we finally get some nice summer weather, complaining is just too much!
Me, my dad and Johan had a small barbeque on my parents terrace. It was so hot in the sun that the sweat was pouring down my face while eating. We had some great food and beer and around 21.00 the weather started to become very pleasant.
I find it both strange and sad that so many of us humans have problems showing who we really are, we are so afraid of being intimate with each other. I have seen many times, in situations where there has been a heart connection, moments of deep intimacy and then, like a lightning bolt, the ego comes in and grabs hold of the situation and suddenly you see the panic in the others eyes. The realisation that you are open and vulnerable becomes too much and in a blink of an eye you are faced with a wall of fear and protection.
It is sad to know and see the True person behind the mask and at the same time also see that giant wall they put up as a front.
We might all realize that to get a deeper connection with someone, we must open up and allow ourselves to be vulnereable, but at times this can be so so hard, and sometimes, we might not even know what it means to be open and intimate. But isn’t it strange, that we can know what is necessary to get to the “next level” with someone, and still be too afraid to do so, because of this ingrained conditioning of past hurts and pain?
Sharing this blog with some people that didn’t know it existed was a way for me to face this fear. I of course doesn’t yet know the effect of it, but as far as I know, the fear was all an illussion…
Some kids…
Some kids are wild, other kids are calm and easy to deal with.
Some of those kids who behave grow up becoming nice, easy going people who do what they are told and conform to the social norm, looking perfectly happy on the inside, yet on the inside being full of fear, terrified of not being loved enough if they for once show any sign of individuality. I see some of them every day on the commute train to work. I ask myself what their lives are like, what turned them into the kind of people who tell their children that you are not supposed to enjoy your work, but get used to it being boring and meaningless. Saying you have to endure this because this is what life is.
Some of these people are my friends. I love them but also know I will never be like them. They probably say the same about me.
Some of these kids grow up, always playing their part in life, not knowing there are any rules or boundaries around them. Because they have never felt the urge to push outwards to see if there is anything out there. Some of these people are my friends too. I love them the same and have probably annoyed them thoroughly trying to show them the chains around their feet that they don’t seem to have. To say the least, they make me confused.
Then you have people like me, who are a slave to the desire of finding freedom. Exploring everything possible to explore, pushing the limits not even knowing what Freedom really is. I do not know where I’m going, only that I have to go. No matter what the price.
I guess I was lucky. Because I never had parents who told me to get used to life. They said, do what you want with life and respected my difference,s my issues and my crazy ideas. There was and is plenty of people around me who tried to tell me how to be, and one of them is myself. This is hard to find out, but my Friends tell me not to be too hard on myself.
This turned out to be quite a different post than first thought of, but all I want to say is this:
Do not be too hard on yourself. All is well.
The secret of Indian rice?
I am at the end of my rope here and need some desperate help.
I love Indian food (no surprise) but have many times over tried to copy the kind of rice you get at Indian restauranants. This rice is very non-sticky yet really good (no fake uncle ben’s rice here).
So, when I think I will finally get this nice rice, it just turns out like every time.
I bought myself a big bag of Pakistani Habib Basmati, but maybe that is not good enough (Pakistan and India are not always friendly towards eachother, so how can you expect Pakistani rice to turn out like the Indian rice I want?).
According to WikiHow the below instruction should do it, but I don’t know, me thinks this is exactly what I do. Could anyone please help me? (Uma?)
How to Make Indian Style Basmati Rice
from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Indian cookery has a whole lot of styles of making rice. If you start with the basic boiled rice, you’ll notice that the Indian style boiled rice is little different from the usual method of boiling. What’s the secret? Here is the secret revealed.
Ingredients
- Water
- Basmati rice
- Salt
Steps
- Wash the rice at least 5-8 times with cold running water (so the rice grains won’t stick to each other).
- Boil plenty of water. The amount of water should be double the amount of rice.
- Add salt (optional).
- Add washed rice and let it cook for 10-15 minutes. Stir once or twice.
- Strain the water in a colander.
Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Make Indian Style Basmati Rice. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.
Conformity
To conform to a group seem to be an instinctive and natural trait for all humans, yet it has a tendency go create a lot of suffering.
People go with the group wether they agree or not, and often feel bad when they really don’t want to. But instead of questioning the group norm, they rationalize their behaviour so that the mental conflict is solved. Instead of saying, I don’t want this, they say to themselves, this is what I really wanted, conforming to the group. Humans have an incredible ability to fool themselves into thinking they really want something they don’t. I am no exception. There are countless situations when I have conformed to the group and probably countless more that I’m not even aware of.
For some reason, a minority of people have problems conforming. I am one of them. Even though I might look like everyone else outwardly, I often feel limited by the conformity around me and when I feel that way, I have a childish tendency to revolt against it. When I became a vegetarian about twelve years ago, it was an act of rebelling against the society I am living in, and in the beginning especially I identified with it just to be able to tell to myself and to others that I wasn’t going to accept the norms around me. I was different.
Conforming to a group or rebelling against it, can if you look close enough be seen for what it is. It is a dynamic pair of opposites that consitute life. Wether you conform or rebel, you are still very much part of the game, and even though the rebel thinks he is standing outside not taking part in the game, he is still a slave to it. If no one was standing outside, how could there be an inside? If there were no rebels, there would be no definition of that which the rebel was fighting.
To be truly free from conformity might sound utopian, but perhaps only because it is so rare. My rebellious acts has always been a strategy to reach a state of existance where no conformity exist. I have had little success, at least with that strategy.
To be free from conformity is not to look, think and be different from everyone else. A free man might look and talk just like you and me. Freedom is not a quality on the outside, but a release on the inside. To stop identifying with that which is always stuck in this world, that which will always conform in a way, our sense of personality and our body and start to see what we Are. That which never conforms, that which is always free, open and alive.
Why some people walk their own way, or why they feel so limited in the face of expectations and conformity I don’t know. All I know is that I have always been that way (that I know of), always questioning the obvious.
What would the world be like without non-conformers? Isn’t it in the dynamic ”conflict” between the conformers and non-conformers where all kind of change happen? And just like the rebel and the group rebelled against, there would be no concept of conformity if non-conformity didn’t exist. So, in the end, we all play our roles in this universal game called life, and perhaps suffering only happen when we try to go against these roles. Trying to conform when we know we can’t or trying to act differnt when all we are is normal.
Blogging and Identity
“U” gave me an article about young peoples increasing use of the internet for media such as blogging and communities and Identification. It was a very interesting article that tied a bit to the things I wrote the other day about Blondinbella. A lot of people, girls especially, write about their lives in a very personal ways, often sharing about their concerns regarding self-esteem. Are they good enough? According to the article some of these girls express a strong identification with their bodies, as it gives the feeling that they can rely on something concrete and “real”, whereas their minds and personality is something that is hard to get hold of, as it appears to be less solid and more changing.
Identification with the body is nothing new, it has been around for ages, but in this information and internet times, it takes on a bit of a different flavour. The old saying that everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame in TV is more and more shifting towards the feeling that if you don’t have a blog or an appearance on the internet, in communitys such as facebook and myspace, your existence is questionable. When your existence is questionable, it is easy to turn to something that you can see, touch, smell and hear.
With the identification with the body, though, there comes a few drawbacks. No matter what you do, you are still faced with the inevitable. Your body is going to die.
Even though some people think they belong to the first generation that will never die, and todays younger generations not only think they will survive forever, but also that they will stay young forever (or at least that is what they try to achieve), we will all die, and the more you identify with the body, the more fearful we get thinking about death and all the things that could happen to us.
Identifying with the mind doesn’t really give us much more comfort. The mind is more or less an extension of the body, but of a more abstract kind, and it is mostly occupied with trying to keep itself alive and real by making you identify with it. In fact, on closer inspection, my personality doesn’t seem to be more than something made up by that very same mind and nowadays, I’m not even sure “I” have a personality. Maybe it is all made up, and if so, Who or What am I?
