I was born nine years ago. I lived another life before that, but nine years ago, I became something more and something different altogether. It was no grand occasion, no event at all. I just know it, looking back, that my current life started around that time. When I was thirteen.

In the beginning, I felt good. I quickly learnt to know my new life, and I was joyous about myself. But I wasn’t alone. I was a symbiot. Not with anyone else, but with myself. I was one, but I was different and new, hosted in the old and slow. I had come from elsewhere, but I had been here a long time already.

It was the old life that made me possible. I wasn’t aware that it also impeded me from being myself. I gradually realized the truth of this, and it made me sad. Ever since, I have lost several hopes, dreams and feelings to that sadness. Disillusionment, some would say. That was one of the things I was taught to believe.

Oh, there were promises. Promises of relief from the sadness. That is the only reason I sold off my illusions. Stop believing, and then do things this way, think that way and feel this, and everything will be okay.

And it really does work, it’s not that.

It’s the cost: forsaking the new life. Problems really do go away when you ignore them, as long as you never look back. But that’s what I’m doing now. I understand now, what the true illusions are. I didn’t sell them. I bought them. I bought into The Real World™, and I moved into the emptiness. It was all that existed. I had never really existed in the first place.

But I do. I do exist! The past years, I have gradually fallen asleep. Answering to the expectations all around me, I have focused on shaping the old, dead life — the holy Machine, my body and mind — into something they like better. Since nobody would respect that I was actually alive, I forgot that I was. I thought the new life — my eternal soul — had died. I sought to claim somebody else’s soul to be my own.

Now, I don’t think it can die. Now, I am disillusioned. Now I know what I am, not based on what others say I can be. I simply know it. I find I can finally believe this. I am my own master, my own friend, my own self, and I alone can decide what I believe.

So say what you want, but I don’t come from this world. I don’t know why I’m here, but since I am, I’ll try and try again to do the best out of it. Knowing what I am, and only that, has opened up the channel of feelings, the bond between the lives, that is my love and life force. I am, at last, a little more whole.

Some things, we do have in common. Rough shapes and rough details of your self, others can pick up. Throughout our lives, we communicate. It is just that sometimes, it doesn’t feel good enough. And that is what gives you access to the feeling. And the feeling can be so strong and clear, it is as if the things we have in common, are but contrivances. That the significant bits lie elsewhere. That what makes you exist, is the very bond between your mind and soul. And nobody else can feel that. Nobody can feel that you truly exist the way you do.

Sleep is invoked to douse the loneliness. In sleep, you don’t know there’s something more to yourself than what others see. You feel understood and complete, and content. I do this and I find I gradually forget what I am. In time, only a select few moments tell me otherwise. This is one of those. Now, I know. Now, I care. Later today, I might have forgotten myself again.

I wish to be awake, always. That is why I care about art. That is why I must write stories. To make sure I remember, that I am sometimes awake and aware. To feel life that is actually my own flowing through my veins. Before I come entirely undone.

“Are you saying love and evil are made of the same elements?” “With a palette, you can make any painting. By itself the palette is not art. It is the configuration of colors that makes all the difference. I am saying you have to choose what you believe in, because nobody can tell you what is right and wrong. That is the depth of your free will, and the concept of faith.” “What does faith have to do with any of this?” “Faith is to dare to acknowledge that you believe in something not because someone else told you to. Instead, you believe it simply because you know it is true. Only such a belief can be worth fighting for.”

“I want to be saved. I want someone to come and give me all the joy and, even more importantly, all the good and special emotions which I still get in glimpses: the meaning of life. Vitality. Art in pure form. Nature’s gift. Everything else falters compared to these dreams, these promises, whose mere existence I only realize in a rare moment.”

“And in that moment, every single time, it is like a revelation. All of a sudden, everything is fine, I am not alone – I am not even myself, I am merely the emotion, taking pleasure from its own existence. I am the frost, I am the birds, I am the white-rimmed leaves waiting to drop from the branches. I am the air, chilly and full of memories of past times when the emotion existed. I am the earth that waits, the deer that grazes warily by the trees, the fox that sneaks past looking for things to eat. I am my self, and I am something completely different. I am free, in focus, but without thought.”

“I have sought love, and I still do, but I am not fully a human being, a social creature. When I am my self, in harmony and peace, I am immaterial. This meaning and value can be brought forth by love, but love is not it. I can follow it alone. Back to the soul. Depths of my heart that doesn’t concern other people. I want those emotions back, and I can have them back without having to seek love first. I need my self. Me without biological limitations. Love could help me, but I… I have to seek other ways.”

Despite that and the fact that is was December 1st, though, yesterday was a bad day. I can tell the bad ones from the good ones from the very moment I wake up; on the bad ones that moment is typically two hours after I wanted to wake up, and also two hours before I manage to get out of bed. Also it’s always cloudy and gray outside. I can still feel good on a bad day, through effort, using music, movies and art. But if I venture outside I will risk interacting with other people in a manner that might make me feel at a lack of social abilities, and I might lose whatever good mood I have in the blink of an eye and exchange it with grinding anxiety. So on bad days I tend to stay at home.

Today was another bad day, with a sky covered by homogenous rainclouds. Yet it’s been quite a special day, too. Even though nothing happened. Here’s how it went:

I wake up just before 10 am, by my wristwatch ringing from atop a shelf. I let it ring for about fifteen minutes before I bother rubbing my eyes so that I can stare at the ceiling and try to become more awake. Finally getting up to turn off the alarm, I grab my cellphone and lay back down in bed. After listening to music from my cell for half an hour without falling asleep, I finally decide to get up. I turn on my computer and the lights on my christmas tree and fetch some breakfast.

Having realized it’s a bad day, I decide I need to do something pleasing. I decide to check the deviantART favourites of an artist whose work I recently added to my own favourites. I’ve realized it’s one of the best ways to find new favourable works. I find a whole hoard of amazing photos. Have an example:

So many of them are so new and unique, and unexpected! I find myself thinking things like “is Romania really that beautiful?” “Does ice really form like that?” “Do forests like that really exist?” Overall my mind feels expanded.

However, I still feel unsettled and unable to focus on doing something productive. Then I remember how taking walks has done wonders for my perspective before, so I decide to do that. But it’s not exactly Spring these days; the sun is already down, and so I walk through the darkness on raggedly ice-covered ground through a constant drizzle, with the clouds looming heavily over me. The light of the city illuminates the nearby clouds, but that light fades into merciless blackness over the forest.

I’m not in a lonely mood, so that doesn’t repel me. I enter the forest and choose paths I haven’t gone before. And then, whilst slipping downhill on the icy ground, my mind lectures itself and says: “honestly, already the emotion of this experience is far stronger than many of your childhood memories!” I realize the truth in that as I look at some mist rising above a nearby lamp post and notice that I can smell the forest. That makes me smile and gives me hope. Not all memories come from my childhood. New memories can still be created, memories that might even surpass those. I feel I’ve discovered something wise, but then I also think of this quote:

“It’s far easier to write a hundred essays on philosophy, than to practice one single principle.”

There you have me. I’ve philosophized a lot about different things the past years. Now I feel I know quite well what’s right. But that does in no way mean that I follow that philosophy. I used to think myself capable of it, but that is an overestimation. I always try to follow the wisdom I believe in, and through that I might one day manage to practice some of it. But I am merely human, and humans are bound by habit, routine and psychology. It makes the road long. Excitingly, life is, too!

The road I walk on treads close to an open stadium where, seemingly, a match of ice hockey is being played. I stray from it and walk and among the dark trees on the other side until I meet a river. I follow the river to a crossing covered by so much ice I’m not really sure what’s ground and what’s river. When I reach a small nearby lake, I’m far from the nearest lamp post. I walk out on a long wodden pier and gaze into the surrounding landscape. Two words come to me: ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’. Better can hardly be said about the sight of it. Even the hundreds of crows, now nesting in the forest, are hiding away from the cold and the dark. Still, what I think is this: “There’ll be a new Spring next year, just you wait.”

Walking back, I find myself feeling soothingly detached from the world. Or rather, from my own routines and common emotions. I walk past buildings and places where I’ve walked several times a day for over a year, but my mind is not at all set like it usually is when I walk there. No, right this moment, due to the unusual atmosphere, the world is another. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk ahead of me, to keep from slipping. But the ice on the sidewalk sparkles as if to entertain me. And I am entertained, and pleased. I get to live in another world for a moment.

Back home, I feel inspired and so I write this entry. After it’s finished, I prepare some dinner, and then I watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time in many years.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

Many things in the total physical world will never exist in your own. In today’s society many people know about most of the world, but we will never truly understand and feel all there is (hopefully!). We will only ever live in a slice of it. We all have our own separate laws of nature, our own beliefs, truths, ideals, and feelings. And it’ll all be true — per definition — in our own world.

Because of the size of this physical world and the amount of people on it, it can contain numerous individual worlds whose truths are pure contradictions (even ignoring religion). And we may often catch ourselves thinking: “what is right?” Which is because we so often assume that we all live within the very same world, and that all truths are common. The question might even send us into an existential crisis: “have I had it wrong since the beginning?” We might end up being someone else than we were, thinking like that. It’ll mean we’ve effectively changed our own world into something else. It’s possible and perhaps even for the better sometimes, but generally, it’s not necessary.

There is no one universal truth, no one true common world all our minds live in. We all have our own take on the world. In it we’re never misplaced and we’re not mistaken. We can shape our own worlds and decorate them however we please. We can fill our worlds with happiness, or we can fill them with sorrow (and then I don’t mean what happens, but how that affects us and makes us think). Neither is more true nor more right. For what is right and true is also a part of our own world.

Of course, you could say that’s taking it a bit far; perhaps beyond moral, or beyond the limitations of the human psyche. And you’d be right. Because there are limitations to what your own world could and should be. Where the limits are, depends on who you ask, but more importantly it depends on what you’re capable of. Your world has got to reflect your own identity (preferrably including your conscience). And most of the times it will, if you’ve never thought about it. I’d say it’s even possible to find your own identify by realizing what your own world is like. But you might also change your own world to something that’s not you (however paradoxal it might sound, I still think it’s possible), and that might be bad for you. But personally I believe that most of us can live in many different worlds without this problem.

And as if things aren’t complicated enough: nobody can live isolated from everyone else, so there are a whole lot of other worlds we’ve got to pass through each day of our lives. There can also be collective opinions shared by many different individual worlds, and there’s also this monstrous, shapeless, vague lump of billions of individual worlds that one can choose to put to represent the common mind of the whole world. In short, this is a whole science (which has probably been science’d lots of times already).

Today it’s been windy with a few scattered showers, otherwise sunny. Wind of these proportions are rare here in Oslo. Any wind at all is rare here. It felt reminiscent of home in many ways. And when I finally went out to get some groceries, countless old feelings rushed through my head. The sound of the wind, the humid smell and feel of the air, the changing light from small clouds blocking the sun and countless other impressions pulled strings in my brain that led way back, and all sorts of related feelings and half-memories popped up. I felt feelings I’d felt during similar weather back in my childhood, and I could picture it, but all pictures were general and possibly even generated in my head, and not specific memories.

Lately I’ve done this a lot with dreams, too; when I’ve had a dream worthy of writing down, I always get all sorts of flashbacks from other dreams while I’m doing that. Each flashback is related to a specific mood in a part of the dream, and then other flashbacks show up based on the same mood or even on a different mood in the dream of the first flashback. It’s very odd and otherwordly and I love it. The feelings I sense in dreams are always the ones that are furthest from ordinary feelings. And I find that the more the difference, the more interesting a feeling is. It always feels like sitting in a cave and getting to see an image of the outside world. Which is part of why I like these feelings. They shows me things, feelings, perspectives, that I’d forgotten. Part of the outside of my current box.

In each and every mood there’s another world, another way of thinking, another way of living, a separate meaning of life. And experiencing it all is part of my meaning of life.

Which, I coindidentally realized, is also why endings are my mortal enemies. An ending means the destruction of such a mood. I always need to find a perspective that hides the fact that it was an ending in order to deal with them. I hate the idea of the “emotional world” shrinking due to endings. Luckily, there are also always new beginnings. In the long run, this means that the emotional world will become something entirely different after a while, which does agonize me. But that’s the way of this world, and if you don’t manage to keep up with the change, then you yourself will end along with your own past moods, all alone. So the trick is to accept change and never stand still.

In fact, this just gave me a different perception of a human life. For one can always argue that if you change, you’ll eventually lose all you used to be and no longer be your old self. But you’re still you, so if you’ve become another person, which you is the “canonical” you; the old of the new? I say, you’re never the exact same person at two different times. Your mind is like the bank of a river, and who you are changes constantly like the flow of that river. Or more accurately, let the river be a long pool, and let time be the length of that pool. The water in the pool is you, but your personality — what others would call that which really is you — will depend on where one stands along the length of the pool. If the pool is long enough, you might be able to isolate different sections of the pool which represent completely different personalities. If we lived for hundreds of years, perhaps we’d change over and over, practically having lived the lives of several different people, except we’ve kept memories from it all (or perhaps not). All in all, what I’m saying is, a life doesn’t consist of being one person, but of being an infinity of transitions from one person to another, all melding together into a body of water that is the whole you.

After just a few more minutes on my bike, I stopped by a side road in the forest, by a small bowl-shaped miniature valley around a small stream, all covered in pine trees and clovers, yet sparse enough to let through some sunlight here and there. And incidentally, two squirrels went up one of the pine trunks just that moment. They glared at me and tried to look scary, but somehow, perhaps due to their fluffy tails, that attempt failed quite miserably. At that moment I realized I really need to get a digital camera. When I realized I might be scaring them, I walked further down the hill to look for four-left clovers for a while, but then I decided that this section of the forest was too dark to be staying in at such an hour.

I walked across the side road into the forest on the other side, which proved to provide even another kind of mood. No, several. First, this place was much more sparsely covered with trees, and there was a lot more grass and green bushes. Also, there were several rocks very reminiscent of the forests back home. All in all, the moods I found here were quite special in that I’ve felt them a lot before, in my childhood. No memories came to me because of this, only feelings stored from when I’d been in such forests before. It’s very interesting.

Before heading back, I also went some distance on another, dark side road, over another stream and up a steep, rocky hill where nobody could’ve been for a long time. Suddenly I was on another level of the forest, a kind of highlands, full of blueberry bushes and very sparse pine trees. Of course, though, there were paths up there, too. Nowhere is completely isolated in that forest, which is one of the things I don’t like about it so much, but which at the same time makes it gentler somehow.

When I’ve got my breath back from racing all the way back here, I’ll head down to the gym, after which I’ll read for my next exam for a while until I grow tired, buy a few eggs in the kiosk and head back home to make pancakes for dinner.

Myself, I wish to counteract that as best I can, by constantly introducing changes in what I do, how I do it and most importanly, what my mind is doing. Or else I’ll be too prone to fade into the gray again and live on autopilot, never knowing what I’m missing.

The last weeks, more or less since my last post, I’ve been exploring new directions, paths I’d forgotten and paths I didn’t know I’d used. I’ve searched for moods and feelings, both recent, old and ancient. But none connected to anything of my new daily routine. And that made me think. My theory is this: things you enjoy or feel are special might turn into their own feelings, but not until you stop doing them.

First, Blaizer – Weight made me recall a very special feeling connected to chilly winter afternoons. I remembered images of the yard outside the house where I grew up, and some places nearby, all covered in a seamless layer of snow, the sky either cloudy, making the air dark bluish gray and magical, or clear, making the snow glitter and the feel of winter even stronger. I also recalled the refreshing chill, the taste of the air, the numbness in my fingers and even several thoughts adding to the mood – the desire to make a snowman, the urge for some hot chocolate, the joy of sliding down a snowy hill. What amazed me it how all this came pouring into my consciousness like the music was a mental magnet. I didn’t seek out old memories; I recalled the feeling through the music, and with it I got hold of all the strings attached to that feeling.

The next one, although not that special, was an exciting surprise. Listening to Amphibiotica – Starwatcher, gamle oslo – Haukelifjell, Gargamel – Towards Compression, and even Røyksopp – Only This Moment, made me think of the past three years. Not in general, but specifically two things: driving a car and riding the bus to school, both under a pitch black sky. Those are some of the most magical things I experienced in those years. Only, I didn’t really think of it entirely that way until I recalled it now, through this music. It’s been made into a special feeling because it’s in the past, now (although that does in no way mean I can’t go back). Still, one of my favorite things this last year was driving, to school, home or anywhere, anytime. One of the best ways was in total darkness, preferrably night, where I could privately enjoy the quiet of the sleeping world while listening to some music (much of the sort that reminded me of all of this) and merely consume that special atmosphere. Before I got the license, riding the bus to school during the dark half of the year gave me some of the same feeling. That carefree moment – isolated from the rest of the world, isolated even from the world right outside the windows – brightened my mood and relieved my stress countless times.

That’s why I believe in my theory three paragraphs back. Such moods don’t come from reminiscence, it’s not that you felt things stronger the younger you were. When you recall moods from the past, you feel more the more your mind has changed since then, and the less you’ve thought about them. That’s why moods from your childhood might feel most special. But it’s nothing exlusive to your childhood. The reason you might not sense such intense moods from later years is because you haven’t changed that much. If you stop changing, then you’ll stop producing new moods, and all those you might recall will be from ages past. Also, I believe it’s incorrect to believe you experience fewer moods that you did before. Because moods never become clear until you stop doing what made them. That means two things: you’re exaggerating what you felt before, and what you feel now you might recall as being stronger once you’ve stopped doing it.

The moral: Music can be very good for you.

We’re living in a world where information is power, where art is commercial and everything is analyzed based on its usefulness to our mundane purposes. Here, a weary mind remembers the falseness of this and tries to look for more.

What is grass to you? What about your room? Christmas? A bottle of water?

If all your answers are equally logic and explainable, if you were able to define them all, you might want to hear me out.

Sometimes I wonder.. what if the things I treasure — fantasy and its beauty — will some day mean nothing to me? What if I will one day picture a dark, enigmatic castle in front of a magnificent stormy sky full of roaring dragons and fire.. and feel nothing? It could happen, such things do happen to many people. They lose the magic, the touch, for a while at least. Fact is, even the most wonderful image you can ever imagine, is nothing at all without the feeling that comes with it, a feeling that is not part of the image but of your mind. The magic of the image. But what the heck is the magic, and why can’t we keep it?

I asked what things mean to you now. But what was christmas like when you were a small kid? And you room, grass, even the water? It wasn’t the same, was it? For your sake, I sure hope not. Was it something different, or something more? For me, it was definitely more, much more.

Today, you look at the bottle of water, and you see and think of water and plastic, or glass. You probably also think of the company that makes the water, perhaps you think about where you bought it, where you’ve brought it, what you want it for and what you’re gonna do with it.

When you were a kid, you didn’t really know what plastic was. You didn’t know who made it, or at least you didn’t care, and if you did something with it is was only a spontaneous action. You didn’t know the definitions you know today, the words you use now. Yet, you could define that bottle of water just as well, you were in no confusion about what the thing was. How come? Because as a kid, you don’t define things with words and relations, you define them with feelings. You felt that it was a bottle. It was what a bottle meant to you. Such definitions are not at all explainable with words.

So why, why did you throw away this magic in order to define the bottle with emotionless symbols like ‘water’ and ‘plastic’? No reason to defend oneself, because we all do this for some reason. Most likely, it’s the society that teaches us to do so. And what is the human society, except a product of experience alone? What I mean by this is, we’ve built it on logic and reason, through neutral and emotionless thought. Such is an ability of our minds, but it is not something we are limited to. Hence we start our lives thinking in wholly different patterns. We do this by running on the only thing we know yet, which is instinct and subconsciousness. This, our BIOS if you like, cannot define things using the words we do not know yet, or the definitions we won’t learn in many years yet to come. The only thing it can use to make us see any difference in anything, is an infinitely advanced piano of the heart and mind, merging thousands of factors to form an extremely complex set of emotions.

That is the wonder of the human mind. But we, our own consciousnesses, cannot be aware of how this wonder works. If we are to think in our own ways, if we want to understand things and learn, we have to form our own primitive definitions based on the limited possibilities of the conscious mind. Sure, it’s a great ability to achieve such freedom, but we are blindly ignoring what we are forsaking. We leave the keys of the piano to hopelessly try and study it from a distance! It’s like you stop moving the muscles in your leg in order to use your hand to do it instead. And we do it because we thirst and thirst for knowledge and power and freedom and happiness. But we never do get the last one. And we don’t understand why. And we are forever lost because we’ve long forgotten the crime we did upon our own minds, because we’ve walked away for so long we forget we’ve moved.

Perhaps you’ve been standing still for years and years. You might have fallen into the same routine day after day, with emotionless definitions surrounding you on all sides. You know everything well now, you know all the definitions of the world, so you don’t need to think them over. It’s far too easy to fall into such a trap. Try to look around, try and remember where you have been, look for your tracks. It wasn’t always empty, dull and directionless like this, was it? Then why now? It doesn’t have to be like this, you know, it’s actually something you’ve chosen. You take everything for granted now, you know it all well, but at the same time, you don’t know anything anymore. But you can still move, never think you can’t, for then and only then, you never will.

This is why I don’t do like everybody else just because everybody else does it. This is why I analyze and search and see what’s beyond, find the whys, the meanings. This is why I want to know at all times just what I’m doing, and its consequences, and why I rarely do something new. It enables me to see before it’s too late, to know before I’ve forgotten. Sure, it’s not like noone has the same ideas, once every so often you always hear the typical ‘oh, don’t waste your youth, stay young, keep the mind of a child’ — but have you ever thought it through like this, have you ever stopped and really tried to confirm it and not just accept it as wisdom? In today’s socitety, there’s rarely any time for such. It engulfs us is what it does, eats us bit by bit if we’re not wary.

But we are all still able to define by feelings, define my magic, no matter how much we’re crippled by the ignorant ideas and attitudes of today’s society. Later definitions, conscious definitions based on relations and observations, lay piled up like a mountain in our minds and heart, but we haven’t lost the old ability. It just takes a little shift of mind, a change of attitude. Don’t look at surfaces, don’t think with words. What do things really mean to you? Never look at objects, look into them, look beyond them and search. Forget their words, forget what they are, define them with feelings and they shall mean feelings to you.

I’m not saying you can go pull a lever in your mind and then see wonders in everything. It was once said ‘happiness is not a place to arrive at, but a manner of travelling’. It’s not about doing, it’s about trying and believing. This subject isn’t about happiness alone or any other feeling, but it is however about all of them. Most of the feelings we define by words are mere points along the line of feelings. You can pinpoint an infinitely accurate point anywhere on that line. And any two points on the line have an infinite other points inbetween, no matter how close the two points are. Thus, the few pinpoints we have made into words are retarding, to say the least. Never try to define anything and everything with them, for every single mood and every single object and every single anything has its own unique feeling, and the less you can define it with words, the better.

Yes, this is a reminder, a little wake-up call. Wisdom isn’t good enough if it’s just there, it matters not how many times you hear it be repeated if you never think it over. Do not let the opportunity pass when you can do such. Don’t forget. You might never hear this reminder again.