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.