The past holds all of our dearest memories. But beware of forgetting yourself. This post is about finding the courage to stand on your own feet, as the result of your past, instead of looking to it as all that is good and gone.

For many years, perhaps since my birth and until some years ago, I had a very grim outlook on change. Change means an ending of something you’ve been a part of. Change means letting go of something old and heading into an uncertain and scary future. And if you look into it the wrong way, like I was good at, change is melancholy. However small a change, change is death itself. Change means that the world and life gradually parts from you, and leaves you alone.

That detachment doesn’t hurt just superficially, it lashes out to your very soul. It is a pure form of loneliness, and it has a beauty, as most emotions do. In reasonable quanta, it’s an important part of life. It should be accessed sometimes, I think, for the same reason that we need to preserve machinery. But loneliness is a brittle bridge over chasms, and shouldn’t be taken lightly or made a habit out of.

It is some years past, now, that I started having a more positive outlook on change. That is because the world started acting friendly to me again, and I became more independent and self-confident. Because as a first, the world didn’t just race past. Some bits stayed with me, and evolved with me. Before, there was mostly just me, and old, ended stories I’d been fond of — by this, I mean video games and books; now, there were also friends, and stories I shared with them. Instead of being a lone figure in a raging river, there was now more of a structure.

But despite that, or perhaps because of it, I kept a fondness of the past. I’ve kept records of so many things (digital files, for the most part). After all, what is there to fear of the future when the past is always there to relive? Confronted with the thought of deleting such records, I’ve relived the sensation of change.

I now realize what’s been going on. What the loneliness really is, and why. It is insecurity. It is the fear that, in absence of your surroundings, there’s nothing left that is yourself. It is the subconscious belief that the past is all that lets you tackle your future, that there is no constant you with any worth of its own. It is the anxiety that nothing is certain, that everything you hold dear might, at any time, disappear, completely without reason. It is the lack of hope and of faith; in the world, and in yourself.

Overcoming such insecurity has several stages. You can gain control of change, and gain confidence of your control. But though it might help you further on, that control doesn’t really change things. If your fingers slip, and records vanish, is the past really gone? Will it leave you anyway, despite all your effort? The truth, the way I see it, is that the past is always gone.

We’re forever stuck between the past and the future. You are a part of the world, and some parts of you will stream by seamlessly. They will linger in the present, where you forever stand, in virtually no time at all, before they’re gone and away into nothingness.

But the trick is, I believe, to see the present for what it really is. See yourself for what you really are. There is something constant in us. In the previous paragraph, I presented the past, the present and the future as sections of a timeline. There, the present is but a point. But it is just a model. Another one can be, for example, a bird flying in the rain. Rain pours on the bird. This is the future. It trickles down the bird’s feathers and falls further down, away from the bird. The past. In this new model, the passing of time is just generic drops of water, whilst the bird is something way more concrete. The bird is the present. Or you. Whichever one you please.

What I’m trying to relate, is not just the importance of confidence, but the (abstract and alternative) understanding of it. The confidence I’m describing, is the realization that there is always something resisting the flow of time. For once, you have what some might call a soul, which stands outside all time and guides you. Its shadow in this world, on the present, lies beneath the conglomerate of transitions, beneath your dropping feathers, and it will not leave you. It does not grow and change like the rest. All it does throughout your life, is to get to know the rest of you better. If your conscious self allows that, of course.

Through this perspective, I find myself becoming able to let go of the past, to let go of the control. The subconscious fears it because it thinks letting go lessens what you are, but the opposite is fact. The past has made an impression on the present, and the present shapes the future. All time is thus encompassed within that singular point in time, and it’s all you need.

This note in other words: today, I went through my things and threw away a lot of old stuff. It felt good.

I remember when magic was a day-to-day business for me. I’m talking about my childhood, of course. Sure, you could say that whatever magic I imagined was just that; imagination. It never existed, I was only fooling myself. But then I’d just shake my head, because that’s not the point. I still know magic.

Because the real magic is the moment itself, when magic and wonder really does seem real. Magic is when you can actually picture a world where heroes always win, where deceases and accidents don’t exist. Magic is when you really feel like there’s something more out there, something wondrous and curious and impossible. And magic is when the real world allows wondrous things of other worlds to happen here, too.

The last kind will happen only if you believe it can. If you don’t, the same might still happen, but you will discard it at coincidence, and your world will forever be boring.

I really look forward to the day I’ll be able to make magic happen for someone else.

This post tells about the need to have a safe home to come home to, the insecurity of not having one, and what you need to make one.

I’m not content right now. I’ve got this vague feeling like something needs fixing, something that’s gone wrong somewhere but that nobody’s noticed. It’s like the world used to be run properly, but then we all started neglecting it to stress over less important matters instead, and now we’ve all forgotten how it was and how it used to be run. I feel I should do something, I feel I should take control and make things work again, show people that the happiness of the past can return not only in our minds.

But things seem so different now, so much more complicated. Complication has tainted my mind, and ignorance has become a habit. I can see it happening and I work against it, but I cannot help but be carried away by the huge current. I knew once that there were refuges on top of the water, many of them. Refuges built on happiness, joy and friendship, built by those who share it, who know it and who can give it. Those refuges still exist, in new forms, for others, but I shy away from them. I do not feel at home in them. I visit sometimes and it inspires me greatly, for a while, but overall I’ve become an outsider.

I constantly try to build my own refuges. But they are mere shadows of those I remember. Though I wish to build them for others as well, they are made by and for myself, and I alone support them. And that’s not how it works at all.

However, I’m well aware that I’m not the only outsider. And you don’t need to be an outsider either to be troubled by this. The problem is independence. Before, I used to have little to no control over my own life. My family and my friends’ families controlled everything that happened in my life. They’d lived long lives already and they’d built several refuges between them; a network of houses on the water. In due time, we will also have built such for the next generation, and they will, hopefully, live happily in this safe haven. But what about those of us, here, now, who’ve left the nest of our childhood?

We’re in the cold of the river, swimming to find our own path. But we also need to find together. We need those refuges, and we can’t build them alone. Many of us aren’t good at building, or at cooperating, but letting that hinder you will never lead you to happiness. This is not the time to lay still in the water. Good friends are the most important thing of all when you’ve become independent.

Lastly, who says you can’t return home from time to time? We’re humans, and not birds. Leaving the nest does not mean you never go back, not at all. Of course, not all of us have the luxury of a safe home, but for those of us who do, it’s a great source of inspiration.

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.