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.

“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.”

Music is just one of the things. Ideas pop up in my head frequently, around moments of inspiration. Those are moments of strong emotion; not necessarily intense, but clear. I can picture elaborate movies and dances while listening to music. Dreams are also interconnected into this complex construction. The core part of any inspiration, to me, is an atmosphere of another world, a subset of this world’s extremities gathered into a package. I find deep meaning and vitality in dealing with these packages — gathering,nurturing and creating them.

I even apply the abilities to my own future. When I am in love, which is one of the highest states of inspiration, I can’t help but picture special moments, somewhere in the future, that would make my life more complete. A touch, an exchange of emotion, a display of deep love, a fundamental understanding. Things I know I need and long of, things I understand the workings of, but things I have never experienced or managed to produce.

So perhaps inevitably, it comes coupled with a longing, and that longing turns into a sadness. Then I try to make these things happen, but I find my abilities cut short, like in the playing of an instrument. I see what could be there, but am unable to create it. This all boils down into a fear, the fear of failure and insufficience. This I deal with daily, sometimes, and it is the dark side of the coin that is my dreams of love.

In the year that was, I succeeded in getting better acquainted with my soul. I shall uphold that bond, but this year, I will try to access my heart, too. Too long have I hidden it, shrouded it and unsuccessfully tried to shield it from the outside world. This year, I shall muster up courage and faith and face my fears and anxieties. Somehow I believe those come from the heart, whom I have so mistreated.

It is also time for me to shake off some more apathy. These past years by myself have faced me with many challenges and new situations, many of whom I have avoided altogether. Now I am more experienced, and I can apply my abilities of problem solving to set things right. I’ll build, I’ll fix, and I’ll create my own life. I will take responsibility for myself. I’d be a joke for a man if I could never muster the wits to see this necessity.

And in the midst of all this, I want to do creative works. I have already begun to brainstorm, with snippets of music, writings and photography. The idiocy of my neglecting side would have me sit and whine while these abilities rust.

In short, I will recover all the lost and more.

I have one emotion that I hold in high regard as the one I bring with me into this new year. It is an emotion I have not felt in a long time, which I now feel in a rather peculiar and, you might say, imaginary fashion. It is a feeling of being in love, but it stems from music and from a most fictitious story. I am merely observing this emotion.

So. A track for the newborn year: Rebecca Kneubuhl – Guide You Home

This is the inconvenient truth  that sometimes, bad things happen, and if you don’t realize it, it will only get worse. Sometimes we even have to save ourselves from ourselves. That is when we must stand up to our own feelings and relieve ourselves of involuntary torments. That, or live our lives in fear and distress.

Throughout life, people bond. Not only with eachother, but perhaps even more so with all they experience. We bond with memories, with emotions, habits, norms and with ourselves.

Bonds form, and bonds break. Many break because they were weak, and they make space for greater bonds, and we do not even notice. Meanwhile, some bonds are much stronger, and will become a background for our life for a long time to come. New bonds will be made on top of these strong bonds, and rely on them to hold.

They do not always hold. Even strong bonds can break; and whether they connected us to other people, to a daily life we used to have, to our place of birth or even to a scent or a color — the feeling is much the same. The difference lies only in the nature of the bond and what we can do about it. Naturally, the death of someone we know is hardest because we have the strongest bonds with them, and nothing can bring them back.

Parts of us die along with the ones we love. Parts of us also die along with other bonds. The truth of this points out a rather revelatory fact:

We are the sum of all we hold dear.

I have already written about the importance of making new bonds and the courage to let go of what you have already lost. Today, I wish to inspire the ability to see bonds clearly and understand them.

This does not come from my heart, for my heart would not agree. But sometimes, you make bonds that turn against you. It can be an unrequited love, a mistaken norm, and it can even be a direct bond with destructive emotions like melancholy.

Sometimes you cannot even see the fault. And even when you do, you still do not wish for change — because of the bond, because you feel and know that a part of you lies in this bond. And you don’t want to die. So you keep the bond.

Under other circumstances, the affection from the bond would conquer the force of truth that would sever it. Would not a courteous soldier spare the life of an offender, was he bidden by the man’s infant daughter? But we’re talking about circumstances where the girl, mistreated by her tyrant father, obeys him yet in blind affection, whilst rotting within from the corruption of the situation.

The tyrants I wish to denounce, are those inside the girl’s mind. Instead of her father, it can be a depression, a bad habit or even a memory (most likely all of them combined). There are many inside tyrants, and they are cunning in their manipulation; so cunning that we can’t easily see their reign over us.

With open eyes, however, it is possible to face the demons. And here’s the catch. No less than in a real battle, your safety will be on the line. You might return defeated and weaker than ever, and you might return victorious, but not unharmed. In any case — I will not hide it — you will lose something of yourself, something that will never return.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.” (Ambrose Redmoon)

And then you will be free.

The modern opinion is cynical towards the world, expecting to recieve no compassion or meaning — because after all, the universe is a faceless machine, its gears the cold logic of physics and probability. I battle this opinion under its own terms, showing that emotions like love cannot merely be explained by their apparent purposes, but must have been present since the conception of this world.

Humanity. We live and we persist because it is inevitable. In this world of change and peril, only that which persists, lives.

Our highly developed consciousness, our imagination, made us persist. Our hope in better days, in great wonder, made us persist. Because of them, we still exist to this day.

And because they made us persist, these parts have persisted in us. That is the only reason we have them. If the world had challenged us in different ways, we would have developed different abilities. In another world, we might be unable to learn to swim, climb trees… or feel happy.

So how can we think that there is any meaning to our emotions? That is, beyond their effect upon our actions, and leading us to our survival. How can we ever claim that emotions are anything else than our naive imagination of the world, our colouring of what is truly neutral, a machine?

By questioning how they are even possible.

If emotions are in us alone, then they are part of us but not of the world. This would imply that emotions come through us from somewhere else than the world we know. Which, of course, is a rather uplifting thought.

If this seems unreasonable, then the other logical option is that emotions have got to be a part of this very world, inherent in it without the need of our presence, and made possible by the very laws that govern it.

Great, so our emotions exist. That’s fine and all. But how claim that the very emotions themselves are any more than gears and wheels, pulling our strings? Love is just there because we survived when we stayed together, right?

That doesn’t matter. If I want to put a nail into a wooden box, I get a hammer. But if I lived on a planet made out of jelly, it would be no use. Likewise, if we lived in a world without love, there would be nothing we could do to stay together and survive. Our emotions are seperate from what they do for us, as the hammer is seperate from the need to nail wood.

So evolution might have given us all we have, and that explains why we have it, but not why those things work. It couldn’t have been given, had it not been there to give. All of our abilities, all of our emotions, all our imagination; they are all tapping into the big picture of all things.

So…

What is music, really?

A little valley, a sink in the landscape. A tree on a tiny hill. Nature around me, teeming. A clucking stream bending around the hill.

I lift my arms, take it all in. Hanging from a branch in the tree. Effortlessly. Nature is coming. Animals approach. A deer, many birds.

A fox. I understand. I follow her.

The stream is bigger here. A waterfall. She jumps over, I follow. It’s ridiculously easy.

Up a hill, leading to another waterfall above. I practically float up the hill. There is an opening behind the waterfall. We go in.

There is light behind the water. It opens into another valley, more beautiful than the previous one. I see a crooked tree on the top of a hill that’s arranged in great steps.

She speaks. “Follow my lead.” Now we’re in the grass on a hill close by. “Break free of bonds… of limitations.”

We lay down in the grass. She curls up by my left hand. Friendship. Presence. Calm. Then she crawls up to my neck and curls up there. Intimacy. Support. Empathy. At last, the settles down atop my heart. Understanding. Protection. Attachment.

“Of course I know.” She accepts me and guards me. She is, after all, a part of me.

For a short while, we lie like this. Not too short, but not too long. She stands up and walks away. I can manage, now. The sky, once blue, has filled with stars. She runs towards them and grows wings. In flight, she turns to me. “See you around.” She disappears in the night, but not before she has made the trees bloom all around me. A beautiful, protecting sight against the dark sky. I am content, and I lie there for a while longer.

Then I’m outside. I find the little valley and the tree. I sit down on a branch and listen to nature. Thinking about her. And then, as if she’d always been there, she appears in the corner of my arm. Calm.

Here I end the meditation session.

But it creates a heck of a good view being just where it is.

Without the horizon, I do not know which way to go, and even if I go the right way, I will wonder why I did so, without any sense of purpose.

Here I am again, talking about attitudes towards life. I lost faith for a while, but now I’m back. I believe I created something of myself through this journal, and leaving would be forsaking that. Now I choose not to.

What I accomplish in life has limited meaning. It is how I live my life that is most essential. What I choose to use as a background setting for whatever my life turns out to be. What I put my hopes in and what I choose to believe is true. When I have faith in something, I create a new section within myself. And this section can then give me the guidance and the answers that I need to achieve meaning in my own life.

So what do I believe in?

Love. The unconditional caring of other beings, that we all talk of yet never seem to understand.

I used to blame love for my hurts and wounds, but it was never love that hurt me. Love does not hurt. Lust and envy, however, does. Sadly, we all tend to believe in these things as well. But that does not mean that they need to be on my horizon.

True love is an ideal — we can always do better — so it is a perfect setting for a horizon. We can get infinitely close, but it will always be ahead to drive us further.

Or perhaps I’m wrong.

But I really like the view.

We are sometimes afraid of ourselves, conforming to what feels safe just to lessen our anxieties, our fears of the unknown, however good.

Why do we all hinder ourselves? Why do we hold back, in favor of being gray? Is is because we are afraid of loss?

Even when we know what can be, how life can be, why oh why do we still do nothing? Why do I do nothing?

Humans can be so special. Relationships can be so special. But we.. no, I. I am so afraid. I cannot hide behind mankind on this one. It’s childish, it’s introverted, it’s straight-out stupid, but I am afraid of letting anyone close. All my life, I have kept more distance from others than I can honestly say I’m happy with.

Why doesn’t matter. Whys are not just excuses, they are shields; shields of lies that you can hide behind and believe it’s okay that you’re doing something wrong. Psychology is an elaborate shield that lets us be gray with a clean conscience. I will not ponder on why I am afraid and distant, and then be happy with the reason I find most likely. I will not be happy with being like this for the rest of my life, with not being as I think people ought to be.

Difference starts somewhere. And then it spreads. We would all do best not to resist the kind of change that this movie inspires in us.