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.

For a long while, I successfully suppressed the angst in myself, because I had become able to do it, and I knew that angst was stupid emo business. But I’ve changed my mind. Now I try to seek my sorrows, because they are there for a reason. Either I should resolve them, or I should at least acknowledge their existence.

The following text is made the way I prefer to write. It is not an essay, not a message, but a description of a fleeting chain of feelings, written while those feelings are strongly present. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel alive.

“One can’t expect too much from me. I’m no average person in an average state. Wounds have formed in me, and I need to heal. This is no illness, no fault in me, but a fact. I am depressed at certain times. All that has come to pass, has set its mark on me. The sorrow is part of me now, I let it reside in my being, because that is how I turn it into something meaningful. Because of this, there are now paths I must walk, phases I must pass through.”

“It is hard to do alone. I stagnate. Years have passed, and I am still not free from myself. Still I am impatient and anxious, but I am learning, the hard way. One day, things will be very different. Yet some emotions will never go away; I have responsibility for the sorrow, now. I must take care of it as I take care of myself.”

“The situation would be different, had I taken another course through time. There would be less sorrow. But that is not how it is. I am what I am, I have what I have, and I must start from there. Not from the level that the expectations of others would have preferred. They must understand this, respect it and help me to walk my paths. Without this, I can go nowhere. Without friends I keep on shrinking. To make it even harder, I have not been blessed with the ability to form close friendships. I retreat into my own sorrow rather than share it with others. I just don’t have that confidence in those around me.”

“And so I wait for the one person that I can truly confide in. The one person that can save me; set me free; turn me into myself; open my heart and stay with me. It is the only way I can feel, the only one that feels right. This is what my heart seeks, and if I do not listen to it, it will stop talking to me, as it has before.”

Sarah Brightman – Deliver Me

That and a million more words would never be enough. Even understanding and appreciation of all the principles of music that we had learned throughout our thousands of years upon the globe, would never be enough.

The world stood still for a while. She was unaware she had just been thinking about something. A restless kind of glow surrounded her, reminiscent of the excitement before a rollercoaster ride or an urgent kiss, except it was embedded within the very glow itself. Tangible and not fleeting. It was not her own emotion, but the emotion that was there was not intruding to her. It was more like she was allowed to take part in its discovery, trusted in to understand.

A beat appeared. It was not heard and it was. A moment later, she could see the glow reacting, synchronising itself with the beat. Not only a sync in time, but in emotion as well. A soft beat, gradually clearing the mist in careful and gradual nudges.

In front of her, a denser part of the mist was beginning to take form. Was she was beginning to see, she felt she knew already, but only as clearly as the outlines of that form. Then, coming like the excitement before, a realization that what she saw, was the music itself. It was the face of this musical piece, as it had defined itself thus far. The shape was beyond any geometry she knew. She was not certain she should be able to see such a shape at all.

It proceeded to break up into pieces and become mist yet again. This time, however, there was another kind of anticipation hanging in that mist. She nodded, a sign of her acceptance. And she felt as if a flow was directed into her own soul. She found she could feel the music as if in dance, but she wasn’t dancing, she had never mastered that art. And this was so much more. No, she was expressing the music in some other way, an invisible way.

The mist changed, and she responded, her role in sync with the roles of the mist, together forming a clearer picture of what was being brought forth. Several shapes were beginning to take form now, veils of mist wrapping around them. She could not determine any color, only that there were just enough of them. There were also smells, changing conditions of the air, and sensations she did not know she could even register. All of it playing many roles: discovery, reminding of what has been discovered, and lighting up the path to what lies yet to be discovered. Each moment, each movement, with its very own revelation.

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

So now, I take the time to reflect upon a year-long walk.

The year 2008 has been a year of learning. A year of change. A year of humility, of compassion, of slumber, rest and harmony. It has also been a year of neglect, of panic and exhaustion and of intense self-searching. I have cried more this year than I have all previous years combined.

Well. Let me break it down chronologically.

January, I was a mess. I was spinning round in the treadmill, spending all my energy but not getting anywhere. Several times I changed back and forth between hopeless love and just pure hopelessness. However, though I can be an idiot and even a jackass, I am not a fool, so I had my recovery planned. All the time until Spring, I spent preparing myself, mentally, for a change to the better.

Like a blessing came April. Inspired by newly added wisdom and spiritual ideas I related to, I sought and found all-new experiences in nature. I heard birdsong like I had never heard it before. I saw deer several times. Half of the photos I took this month were of birds. The other half were of clouds. Spring was showing to be exactly that rescuing angel I had hoped it would be.

The weather this summer was glorious, and thus, so was my mood. I walked in the nearby forests time upon time, paying close attention to the developing life and taking hundreds of photos. I did good in the external life, finishing exams and getting a summer job. I also went interrailing through Europe. The amount of new experiences was astounding, and I kept them all in a detailed log.

Eventually, I could see and feel nature starting to wane, to lean towards a new slumber. But with all that’d been this warm season, I welcomed Autumn with open hands. Summer had become plain, and it was time to rustle up other parts of myself and enter a new phase. All Summer had been spent looking outside, and now came the time to look inside, and digest all the new stuff.

I now found a renewed liking for New Age music. In my preparation for Spring I had taught myself meditation, and now I could combine these two to explore deeper part of myself. I make no claims and I hold no belief, but I react rather positively to this stuff. Meditation has proven to be a very effective way for me to clear my mind of stress and reactivate my creativity. This has been a goal of mine since. I even bought a guitar and managed to learn its ways and its theories pretty well.

Since Winter crept over the lands, I have longed back to the green of Spring, but I have tried to discipline myself and be glad for what is now. That’s something I’ve had to do, because this year has been lacking compared to earlier years. It’s my energy that has lessened. I’ve become economical and I make do with what I have.

I am steadily becoming a better human. But I am not forsaking my other sides.

A track for the year that’s been: Wim – Serenity Falls.

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?

Photographers find the exact angle and composition where the beauty is the clearest, and then they doll up the scene in Photoshop afterwards, making it into something that can’t even be found. Writers also give us prime examples and leave out the mundanity that truly fills our lives. And musicians hog the well-used beats and harmonies of the rare moments in life. Art, in effect, makes us disappointed in the world.

The world has no beauty.

It is all a fantasy.

But, then again…

What isn’t?

Artists don’t show us the world. It is not what they do. They show us ourselves. The art invokes thoughts and emotions and unnamed things in us, and that is what they want us to see. What we experience through the art — and now I’m not talking about abstract sculptures and the stuff that only a niche of pompous pricks gets, but your own favorite stories, music and images — is not the art itself; the experience isn’t inside the art. The art just accidentally brings it out in you. And in that moment, you are the artist. Only to yourself, perhaps, but still an artist.

All art is about the human spirit. All that we can feel. If something doesn’t feel any special at all to us, then why, it’s not art! So art isn’t out to show us the world; it picks only the best because it’s there to teach us about the extreme possibilities within ourselves.

Art is example. Each piece, a mere slice of a greater connection, a glimpse of the infinities. The infinities that are present, not out there, but within us.

We are thus the most beautiful things in this very existence.

Remember that when you interact with others.

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.

The album tells me this: There’s always something to fight for. If you lack concrete things to devote your attention to (which a lot of us do, I daresay), then fight to remove that very fact! Fights in this sense are always fights for better days. Yet we look upon today’s human society, and we acknowledge that we’ve got everything and even that is not enough. This depresses us and makes us believe that there are no “better days”. So we forget and ignore that insistant feeling we have inside, the promise of wonder and happiness. We think things can’t improve, and so there is nothing to fight for. That’s when we need to fight to reactivate that wondrous feeling, fight to start believing again, fight to create something to fight for.

And somewhere across that line we might come to realize that the fight itself is the whole point.

Every joy I feel, I want to share. Every good thing I discover, I want to pass on. If doing that was easy, I would be a very happy person, for I have so much to share. But it’s not easy, so I always try to refine my methods. It’s not like striving to be accepted, which is generally a bad thing. No, I strive merely to become a better person, a better friend, a better mentor. A better father.

I’ve actually thought about fatherhood a deal lately. Perhaps it’s because I’ve recently managed to form a mental image of the ideal paternal spirit: the caring, compassionate, strong, wise, never-failing fatherly role. I suddenly understood better why some religious people are so caught up in characters like Jesus, an example of such a spirit. Another example is Aslan, from The Chronicles of Narnia. Both are genuinely caring characters that you just know you can trust, rely on to make things better, who do not waver or doubt. I understand the attitudes and ideals that form the basis of this spirit, this archetype, and I want to give it my best shot at living up to the same role when my time comes. I believe I can be a good father

I guess … I guess this actually provides me with something to fight for. I’ve been a bit short on that lately. Yes, I can fight for this. A possible future. My future children. They’ll need me to be strong, so why not start towards that goal right away? They won’t want to be hearing about how I couldn’t pull myself together and become strong for them because I spent my youth being heartbroken, lonely and anxious.

I’m a goddamn genious.

Inspiration, yes. It’s what I’m all about. And from this moment on, I’ll be just a little more stubborn in my ways, a little less respectful of the society’s norms and expectations, and a deal more self-confident. Sure, with all I’ve just said, I could instead profess that, from this day on, I’ll be radically different. But experience shows that’s not the way it works. And that’s a good thing. So this is one more step, one of many, towards the future I seek. The soil beneath my feet is not mud and pebble, but dreams and inspiration, hope and confidence, love and compassion. I do not choose my way from what I know exists. I make my own way. Step by step.

This entry in other words: I started playing Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean today. I absolutely love it so far, because of the wonderful score, and I want the whole world to play it, to feel it.