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.”

What does the world really feel like, and what is the most true way to feel? In the next paragraphs, I conclude that this difference in feeling, this paradox of the human soul, disappears when we realize what is really going on.

Not so rarely, I find myself engulfed in some specific emotional landscape. It can be the set of emotions found in a specific book, the strings pulled by a certain album, or even the emotions brought forth by the nature around me. While in this landscape, the similar emotions within me stand out more clearly and are easier to access. I all but settle down in the surroundings and become a part of the experience.

Like all works of art, emotional landscapes have an array of emotions, some more present than others, and put together in a unique way. So while no landscape relates to one single emotion, different landscapes can take up wholly different sections of the great continent of emotions. Also, just as a musical piece can be complete in and of itself, so can a landscape feel complete and un-lacking. In effect, two completely seperate landscapes can both feel like the “most real” one.

But, as human beings, we answer to the continent as a whole. That doesn’t mean that the “most real” emotional landscape is the one you see when you strap onto a rocket and hitch a ride into space. Even if this, too, is an emotional landscape. No, the continent cannot be felt, and so all the different variations of scenery are equally real. Such a conclusion might not be true for scientific perspectives, but human emotions are different.

What’s more, we have somewhat of an obligation to know ourselves. And here comes the last piece of the metaphor, too: the continent is an individual thing. There are variations between us: some mountain peaks are taller or shorter, some lakes shift, forests come and go and lands vary in size. We need to traverse it all to truly know who we are. How we travel and how long we stay in each place, will determine the colors of our lifespan, the richness of our lives.

There will be landscapes in life that we prefer over others and in which we spend much time. Then times might change, and emotions become different. Is it growing up, is it being led further into the truth? No. It is travelling. Not into truth, nor from truth, just elsewhere. I will not pretend otherwise; some things (perhaps all things) in life will change the face of the continent, and you might travel back to find forests gone and mountains moved. But this is just the more reason to travel — so you will always know what you are become. If a land suffers, it can make alliances with friendly lands on the same continent, and many things can be rebuilt.

When travelling from a landscape to another, do not think you are leaving something behind or denying one truth to replace it with another. You are simply travelling, because all the lands need attention and acknowledgement. The human soul is many-faceted, and any face can grow lonely. Don’t just know yourself. Come visit yourself, too.

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

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.

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.

And I would stop all I do wrong: all I am expected to do, but that I deep down know I shouldn’t. All for the sake of comfort, I risk resignation, I risk forgetting, I risk dying in life. I would stop it, and I would travel. To rediscover the forsaken, remember the forgotten. I would travel to visit my soul.

Not to find a path. Just to walk.

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.