Tales and Journeys

Yesterday I refurnished my room. The practical reason was so there’d be better room for my christmas tree. But the true motivation for doing it was so the room would look and feel different. And it worked extremely well! The change in lighting (now from my christmas tree) gives the room an all-new atmosphere.

Despite that and the fact that is was December 1st, though, yesterday was a bad day. I can tell the bad ones from the good ones from the very moment I wake up; on the bad ones that moment is typically two hours after I wanted to wake up, and also two hours before I manage to get out of bed. Also it’s always cloudy and gray outside. I can still feel good on a bad day, through effort, using music, movies and art. But if I venture outside I will risk interacting with other people in a manner that might make me feel at a lack of social abilities, and I might lose whatever good mood I have in the blink of an eye and exchange it with grinding anxiety. So on bad days I tend to stay at home.

Today was another bad day, with a sky covered by homogenous rainclouds. Yet it’s been quite a special day, too. Even though nothing happened. Here’s how it went:

I wake up just before 10 am, by my wristwatch ringing from atop a shelf. I let it ring for about fifteen minutes before I bother rubbing my eyes so that I can stare at the ceiling and try to become more awake. Finally getting up to turn off the alarm, I grab my cellphone and lay back down in bed. After listening to music from my cell for half an hour without falling asleep, I finally decide to get up. I turn on my computer and the lights on my christmas tree and fetch some breakfast.

Having realized it’s a bad day, I decide I need to do something pleasing. I decide to check the deviantART favourites of an artist whose work I recently added to my own favourites. I’ve realized it’s one of the best ways to find new favourable works. I find a whole hoard of amazing photos. Have an example:

So many of them are so new and unique, and unexpected! I find myself thinking things like “is Romania really that beautiful?” “Does ice really form like that?” “Do forests like that really exist?” Overall my mind feels expanded.

However, I still feel unsettled and unable to focus on doing something productive. Then I remember how taking walks has done wonders for my perspective before, so I decide to do that. But it’s not exactly Spring these days; the sun is already down, and so I walk through the darkness on raggedly ice-covered ground through a constant drizzle, with the clouds looming heavily over me. The light of the city illuminates the nearby clouds, but that light fades into merciless blackness over the forest.

I’m not in a lonely mood, so that doesn’t repel me. I enter the forest and choose paths I haven’t gone before. And then, whilst slipping downhill on the icy ground, my mind lectures itself and says: “honestly, already the emotion of this experience is far stronger than many of your childhood memories!” I realize the truth in that as I look at some mist rising above a nearby lamp post and notice that I can smell the forest. That makes me smile and gives me hope. Not all memories come from my childhood. New memories can still be created, memories that might even surpass those. I feel I’ve discovered something wise, but then I also think of this quote:

“It’s far easier to write a hundred essays on philosophy, than to practice one single principle.”

There you have me. I’ve philosophized a lot about different things the past years. Now I feel I know quite well what’s right. But that does in no way mean that I follow that philosophy. I used to think myself capable of it, but that is an overestimation. I always try to follow the wisdom I believe in, and through that I might one day manage to practice some of it. But I am merely human, and humans are bound by habit, routine and psychology. It makes the road long. Excitingly, life is, too!

The road I walk on treads close to an open stadium where, seemingly, a match of ice hockey is being played. I stray from it and walk and among the dark trees on the other side until I meet a river. I follow the river to a crossing covered by so much ice I’m not really sure what’s ground and what’s river. When I reach a small nearby lake, I’m far from the nearest lamp post. I walk out on a long wodden pier and gaze into the surrounding landscape. Two words come to me: ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’. Better can hardly be said about the sight of it. Even the hundreds of crows, now nesting in the forest, are hiding away from the cold and the dark. Still, what I think is this: “There’ll be a new Spring next year, just you wait.”

Walking back, I find myself feeling soothingly detached from the world. Or rather, from my own routines and common emotions. I walk past buildings and places where I’ve walked several times a day for over a year, but my mind is not at all set like it usually is when I walk there. No, right this moment, due to the unusual atmosphere, the world is another. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk ahead of me, to keep from slipping. But the ice on the sidewalk sparkles as if to entertain me. And I am entertained, and pleased. I get to live in another world for a moment.

Back home, I feel inspired and so I write this entry. After it’s finished, I prepare some dinner, and then I watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time in many years.