What if?

What if everything we believe in this life is just a series of illusions we've taught ourselves to believe?
What if that's all there is to it?
What if Nietchze is right and there is no truth, just what every culture needs to believe in order to survive?
No right, now wrong, no good, no evil, no true love, just survival instincts.
What if our only purpose here is to exist, and go on existing?
Maybe as our minds are freed from the need to constantly struggle to survive through hunting and fighting in more primitive times, as we progress into times filled with time to contemplate, we try to create that meaning, but it doesn't exist.
Maybe it never can.

This week on Post Secret

There's always a secret or two that hit home.

Amidst triumph, lies irrelevance

In the midst of determination to be great, there is doubt for the cause.
A drive to succeed, win, for greatness, fame, dampened by innate knowledge that we will all one day die.
Leave a legacy, for what? for fame after death when it is no longer of any consequence?
I can have the cleanest room, the most expensive clothes, do the greatest things and hear praises from all ends of the earth, and for what? To die and leave it all behind? I can't take it where I'm going, wherever that is.
All the life experiences are of no consequence. This life is a fleeting moment, and our presence here will pass. And when it does, and we leave behind our legacy to those in the next generation, they too will pass, and if we are remembered? Revered? If school children across the nations sleep through lectures on our accomplishments? What consequence is it to us? How will it affect us in whatever state of afterlife exists? All that we do here is lost in the grand scheme of things. It is humbling in the most useless way, since I will only continue along this path with this knowledge in the back of my head, dampening the triumph.

Maybe

Postsecret.com

What happened to me?

I used to be happy.
Not just happy, overjoyed. Completely, overflowingly, un-containably happy. even I was amazed at how happy I was capable of being. I couldn't ever even remember the last time I'd cried. My life was imperfect but I LOVED it. Relished every challenge, adored everything and everyone, I had endless energy, enthusiasm, patience with people. I was excited for work, to prove myself. I even s smiled when I cried. It wasn't normal, but it was wonderful.
What happened to me? I cry almost every day now. I hate to, almost can't admit, how far I've gone from who I used to be. I don't even feel capable of that kind of happiness anymore. I'm a shadow of that girl. I'm not proud to be me anymore. I'm not excited for the future because I feel destined to fail. I'm ashamed of how often I'm unhappy, and that makes me even more unhappy. I see old friends every day, scared that they'll compare me to the way they used to know me. That they'll see. That they won't want to know me anymore. I can't even put it in words. And that's the clincher. That's who I am now. Unable to put my unorganized, mess of feelings into eloquent words. Ultimate degradation.

I don't know how I got this way.
And I don't know how to get back.

It's funny

how one good day can make you realize that you're taking life too seriously. Sometimes you need to chill out and realize that this moment IS your life and if you're spending it in a downward spiral of stress, you're wasting it. I am going to be happy and grateful because I have SO much to be grateful for. I have parents who love me and bail me out when I get in too deep, I have siblings who are always there to set a good example and help me out, I have room mates who I adore and trust and enjoy living with, I have sweet horses who are worth every penny and every time I haven't had enough money because they needed new shoes. I have a cat that's more like a kid, a boyfriend who doesn't make me worry, stress, who doesn't hurt me and just loves me, in every moment that I don't even love myself. I'm surrounded by people who make my life worth living every day, who show me adventures, who listen when I'm feeling less than adventurous, who understand more than I could ever have expected and who show me more kindness than I deserve, I live beautiful, in all it's chaos and mess, and I will remember that when I'm having a glass half empty day. You can't have a rainbow without any rain.

Pressure

Sometimes I feel completely surrounded. I feel like the pressure building around me can only get heavier and I want to run. I visualize it like the pressure deep in the ocean, in the darkest depths of the sea where the squid lives and the pressure would kill you. This is the area where I picture a sunken ship- a ghost of failures past. Other times I see a swirl of images. My sister losing her house, my brother as his job gets closed down, my cousin as the father of her child leaves her at fifteen, the sickening swirl of chapters I haven't read, plants that needed to be watered, bills that I can't pay with money I don't have, me in the future, never having chosen a career, never loved my work, never helped anyone, never successful, living paycheck to paycheck hoping to make enough. It paralyzes me and all I can do is lay in bed-terrified of things I can't even wrap my mind around. Things that aren't solid. An overtone say it will be alright. But the pounding, swirling baritone beneath is drowns it out and swirls on. And I can only go deeper into this ocean.

I see

No light at the end of this tunnel.

"Through difficulty.. Sweetness"

What's the point in battling difficulty, in struggling, if only to just survive? To drag yourself out of the hard times, barely hanging on, exhausted and beat down?
If I have to have difficulty in my life, if I have to struggle, if I have to hurt, I want to take something from it. I want it to force me to grow and I want to learn and come out of it stronger each time. I want to be triumphant.
There's no breaking down, I want to pass all these tests, I'm scared to death of choosing the wrong options, but when I'm through with it all, I want to be proud of who I am, what I've done and who I've become. I want to be able to look back and say that I was strong and stood my ground when it was hard.
"Through difficulty lies opportunity."
And I am determined to find the opportunity in each and every difficulty.
There may not always be an easy sweet side, but there will always be an opportunity.

Muse sums it all up: "I'm not breaking down, I'm breaking out."

Continuum

Colors blur;
Time fades in and out;

The world is melting into one continuous form where colors and time are the same and motion joins them, and they are one.

The street lights are especially bright tonight, and they form a continuum, stretching out like they lead the way to somewhere spectacular, and I am lost in them.

And I can feel the rhythm of the earth, feel the vibration, and it overwhelms me.

And it all is one; the rhythm and the time, the colors and the motion; all are one, and I am witness.

All become one; all are one.

Time goes by

Don't laugh at me, this is something I genuinely got side tracked thinking about while I was trying to study at the park the other day. It was a beautiful, sunny day in Milton and it smelled like tree sap and pine needles and bark. I'd found a picnic table, sitting randomly in the parking lot in a patch of sun, facing the woods. I was sitting, staring at the swaying trees, thinking about how long they might have been there, and how many times they'd swayed just like that, and as I watched the different people filter through the park with their families, and how many families and dogs and couples just like those the trees had born witness to, going about the same activities over the years. The more I stared at the trees, the less appealing my homework seemed to become as I got lost in my own head again. I pulled out my pen and notebook and started jotting my thoughts.

"How do we know of passing time? s it the passing cars that we see and say "Oh, that car is passing, thereby, time must be passing as well."? As if their motion pushes on the motion of time, for isn't time, the ongoing passing of action?
Is it then, in movement? If the cars didn't pass and the birds didn't fly; if the trees didn't sway and everything -and everyone- stood perfectly still- would time still pass? If it never got any darker, or any lighter, would time still pass?
What if, people didn't grow weary and wrinkled and the same generation just hung around forever?

Would time still pass? What would be it's relevance if it did?"

"deserve"

Generally, it's music that makes sense of the world for me.
Driving home from class today, once verse in particular sent me down another path:
"Each day is a gift and not a given right."

Somewhere along the line, we have gotten the idea that we "deserve" certain things out of life. That we deserve to live an easy, comfortable life, feeling as if we own each day and it should provide to us, like an employee of sorts. Somewhere along the line, this feeling of ownership came back to bite us, with the realization that we cannot expect the world to provide simply because we "deserve" it. The residents at my work always say "Every day that I wake up again is a good day" when asked how they are. The simple act of waking up every morning is not even something to be expected, earned or deserved. This ability, in itself is a gift, and I plan to start each morning from now on being grateful for that gift.

Without the expectation that you "deserve" things out of life, you are free to be grateful for every good thing that comes you way as an unexpected surprise, not as something adding up to fill your quota of the good things you deserve. Realize that we, as the general population of humans, have made enough mistakes, that we really deserve nothing. Even those who are "essentially good people" who expect to have Karma repay them, if you have that expectation, you have gone into the good acts expecting reward, with impure motives. The world is full of kind people, but not one of them "deserves" the perfect life, and not one will ever lead it. Every kind act toward us, every happy "coincidence", sunny day, every "good day" is more than we deserve. Let that overwhelm you with happiness and gratefulness. We have so much more than we deserve.


(On that note, I am calm again. "All I know is, I'm going to be alright." This is my attempt, I won't always get it right, but here's to trying.)

Not Myself

Really, honestly, this is not me.
It kills me that this is the first impression some people will have of me.
Stressed and exhausted constantly.
I don't know how to be this. I don't know how to not be ashamed of being unhappy.
I need to turn this around, but I can't do that until I immerse myself in it and feel it and embrace it, and then I can leave it; This much I have learned from past turbulence. This is not something I want to immerse myself in though, so I am fighting it. I am ashamed that I can't just suck it up and tough it out, when my problems are small hindrances compared to those of others. "Problems" is not even a word that I feel comfortable using in description of what I have. I don't actually have a word, no matter how hard I search, not a single one seems entirely appropriate.

I guess, this is just my form of apology, for not being the person I I have always been, and the person I owe to you to be.
I guess, I don't even write for myself anymore, but to apologize and explain and project what I want you to see. If I knew no one would ever, ever see, what would I write? What would I say?

And here, even this adds to my growing sink hole of things. For lack of a better word, things is the only one mundane enough.
I am so worried about making time for everyone, for making everything better for everyone, about being what everyone else needs me to be that I can't even begin my own "things". And I'm blogging to make myself feel better, thereby, procrastinating the homework that is wearing at me.

I have one dollar, an empty house, a horse to feed, and a family in south dakota.
I do not know how to be self sufficient.
All I have is faith, and I stand by that as the strongest weapon against all that life throws at you. Without faith; hope; ambition; you are where you are. And you will stay there. I have to keep the faith, keep hoping and dreaming, and acting on those dreams.
And in certain moments, that makes everything better.
But it's like a building underwater; the pressure will crush you if you don't fortify it with something more.

Of course, the perfect song to describe my current state is by none other than John Mayer. He sings my soul.

John Mayer - Not myself

Suppose I said
I am on my best behavior
there are times
I lose my worried mind

Would you want me when I'm not myself?
Wait it out while I am someone else?

Suppose I said
Colors change for no good reason
words will go
From poetry to prose

Would you want me when I'm not myself?
Wait it out while I am someone else?

And I, in time, will come around, come around
I always do for you

Suppose I said
You're my saving grace?

My grace
My self
Not myself, my myself and I...
When I'm someone else
When I'm someone else
When I'm someone else
When I'm not myself
Myself
Myself

I guess what I want to know is
Would you want me when I'm not myself?

Breakdown.

I am constantly on the verge of some sort of breakdown.
And unable to talk to someone who will make it better.
And it's getting consistently harder to help everyone else with their problems the deeper into this I get.

I used to be able to turn anything into something good.
And I still can, but it doesn't soak through me anymore.
When did this become my life?

Dizzying

I just got struck with this wave of unhappiness.
The kind where you don't want to do anything because you're depressed and you don't want to move.
But at the same time you know that it would make you feel better to get up and go out.
But you can't bring yourself to do it.
The kind where you need someone to talk to, but you don't know what you need to talk about because you don't even understand why you're so unhappy in the first place, or who you would ever want to bother.
And then your body feels numb.
And you want to eat your emotions, but you're too unhappy to eat and your stomach protests the thought.
And you can't even bring yourself to use "I" so you talk as if it is someone else, saying "you".
And I'm not sure how to make it go away, because I don't want to go to sleep like this.

Life is Good

Thanks, PostSecret

Home is where the heart is

Just before the start of fall quarter, at the end of the summer, I went on a weekender on Odyssey. It was one of the most beautiful weekends I can remember.  I felt happier in those few days than I had in the last few months, and I felt as if I wasn't chained to all the things that felt like they swirled into a fog that dampened my old feelings of bubbling, un-containable happiness. I felt muffled, like there was still happiness, but it was padded down like listening to the world through earmuffs. Out on the water though, I sat in one of the lifeboats on deck in the sunshine, and wrote about the overflowing happiness I felt:

"I'm completely surrounded by the sea.

It sparkles and glistens in the light of the sun, both calming to the soul and deadly at the same times, rolling and calling- a deep, dark, impenetrable force- it's own world beneath our ship.

The ship moves in an effortless glide through the water, sometimes filled with music and laughter  and other times, like now, wearied, teenaged sailors heading for home after three days that flew by all too quickly.

But "home" is a relative term.  Though the world would recognize my street address as my place of residence-my "home"- the coined phrase "Home is where the heart is" would lead me to believe otherwise as my heart yearns for nothing more than this boat- than the ocean, the salt, the sun to surround me and consume me in the gentle rocking of the waves and the foam of the water that so distract me into peaceful bliss as I write.

Yes, I will return "home" tonight, but my turkshead bracelet will remind me of then I belonged to the sea in case my time on land ever leads me to forget.  If it is possible to forget the feeling of falling asleep under the stars to the swaying and the creaking of the boat with the bustle of hectic cities and people and stresses so far away on land where they can't reach you.  It is a pure and unparalleled  joy, a feeling beyond my comprehension to be this free. If I could do this forever, just sail away and never be bound to return-not owned by text books and work hours and the sense of duty and responsibility to have a respectable college education that leads to a respectable career to fit into a modern society of waste and prejudice and twisted methods of belonging.. if I could leave it all behind and belong to the ship and the nature and the sea (as I know it does not belong to me but to itself) then I would be happier than at any office job or anywhere bound by land."

Ramblings from the summer

9-10-08

The following is an excerpt of my ramblings from one of the notebooks I wrote in over the summer:

"I was thinking today about how much more connected each person is another than they realize.  How many times I must have crossed paths with someone before formal introductions are made. How many times I might have driven past them on the way to school or been in the same restaurant or bank.  Think about how many times you might have encountered the person you married before you even knew of their existence concretely.  And you may never know know of all those times, may never recall buying a taco from the love of your life at Taco Bell three years before you met formally and started dating.  You'll likely never remember the person in the car next to you at the stoplight who turned the opposite direction, but even this is an interaction as driving was described to me as a social activity in my driver's ed class and I have pondered this statement ever since.  

It seems to me almost like a ballet. or an equestrian drill team.  Lines of cars taking courses in synchronization out of a stoplight, veering out into clover shapes and meeting with a line of cars going to other direction who may also turn, or split from that group and go straight, all forming beautiful patterns like a dance or a drill and also in a perfect imitation of a silent social scene.  Like people who meet and stay together for a while but leave down different paths, all ending at separate locations and destinations, or ending up at the same ones by different paths.  Sometimes these thoughts distract me as I'm driving.  There's just so much beauty to see in everything.  So many different ways to see."

Did you ever notice that wondering and wandering are only a letter apart?

I write in silence, lest the words of others cloud my own.

I write when inspired, and I will try not to let myself cloud my creativity with thoughts of doubt or distraction.

I write by pen, so I am not confined by a desk and office. So I may look outside, beyond the old fashioned white windows that in my childhood would have inspired hours of imaginings of fairy tales and lack luster stories reminiscent of "A little princess" locked up in her isolated room.

Beyond the window there is moss on the shed roof, and bare trees that on this gray day, don't stretch upwards to reach for the sun, but rather look as if they are tired. Though these thoughts are contradicted by the small green buds sprouting from the limbs, quieting whispering that the life cycle cycles on, and these weary trees will spring up and blossum and throw themselves into another year's new season of spring and awakening with all the same ferver as before.

And from here I can see the houses and I wonder about the families inside them, and I wonder if they wonder about me. And of all the wonderings in this world, how many people sit within the confines of the same city, same building, same room, and never know that they crave the same answers or just to continue to ponder the same ideas, for sometimes it is the wondering itself that is most fulfilling, rather than the answers to the ideas you wonder about.

If only a person had it in them to ask. It is the habit of humanity to choose to believe they are all alone in the world with no other being who feels or things or wonders the same things or craves in the same ways or ponders the same concept.
It is our habit to set outselves apart from one another; set ourselves upon a pedestal high above the reach of others and pity ourselves the solitude as isolation.

Did you ever wonder what everyone else is wondering?

Two roads

I have decided, that my block is a result of a period of attempted growth.
When I was younger, I wrote about what I saw and what I knew. I was descriptive. Nature, people, events; abstract but concrete at the same time. I can write about nature easily. I can describe what I see and make it sound pretty- invoke images and memories, but that's not what I've been attempting to write. Somewhere along the line, I began to crave to write about ideas. Ideas that I haven't fully explored and that's where I found my block. It's not blocking an entire path, just one branch of that path, my road less traveled by, if you will. And now that I've realized this, it's not so much a battle as it is an obstacle I need to find my way around in order to grow into the writer I want to be.

Does it seem mind boggling to think of how writing about writing helps me sort out my problems related to that very thing?
And through it all, it feels like I'm coming home.

Hm,

I just did it again.
I wrote up an entire post, and deleted it because I decided it wasn't good enough.
And with that defeat, I think I'm done writing for the day.

Writer's Block

How is it that I have become so caught up in the words that other people have written, the lyrics in songs that I feel say what I was trying to say, that I have lost my ability to write my own? I read or hear something beautiful, and instead of inspiring me, I let it intimidate me. Someone else has already said something so beautiful, it gives me writer's block to think of how my words will never measure up, and writing has always been at my core. If I can't write, I don't know what else to do. But I don't know how to write my words, not a sad imitation of something I heard once and fancied, when I'm too scared that my own won't be good enough.
So for now, I just write; stumble through words and hope that one key word will open up that block and I'll be able to write freely again.