N/A Air

I am bursting. I want to do everything, anything but I am incapable of nothing. I am like the hanging man, waiting and waiting for my own potential, my own development to come to fruit;  but instead I self -sabotage in a cage of my own making.  I have a noose around my ambitions; my excitement and thrive dying as I pull the rope tighter and tighter until I am left with nothing.

It's cold outside. But the house feels worse; the air is smokey, cloudy and suffocating. Breathing outside, even in the cold, endorses and releases a new energy in my body; I feel my chest stretching and embracing what I imagine to be clean air.

I always had an image of air and its feeling as cleansing. Its soothing hushing sound and cooling touch makes me calm, less agitated. I can sit for hours, in-front of a fan, listening to its slow hustling sound.

Individuality?

Agitation. Loneliness. Frustration.

I am bursting. I want to do everything, anything but I am incapable of nothing. I am like the hanging man, waiting and waiting for my own potential, my own development to come to fruit;  but instead I self -sabotage in a cage of my own making.  I have a noose around my ambitions; my excitement and thrive dying as I pull the rope tighter and tighter until I am left with nothing.

The new age of individuality is harsh. We beckon self-accomplishment, drive; we must be perfect. We must achieve more than we ever dreamed. Or else we are failures.

This need, this thrive for constant and demanding validation and of reaching our dreams is endless. Without possibilities. It makes us imaginative, creative, striving. But does it make us happier? Are we happier by each success, or already drowning in attempting the next?

What is individuality in the contemporary period? Mediation, yoga, spirituality.  All focused on YOUR wellbeing, YOUR mental health, YOUR joy.

I don't think selfishness is negative. Not at all. But the hyperfocus, almost like a thread that goes inside the needle, perhaps disables us. We

Virus

It seems surreal. As much as I could have read on dystopian stories predicting the worst of human nature, the epitome of what mankind can achieve if left unsaid; of the dark alternative timelines, of bleak gruesome realities; I never imagined it this way.

It's hauntingly, increasingly, normal.

It's scary, the power of adjustment. Of complacency.  Every horrible, terrifying situation we can imagine in life is something we can accustom to. Something to add to our daily lives.

Maybe it is a reflection of human adaptability. It perhaps makes us a stronger, more enduring species. We don't have the strength and speed and capacity of wild animals; but we do adapt better.  We survive. Yesterday's horror is today's normal.

Amidst this reality of social isolation, of quarantine, of distancing is also the truth of how we go on. How we live, how we endure.

Despite the fact that we continue and persist, there's a restless feeling that all this is wrong. A pandemic is wrong. Isolation is wrong. People getting sick and dying is wrong. It's scary to walk down the street and have people walk around you, stare you suspiciously if you have a mask, if you sneeze, if you get too close. It's a paranoia that initially was deemed a media fetishization, a hyperinflation of the worst of the worst. But now it's reality.

It's interesting because from the very beginning it all felt fake, overestimated. But the key to human nature is the brutal fact that we are in denial. We deny how at risk we are, how in danger, how every moment in this world is indeed one that could be taken away at any moment. We are consistently, inevitably, in denial.

The politicization and blame of a pandemic is palpable. Which country is doing better, which country is doing worse - who indeed will find the solution to the virus and who started the virus. What political system helped, what economic factors will occur, what will the demographic look like.
Whatever Orwellian analysis of political response to this crisis you may imagine, has probably occurred or will occur.

Despite this, there's a consistent feature which is forgotten. What makes us, as beings, endure? Although we can be in denial about our unforgiving environments, we are also consistently aware. We process through humour, through love; through values.

Often, at dreary times, we can see the the unimaginable, despicable and horrendous nature of humanity.  One which is selfish, one which lets the elderly  and young to suffer, one which lets people die . But we ignore the persistent consistency of our social links, of our friends, our families and our loved ones. They shine brighter,stronger; they dare to give us hope and remind us kindly that life may be short and brutal; ugly and sick; but it is also a journey; a dream; a light that endures through thick and thin.  It is our souls, our hearts and our beings which together let us continue to not only survive but live fully.

Feelings of Acute Awareness

It feels different each time. You think it gets easier, feeling this way. It doesn't.  Every pain, every tear, every time a memory springs itself into your head. It never changes.

I often wondered how pain makes us feel alive. Why is pain a reminder that we breath? But I think I started to understand now. Pain reminds us we are strong or weak. If we are weak there is no life and if we are strong we are remind of life.

Survivor

Sweet, painful tears. I feel relieved of all else, of anything left. Life is not emotion, accomplishment; it is endurance, it is surviving. It is the spirit and blood of the survivor that carry the weight of life. We are nothing if not bones that end up piled up in mud and chaos. Life does not guarantee us anything and yet we believe it does. It is nice to think of faith and hope as guiding lights of our existence, the flow in the veins of surviving. We never really know

I feel as if I regained something that was long lost.  The issue is I never quite felt aware I have lost anything or indeed that something has gone amidst. But now that it is back, it is like watching a tree regain a fallen leaf.  It is one leaf in a million but enough for the tree to notice the difference. It is a sort of spirituality, an in tune need to feel complete. It is a root and part of you that you only value when it is gone.

Now it is back. Maybe the seasons changed or maybe a new leaf always grows. It is like taking a sharp breath after suffocating on water or like a breeze of air when it is warm. You can't tell whether it is refreshing or exciting or relieving; maybe it is all three and you can now climb and out of wherever you lived to see things clearly.

I could be exaggerating. Maybe this is the point where I find out. Either way I hold no resentment or pain and I look forward only to the reality of what beauty can be given.

It's snowing.