Transitions
In that liminal moment as you are trying to sleep, I have been thinking a lot lately about what it is to be yourself, to be condemned to your own experience. I will be alive for a finite amount of time yes, but also that for my brief mortal existence I will only experience life through myself, from my perspective, with my own internal monologue and thoughts. I think it is quite a lonely thought but also a mature one: That you must become comfortable with yourself (love yourself etc eurghh).
Things really get tricky when you realise that everyone else is experiencing life in the same way you are.[1] I learnt the other day that the word for this is ‘sonder’. It is always reassuring to wander a track in your own mind and then subsequently find out others have been down the same path and that there is a word for it. As lonely as your own mind feels, everyone else is probably feels it too and there is a buoyant sociability in that.
Recognising that I am a single individual locked within my own body is also a freeing thought in the sense that I have access to a phenomenal machine for living. The ways I can interact with the world are countless. It can be physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual etc etc.
I guess I have been appreciating this stuff recently as my routine way of living has been interrupted and it is now easier to see the bigger picture. However, losing a routine is also disruptive, it throws the settled into disarray and initiates a transition. I am not sure what the transition is to yet, but it is exciting to feel the movement towards something new. I am eager to see what I discover across the other side of the world and have left my trip deliberately open ended. I guess the only way to know is to just do it, or in the immortal words of Underground Resistance,
‘you just point yourself in the direction of your dreams
find your strength in the sound
and make your transition.’
Therefore, I don’t have much more to say on the future but can reminisce on the past two years just a little more. It has been a wonderful time full of friends and music and dancing and books and art (with of course the requisite, but minimum, level of work needed to sustain it all). I have learnt so much, experienced some many great things and generally had a nice time locked inside my meaty, corporeal cage. I don’t really think I can sum it up in words but I have picked out some songs that capture the feelings[2], and because I am nice I have sequenced them in a (hopefully) logical order and amateurishly mixed them together. I believe the professionals call this a ‘mixtape’.
Anyway, that’s it for now. The next one will come live and direct from the subcontinent xx.
[1] Clearly they are significant differences along class, gender, race, ethnic, cultural lines etc… that make each person’s experience phenomenologically unique. Whether this filters down to a fundamental incommensurability between everyone’s life-worlds/experiences is black hole I don’t want to get into, so I am proceeding on the assumption that at some level other humans perceive and interact with the world in ways that I would understand. (Additional sidenote – lets not even get into other non-human animals/plants or holistic ecosystems.)
[2] I know the songs are mainly dreary and downtempo. They are warm, fuzzy, and happy to me – trust me.