Sunday, July 17th 2016
Dear exiled French person,
I’m writing to you from my parents house you once visited, listening to music we both know quite well, and thinking about how many projects I’ve started without finishing them.
I was counting on you for this one dammit !
To be fair to us, life has been a little more boring geographically, and a little more terribly complex emotionally since our last exchange, almost a year ago. I wish I could update this rusty ol’ blog with exciting travel tips, endless tales of adventures and shenanigans, but the truth is, I’ve suddenly turned into a grumpy grandma who doesn’t even have gardening advice because she lives in a big city, admittedly your favourite in the world. But hey, hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, so I’ll just dig deeper in my static melancholy for your reading pleasure. After all, your latest post mentioned a couple of existential questions so the tone is set. How are those going, by the way ?
Flicking through files of stories I’ve started to never continue, documents full of ideas, layouts for books never finished (or sometimes even begun), I can’t help but dipping into the spiral of identity crisis. I read a quote I wrote at age 15 thinking it was brilliant and don’t recognise the brain that wrote it, or the brain that judges it now. I can’t figure out quite how time passes, as the present has much more weight than any other time in my life, but scientific evidence suggests it’s all behaving linearly and politely. I’m tempted to delete the files. The people around me have been talking repeatedly about the Konmari method, and the whole idea of de-cluttering your life by getting rid of anything that doesn’t bring you joy. Most people do that by throwing all their books on the ground and going through them one by one, holding them and thinking about how they make them feel. And to be honest, it sounds great. I do feel cluttered by the weight of books unread, of clothes bought for nothing, of bright, brilliant ideas that make me a stranger to present and a disappointment to my past.
Time is being a problem, at the moment. A problem I haven’t really had before starting a long distance romantic relationship, where clocks seem to be ticking a little bit more than in a magical, transcendental unicorn union (Unionicorn ? Unicornion ? I need your linguistic input, dearest). It leaves me wondering : for which self am I doing things ? There is the personal pressure of making your (often past) dreams come true, but an equal pressure to grow out of them. There is the social pressure of living in the (often made more glamourous than accurate) moment, but an equal practical pressure to build a life for your self-to-come. There is the inevitable pressure of mortality that says all of this is meaningless in the end anyways, so even the future is unreliable !
I read this quote that struck me as meaningful enough to write it in my journal at the time: “Guess what ? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn, my mad Googling skills tell me). It sounds reassuring in a way most #inspirational posts don’t for me. Because it’s true : where you don’t go doesn’t matter that much, because guess what ? You aren’t there. You make it about the journey or the destination as much as your personal philosophy wants you to, as long as you don’t make it about the journey you aren’t on or the destination it isn’t leading you to.
I’m glad we settled that. Genuinely. But.
Butt.
This quote is meant to be a gateway into mindfulness, the practice of valuing your present emotions and existence. Yet it is unquestionable that present decisions influence your future. And that it might be nice to be choosing whatever feels nice and comfy at the time, but if you’re setting yourself up for years of misery and difficulty afterwards, not worth it in my books. So how do you make decisions, then ? How do I balance between preventing myself from banging my head against a wall right now and also from doing it in two, five, ten years ?
To add an extra layer of difficulty, guess what ? People CHANGE ! Who designed these humans in the first place ? I was perfectly fine in a tree with my local source of potassium. Instead, here I am, 21 years old human, crying over stories I don’t remember the ending of whilst hoping I don’t slap myself retrospectively in half a decade.
This brings me to an endless spiral of mixed time frames and mild depersonnalization. I’m a little bit scared of backing myself into a corner and not being able to find the way out of my handmade obsessions. I can distract myself out of it, true. But what if by just staring at the sunset all the time, I stop exploring who I am, what I want, where I could be going ? Am I building problems by digging into myself or by avoiding to do so ?
Ahaha brains are so fun. Someone give me a 42 steps Swedish manual please. Anything but this.
I guess all this rambling is to ask you a question : what time frame do you live your life in ? Is it okay to put happiness aside for a couple of days, weeks, months because you’re fairly sure it’s necessary to get somewhere you won’t regret going ? How do you make the time in between meaningful ? How do you resist the urge of skipping forwards, or backwards, or pausing ? Have I asked you anything that is humanly possible to answer ?
Help me bake, please.
Find enclosed a picture of the last time we were on the road together. I am prouder every day of how well you drive that car, and a couple of other things.
I love you, past, present and future,
Astrid