I like the word being. I am a being and I am being here…that last one didn’t sound right but it makes sense to me. Intrigued I looked it up on the net and quickly realized its a grammatical rabbit hole I can disappear in for ever so I turned around.

In the little poem I wrote the 25 of March 2018 I used the word being.

Day 731, turn.

I drive home and turn

because there is a being over there

I don’t want to be.

When you read it quickly you might think that I mean that there is someone there that I don’t want to be around but its more the circumstance of my life or being that “i don’t want…to be”

I would probably write it differently now but I do this kind of writing every day. It takes me between 15 and 60 minutes to edit a picture, write the poem and post it. I have other things to do to so after I read it a couple of times and I am satisfied I will post it, knowing that I probably want to change it when I read it again a couple of days later. But the main reason I do this is for the brain exercise and not to write the “perfect” poem. I also think that perfection is hard to achieve if not impossible so a time limit might seem random but it probably doesn’t make much of a different, you can also make it worse by staring at it to long.

The pictures I use with the poems are most of the time the inspiration for the poem. This specific picture I took from the driveway to my house looking back at the road I came from. It is the point where I normally turn if I forget something and have to drive back home. I can of course also turn there if I don’t want to go home, something I never did because it was my (and my girlfriend) refuge, a place I longed for during the day.

I like me (as a person) being there but in a broader sense being there and thus also being there in the world can be more problematic. When we feel despair it is often our habit to look for a cause of that nasty feeling. An easy target is the general state of our “being” or life circumstances that are…misaligned. The place we live, the house we have, the friends we see and/or the person we share the bed with. But I don’t like to blame those “domestic” circumstances, I don’t like to blame anything infarct for my feeling of despair, but if I have to it is our “being” as in who we are that is the cause of our desperate feelings.

If I have to give a layman’s reason for why we feel despair as humans and try to find all kind of ways to avoid it, I would say that not so long ago, in our evolution, we still lived in caves with a lot of dangerous things around us. Imagine that you see an angry dog or a spider you don’t know, we now know what the leash around the dogs neck does and we can look on the net and find an answer on the question: is the spider dangerous. Now imagine that all the animals and sounds around you are unknown to you. For thousands of years that person probably hides in the cave and feels disparity caused by the fair of going outside and be eaten alive. This fearful person that hides most of the time would probably survive and reproduce. The hero would die, walking to the angry dog with no leash and touch the venomous spider. After an evolution of millions of years living in fear we now live for a couple of hundred year in relative safety but also still in a cave.