Roads can turn
on a long arc
but hardly ever
reach the opposite
direction
Nochrisis
Our mind
Day 1246, draft.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
Looking on your own
self
portrait
mystery
Nochrisis
Day 1244, the past.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
The grain of wood
slowly build
up in time
holds the light
out
closes in
the past
Nochrisis
Day 1243, on the run.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
Peaceful
resting
on the run
between trees
that hide
the sun
Nochrisis
Day 1242, turning.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
The sun disappeared
and the memory of her
paints a beautiful picture
Nochrisis
Day 1240, Fear.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
Vertigo rushed in
and I look to my shoes
and see no ground
Nochrisis
Day 1239, staring in the wind.
Day's pictures, Our mind
This house
is somewhere
where the blue horizon starts
and the road ends
the weathered paint reminds you
of all the days
you just stood there
staring in the wind
Nochrisis
Day 1238, left.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
A lone figure
waiting
for the mist
besides a road
~
left there
standing
as the winner
Nochrisis
Day 1237, filter.
Day's pictures, Our mind, Poetry
My two way filter
is partially broken
on both sides
~
I can only fix
one side…
Life.
Our mind, Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche, The gay science
Book one – 26
What is life? Life-that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life-that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak-and not only about us. Life-that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer? -And yet old Moses said: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Life for us human beings starts somewhere around the time we start to remember.
Day 708, Mist in your mind.
Day's pictures, Our mind
The horizon, your future, is often clad in mist, is what people often say. I disagree, if I look to the future with my minds eye I don’t see a fog, a grayish wall of nothing, I see outlines extending from the present. I see some general direction and contours of what might be. I know off course that around the corner the road might turn another way, but I see a future and not a grey wall of doubt that leads you blindly to anxiety. The future might seem tough and overwhelming every now and then but remember, you wouldn’t have arrived at this point from the past if that road was impassible. Air out your brain, let the grey mist be blown away so you can see the outlines of your life and future, the things that matter and the facts you must obey. Life might not always seem fair but that’s just a misunderstanding, life does not know what is fair or unfair, those are just concepts we invented and why there is religion and faith. Life is just there and it is what we live with a few things we know and a lot that we don’t.
Day 701, a chance to hear myself.
Day's pictures, Our mind
If I go outside now and walk to the water and stand still for a while I would hear nothing, maybe my breath and the beating of my heart. It is so silent here that no matter what you do it will automatically calm you down. I am not sure if I really need that silence for myself, but I really like the experience of living far away from a busy city with all its temptations and distractions. It was some kind of a gamble or dare to myself when I moved here over 10 years ago. I had a nice job and after work I went out to be amongst my friends and socialize. I was actually pretty comfortable with that life, maybe to comfortable. Moving to Norway changed all of that, no place to go in the evening in these small towns with maybe a 1000 people. There was one store in the first place I lived and no social live to speak of. It was difficult in the beginning, you get confronted with your own thoughts all the time, something I avoided back in Holland by going out so often. But I am now used to that and like those confrontations with myself, or maybe I am just used to myself now, something I wasn’t when I lived in the city, amongst the people and all the distractions. I guess the silence gave me a voice and a chance to hear myself.
Day 650, How to make up your mind.
Day's pictures, Our mind
It is really popular In our modern culture to say that someone should “make up their own mind”. That you should trust your own feelings and don’t listen to what others say. If you understand that advice as just another platitude than there is not so much harm in it but if you take them literally than there is a big problem. The problem is that you assume that we can make up our own mind but the best we can do is to stick with an internal narrative that is for the most part plagiarized.
Shield
Our mind
When I was in my early twenties I thought for a brief moment that I had all the answers in me, like most people do when their young. After living in different parts of the world, and looking around, I realized that the world is more complex, my inexperienced certainty seemed to be baseless. I started asking people about their thoughts on specific subjects, and got different answers or none at all. I realized that people either have an opinion, are clueless or don’t care. The ones with an opinion often use it as a shield to protect themselves in a discussion or when confronted with undermining facts. The problem with a shield is that as long as it works there is no need to change it, as long as you stay around like minded people your fine. And if you’re among strangers you hold it tighter. These people have their opinion and I wondered where they got it from, or if they ever doubted it. How can you not doubt your opinion? If the next 10 people you meet have a different one, you cannot all be right.
If you ask people to lay down their shield, to step back and look where their opinion comes from, they often cannot do that, don’t understand the question, or get angry. It’s hard to recognize that you don’t know, and that you are vulnerable without a shield.
Behind that paper thin wall
Our mind
I’m rereading the book Human all too Human from Friedrich Nietzsche. I have read the book before, and if I look at it I can clearly see the evidence of that. In this book Nietzsche writes in aphorisms, short pieces that are mostly self-contained, they are not clearly linked together. The advantage of this is that you can read one aphorism and think about it separated from the rest of the book. I have been doing that for the last week, but because I also wanted to write about the aphorisms and tried to analyze them, I used more time than I thought. It made me wonder how much I really understood them when I read them for the first time 15 years ago and read the book in a couple of weeks. Maybe I am so much slower now. Or was I less critical in the past and skipped over the bits that made no sense to me back then?
Letter to a dying friend
Our mind
At the end of your life you look back.
We often think, as people, that life is endless. The days flow together, in a week, a month and before you know it, ten years. Looking at it like this, there seems to be no end and you take your time for granted. But the reality is, of course, very different. What is life more than a memory. You have an experience, process it with your biases, your colors, and archive it. Later you open the drawer with the memories in it and put on your glasses containing new life lessons, convictions, and experiences, and use them to look at those old times. That’s our life, colored memories, strung to each other like a web spun from old desires, dreams and stale air anchored to those sparse, valuable moments that make it all worthwhile. Life viewed like this is a construction and time plays a small role in it. This web is two dimensional, seen from the side it’s a few moments thick. All these ambiguous memories and old stories are not as important as those lasting once. Those lasting moments often fit in a few beats of your heart, so in the time you have left, you can still fit, worth a lifetime of new valuable ones.
Nochrisis 