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.

Inspired by yesterday I opened some more “old” poems, the ones I wrote around three years ago. I don’t remember writing some of them or even care for them any longer but the following one I kinda like.

Are we painting our lives?

Or the frame that cuts off.

Do we choose our colors?

Or the brush that we use.

Because my thinking hasn’t changed mush the past 20 years I can safely say that the explanation of these four lines, that I will give you underneath, is what I wanted to say 3 years ago.

Are we painting our lives? Do you decide what kind of life you live? You might decide what school you go to but have you decided that you are good in math, or that you have an artistic flare so you go to art school? There are many things in our daily lives that you actively choose and some of the decision you think you choose.

Our subconscious mind and animal drift probably share the table with our ego, if they choose the dinner for tonight. You bought the pasta in the store but your subconscious didn’t tell you that he (or she) heard your colleague talk about Italy and the great meals they ate there, the animal in you is probably just hungry in this example. The answer on the question if we paint our own lives is probably: partially, we put some finishing touches here and there but the big pictures is painted (be)for us.

Or the frame that cuts off. If we only “paint our picture partially” than I think that we (our ego or I) play a bigger role in the limits we give our lives. We don’t choose our character and temperament so we can be unwillingly stubborn and don’t take a life altering chance out of spite and thus put “a frame” around our horizon, but we also have the capability of rationalizing our way out of opportunities and limit ourselves that way. Our subconscious and drift can be overruled if it comes to important choices but it’s not always for the better. I think that our rationalized life experiences “paint” the border of our lives as in the decisions we make and the limits we give our selves. How flawed these rationalizations are is an other question.

Do we choose our colors? This is a slight variation of the first line, a habit I have. I like to repeat myself to make sure that I’m understood. Its an irritating habit that is not always appreciated but also something I do unconscious. In this case my unconscious behavior puts a “frame” around my possibility to make friends. I sometimes, in the case I am aware of my behavior, choose the “color” of how veracious I repeat myself.

Or the brush that we use. I guess I repeat myself more then two times…

Something is of

when I look

at the whole

picture

~

maybe

its my point

of view

that’s wrong

~

I will step

aside

~

for you

The sunrise today

brightened the mist

I was driving trough

~

the treetops

I see

far away

appear

and disappear

with no rhythm

in the wind

~

it calms me down

to see the aimless

belie the motions

of the cogs

I hear

and feel

in my head

 

With both my hands

I have been

playing indifferent

tunes

~

finally I move

the bellow left

and for one more time

the blowhole calls

with a sour note

the deaf

~

and silence

 

Where ever I come

and walk away

~

the road leading

seems the same

~

I’ve seen all these walls

doors

and window

from both sides

fade

into the past

rise

in front of me

~

our road

is laid

in a circle

and if you look good

you can see the signs

once made

by you

From certain angles

all the lines

going up

will meet

~

the question is

are we tall enough

to witness this