Everything I wanted...

Because we're the masters 

of our own fate,

we're the captains 

of our own souls,

so there's no need 

for us to hesitate,

we're all alone, 

let's take control.

Captain of my own soul...

Makes me want to yell...

It's easy to see how far you are from your desired outcome. It's easy to see that you are not the man you want to be. But the easy thing is not always the best thing. It's also easy to get discouraged about the marathon that you are only a fifth of the way through. Instead of focusing solely on the hard work and pain ahead of you, maybe I should take the time to celebrate the steps I have made, the milestones I have passed. Maybe I'd feel better. Maybe I'd arrive sooner to certain realizations and maybe, just maybe I'd sleep a bit tighter. I need to make some changes, of that I am sure. To become someone better. Wiser. Calmer. Less of a boy. More of a man.

Upside down...

I am now almost 30 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. Quite exciting, isn't it?

I don't do goodbyes...

 

You won't take the blame...

We couldn't turn around

until we were upside down.

I'll be the bad guy now,

but no, I ain't too proud.

I couldn't be there

even when I try.

You don't believe it

we do this every time.

My joy in reclusion, the poetry of hibernation...

If he could sleep, he thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, he thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear. Not yet at least. 

Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. Even if you know that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, you should still plant an apple tree. You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've walked half way around the world.

Love you, mean it...

It might be time to let go...

It's just that he is about to do something out of the ordinary. And after he does something like that, the everyday look of things will surely change just a little. Things will look different than they did before, yet somehow still be faintly familiar. But he knows he shouldn't let appearances fool him. There's always only one reality - one truth - one perception. For the man who comes back through the crack in the veil will never be quite the same as the man who simply went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which he tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

You will find me in the place I know the best...

For me, becoming isn't about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. But your path doesn't end just because you attain something, because while you might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness, know that this too would in fact be an attachment. A proclivity to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom. So keep moving - even if only you know you are. Even if the world thinks you are fading away. Keep moving and evolving into someone you've always wanted to be.

Now the day bleeds...

She had wished him well in finding his own fate to follow, and he never doubted her sincerity. But it had taken him years to accept that her absence in his life was a deliberate finality, an act she had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of his soul still dangled, waiting for her return. That, he thinks, is the shock of any ending. Realizing that what one might still be holding onto, is perhaps something already finished and done with.

That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is supposed to be. Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.

Think about forever now...

I'd spend ten thousand hours,

and ten thousand more.

Oh, if that's what it takes to learn 

that sweet heart of yours.

And I might never get there, 

but I'm gonna try.

If it's ten thousand hours

or the rest of my life.

Changed with the weather...

Look at him now...

In his writings, he has traveled, not only to other worlds, but into his own. He learned who he was and who he wanted to be, what he might aspire to, and what he might dare to dream about the world and himself. More powerfully and persuasively than from anywhere else, he learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A wrinkle in time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But he felt that he, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else he knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were his writings, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which he might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. His real, true world. His perfect island.

The dancing is killing me softly...

I wish it could be...

I am really trying to finish off this year in a calm and collected manner. I feel like so much has already happened, and if anything, I will never stop trusting extremes that led me to this moment. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding; sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of someone who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, then it must surely be something worth having ... right?