Change course, but never give up...

While in the majority of our days we choose to mystify, could we follow that hint, that small but passionate hint, to clarify who we are and why do we still chose to exist, even when confronted with pain.

Something does stop us. Something also leads us.

Through Art we're seduced to leave all our considerations behind, and the pleasure of discovering ourselves completely evaded of expectations, can be felt in our innermost intimacy.

It's that thin line between solitude and loneliness. Solitude becomes the space you eagerly look for in the chaos of repetitive unstable thoughts, and loneliness... loneliness draws you further away from simplicity, from peace and consequently from love, self or towards others.

"We live in a society which sees high self-esteem as a proof of well-being, but we do not want to be intimate with this admirable and desirable person. (...) We think we are unique, special and deserving of happiness, but we are terrified of being alone."

_
Sara Maitland

To indulge in solitude doesn’t make us aggressive towards another, on the contrary, we become better able to connect, to listen and appreciate the natural space it exists between two people, like the ocean and it's opposite shores. Words can flow, as well as the sweet warmth of silence.

In this I believe...

Change course, but never give up knowing yourself.

Forever

Missed you for so long, to the point I started doubting you had in fact existed, but my imagination could never create the amazing moments of just being by your side. The simplicity of how everything just fitted in, no questions or doubts or anxiety for wanting more, nothing, pure peace, pure clearance of mind, body and spirit, all into a single point in space and time where you and me just were.

But you told me to let go and not constrain in my corporality, the vastness of what we can't understand and only feel through our meditative breath.

Missed you so much, for I lost myself too while searching for you. But you told me not to miss you, and asked me to trust not in my need for stories and facts, but in my intuitive driven belief that you and me still were. And not knowing, we still were who we had been, a you and a me, just happy to be.

"Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time."

_

W.H. Auden

We are beings of time and in time, a time that constrains eternity. From missing you I've learned that. I felt that and breathed in. A moment is not just this second, it's everything all at once.

Yes, you dared to think the unthinkable, you had always hope in yourself while I choose despair. I did not see how defiance would have brought me enough reason to hope. That's when I lost you in your immense kindness of not blaming me for fighting for toughness, instead of just simply holding your hand and letting it go.

Today I let go. Today I trust completely in you, in me, and all that is part of everything we don't see, but feel, the completeness of an expanding unity. Today I whisper gently to you what I've learned from missing you, that man's most precious quality ever is Love.

"(...) I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving"
_
T.S. Elliot

Dignity in staying alive

"Who are we when we are together with no one but ourselves?"

_

Ursula K. Le Guin

Don't fail to stay young and curious (or ignorant with thirst for knowledge).
Unlearn the habit of having to be someone else or nothing at all. Stop practicing the imitation of other voices and mistaking the faces of others for your own.

When we search outside for approval, for proof of some sanity, we loose what we feel as most precious to us, the self.

Everything that is good and joyful and fruitful comes from the pleasure of living the self freely. No fear, no resentment. Accepting our nature, accepting our foolish ways. 

We were all born with specifics traits, stop denying them. Work them out, sculpt them smoother, find a more balanced shape, but don't change your own nature, the same way a sculptor would ruin a piece by destroying the real nature of the material it is working on. Even the artist that burns or covers his piece, is showing the true nature of his intentions, and the nature of the chosen material.

We tend to hold on to this idea that Life is this sort of packaged experience.
No, we are unwrapped off, right when we are born into this world.

Who we are was not borrowed from anything else. We are, we are born to be.
And today, tomorrow, or yesterday, we will always be who we have become and so much of what we have not become...

... Don't quit, don't run away. Face those ghosts.

There's dignity in being optimistic. Believe in that.
There's dignity in Hope.

There's dignity in trying to stay alive.

Life is brief, and we all know that what truly makes us want to survive, even in the face of a hard prognosis, are those comforting recollections of what we meant to another…

On the opposite side, the heaviest burden in dying, is the feeling of regret over conflicts unresolved, breached relationships not healed, potential unfulfilled, promises not kept, words that were not said.

But... to find some comfort in all that cannot be changed, through those pitfalls of decision-making, forgive yourself, have the willingness to accept responsibility for your own life and...

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” (meaning, laugh of yourself, and life's unfair rules)

_

Viktor Frankl

We didn't know any better, or we just didn't have in ourselves the strength to collapse and cry, and show the verge of madness we felt inside ourselves.

The only cure, path to find that "dignity" in being alive? ... stay kind with yourself, which can only be reached through Love. Only through Love can you see yourself as you who truly are, can you look into someone else's eyes. We have to touch and be touched. We must gain Dignity, Respect.