August 8, 2012

The Un-fulfillment of a Dream

I will write again, in memory of Penmachine.

I am sitting down, ikea blue swivel chair comfortable, typing away at this post in a typewriter mindset. Wasting no words, no backwards mis-step of the keys that result from a lack of white-out fluid to erase the inky letters. Typing away at this post and thinking of writing and thinking of thinking that constructs the reality that we (seemingly) know, while listening to a Ted Talk on the tin the background, with interruptions of the hum of the fluorescent lights that illuminate the dull egg-white painted walls.

These old walls, how old are they, really? in the oldest housed building on the street of our neighborhood block, with a petite laurel tree with berries sitting in the front yard and hedges of hydrangea blooms that overflow with shades of purple and scents at night to attract dancing moths underneath star-filled skies and clouds floating in the crowded breeze.

These old walls, covered with a historical trove of posters from the past five years, the five first years of really truly living the lifestyle that I was so curious and inquisitive about from reading novels and society newspapers, wondering and creating a world of my imagination that I scattered over these bedroom walls with art prints and postcards from friends and fellow travellers. Or art postcards from retired artists, collecting from one-stop visits to group art shows and solo exhibitions hidden away in the back of skateboard shops or proudly sponsored at the city’s main or local art galleries.

Newspaper clippings with amusing, heartbreaking, insightful and witty stories of the major events of the past two decades of my life in world politics, revolutionary ideas and modest book reviews or releases. Now these are clippings are also again aging as time quickly speeds by, into yellowing faded slips of paper as the tree it once lingered onto.

Books and novels scattered about the room. Textbooks and notebooks and handouts of course reading material in disarray.

Torn pages from magazines and polaroid photographs of beachside adventures still cause me to look about me daily, in wonderment and heartbreak, at this space: just HOW did these habits of collecting and travelling and excitement-filled adventures happen to be past-me that failed to survive in the present reality?

What-ifs are the thoughts that daily fill me with an overwhelming sense of dread. What-ifs these memories of past happiness and inspirations of artistic creativity and ideal aspirations are only the manifestations, of the the un-fulfillment of a dream of youth from my mid-twenties?

Or were there other lurking demons at play, those pithy words of Descartes First and Second Meditations on Philosophy, where the hallucinations that were involved, are a dreaming illusion of a reality that never existed but was a  white room I had created for myself to escape the stressors of the work-a-day, life of duties and responsibilities?

I know myself, and let go. I do not own these possessions nor this reality, and it does not own me.

“We know our truth–we just convince ourselves that we don’t, and that we need outside opinions… While these can help, they are no substitute for the answers that unfold when we trust ourselves enough to go within.”

(Illusion of Control, ThinkSimpleNow)

(related: Locus of Control)