I just completed What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murukami. Nothing extraordinary but I guess with thoughts, nothing extraordinary comes. Most or all thoughts are cyclical and spun from banal dust. What is banal dust? I too do not understand, but I visualize bottles of magic fairy dusts popping in and out, and banal dust is just dust; nothing of that magic quality that characterizes fairy dust and unicorn. Nothing of the mysticism that enchants and enthralls This must sound really weird, I must sound really weird. Speaking of thoughts, I like Murukami though. Clichéd, but he resonates with the clammy hands, panic-stricken existentialist generation of our youth. Trapped in our bubble of thought and cloistered in our monasteries for the mind becomes the prison of our monasteries. We are so out of touch and reality solely because we are the imprudent sparrows and birds of flight stuck in our little Midas cages. Self-absorbed.
Fly. I want to experience life. I want to experience the adventures that come with unfettered flight and the risks of freedom. I want to experience. The world, brimming with her vitality, age, rigour and (im)mortality. What good is all the worldly, temporal, spiritual knowledge of the world when it is unaccompanied by action? I will always be a frog in the well with a tunnel vision, if I stay. I must go. Someday (soon) I shall go.
4:11pm I am not a focused writer. I get distracted very easily – I am not sure if it is my suspected ADHD* or just my nature and lack of will. I started on C.S. Lewis’ Diaries “All My Road Before Me” *. I have been periodically reading the journals of authors, writers, poets, artists (…) and I suspect my interests for journals belie my inability to forge my future. “What do you want to become?” I get sad when people tell me they have dreams of becoming this and that, of grand dreams and ambition but when the question bounces back to me, I am stumped. I don’t know. The future looks so misty and foggy, not because I have no idea of what I want to do, but because I have too much ideas and lofty dreams. I want to write a book, I want to draw and paint, I want to design, I want to learn, I want to play football, I want to become a detective, I want to travel, interact with people from all walks of life, and I want to discover and read and read… I want to do something that can embody all I can and would become (eventually, as with the vicissitudes of time) . I will always be changing, manipulating and shaping to become another me, another I – the sums of a whole making an unfixed, imperfect whole. And no job, career or vocation seems to be able to fit the demands of my or any changing nature. To choose, I would have to compromise. Question is, am I willing to compromise?
But it helps, reading the journals of giants, of past people and their thoughts make me less lonely in my own thoughts, makes me remember that people under their pieces of masks are all essentially the same, looking, wondering, and contemplating. And in the process of reading, I steal and glean insights of these people for my own, adapt and put them into action, into my own life. Hoping that with these little tips and insights, gradually and tenderly curated, would forge a clearer path even amidst all that fog.
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* I am still waiting for my report
* I am struck by the poignancy and timing of the book. I like to believe I am in the same spiritual vacuum that he is facing during his undergraduate years. But point is, we know where he is headed but I still can't see.
