Too many questions, too little mental capacity

“He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.”  ― Elie Wiesel, Night

I’ve been asking a lot of questions lately. Me having started to write has made me realize how much I don’t know and how much it scares me. About relationships. Responsibility. Time. Life.

Am I worth it? How do I take charge of my own life? What am I supposed to be doing right now? What do I need to do to achieve x? And how can I make sure it doesn’t lead to y? Where’s the line between courage and foolishness? How do I make my life meaningful? How do I gain confidence in myself and my life? When will I figure it out? Am I even asking the right questions?

This is just a fraction of what has been running through my mind lately. And I can’t seem to stop, which is driving me a bit crazy to be honest. And not in the Britney Spears hit song kind of way. 

I’ve started to assume that there is meaning in everything – and if the meaning is not clear to me, then I just don’t get it. But I want to get it. Really badly.

I’ve realized that writing essays like these and poems isn’t a way for you to answer life’s many questions, but ask them. If you have been reading my blog posts, it might have been infuriating to you how I never really come to a sound conclusion, and have more questions than arguments for my viewpoint. 

It has been to me at least. Realizing that asking all these new questions about myself and life doesn’t mean life will reward me with an answer because of my creativity with thinking up the question. I guess it’s a sense of entitlement I have to get over. I know I have to find my own answers, but how? what will they be? when and what must I go through to figure it all out – and at what cost? will I ever figure it out?

See? Whatever the subject I start thinking about, I just end up asking more questions.

Maybe the power has always been in the questions, not the answers. Maybe questions don’t always exist to be answered, but to be asked. After all didn’t Scott Westerfield say that the best books are the ones that ask the best questions, and bad readers are the ones who want everything answered? Maybe that applies to life too.

I always told my friends to ravel in the chaos and uncertainty of life. But I’ve realized the advice you give can be the hardest to follow through yourself.

I guess it’s all about accepting that you’ll never be able to have a full life by putting everything in neat little boxes and maps that show the way from A to B is so much harder than it seems. I guess the only map you’ll ever be able to draw of your life is the one that shows the path you already have completed. But that’s exactly what’s so hard to accept. And what’s so scary to accept, because you realize you have had the responsibility all along and always will.

But I didn’t just write this post to complain about wanting to fathom the unfathomableness of life, but to make a promise to myself and anyone reading this.

I’m going to create.

I’m going to create to keep me occupied and try to focus on less questions at a time. There might not be anything wrong with feeling and thinking, but letting it take you over to the point where you’re going crazy with anxiety is probably not a good thing either.

And to use these damned questions in my head to their full advantage. To understand them better and to create good poems, stories, songs – whatever. Anything.

And to keep you updated, I am currently working on a video to my poem “Star” (renamed from “Exploding Star”. I’ll post it as soon as I finish it, which hopefully is going to be in a couple of days. Which might mean that there’ll be less blog entries until then. 

What questions are driving you crazy and how do you deal?

P.S.: Thank you for the support so far. You guys are the metaphorical answers to my questions.

In the café there was the word

Yesterday I was at my favourite café, sitting on a comfortable couch and reading a Jane Austen novel. In front of the couch, there is this chest, on which there are layers of postcards, pictures, doodles and messages from happy customers from all over the world, and a above those, a glass pane.

I looked up from my book, and this one piece of paper caught my eye. I read the first two and a half paragraphs and felt my heart beating as a result of what I’d read, without knowing its context.

In case you find the text on the picture I took with my crappy cell phone camera to be illegible, here is what I could read at that point:

“what a melancholic world I’ve invited you into, and with no regard for your innocence.

i cannot tell you what love is yet.

but i often think to myself, where was my outspoken heart where”

I couldn’t read any more of the writing, because there was a postcard, a bookmark, a card and other obstacles covering the text. By that point I was totally engulfed in the words on this random piece of paper by a stranger I knew nothing about and I wasn’t going to stop until I could read the rest.

So I put down my book and resorted to using my bookmark to push everything around this piece of paper around until all of the text was visible to me. It took a while, and I had to use many tricks to push things in the right direction, without thereby pushing what was next to those, onto the paper. At one point, I let my hair down (literally – although in some was figuratively too I suppose) and used my hair pins to maneuver everything from the words I found myself so drawn to. So as I poked around under the glass pane, looking like a madman to the other visitors of the café, one by one, the remaining words were revealed to me.

When I could finally read the whole thing, I didn’t know what to think. I just read it over and over, all the while asking myself why I had become so obsessed with these words and why my heart was beating so fast upon reading the raw feelings of a total stranger.

It said: “but i often think to myself, where was my outspoken heart when i gave up my mind to the scarecrow.

and you my dear, where were you when i relinquished my heart for the rusting tin man?”

It’s not on the picture, but below the text it said “d.v.c.” and then there was a row of Roman numerals I can’t recall. I didn’t know, and still don’t, even after the “help” of Google, if this was a quote from a book – and the writing is so good that I thought that if it was a quote from a book, I was being completely culturally ignorant by not recognizing the author – or if these were truly just the thought of a unknown stranger?

Why did I care so much about these few words scribbled on a piece of paper and left at a café? Why did they move me so much and why could I not think of anything but those words for hours after? Why do I still care so much that I’m writing a post about it? I don’t even fully get some of it. What is a scarecrow in this instance? What does the “rusting tin man” symbolize? I can only guess.

I think the answer to that question is very similar to the answer to why I love the written word enough to want to become a writer.

There is something so magical about the art of choosing specific words to best to describe your feelings and others understanding them and relating to them, that so many around the world are willing to have that be the only thing they do for the rest of their life. The beauty of the various deeds language can be used for, the colours of the rainbow it can paint, the amount of people you can get to in places where the entire population is literate is so fascinating to me and many others. Because earlier in this post I wrote “or if these were truly just the thought of a unknown stranger?” Notice the “just” I chose to have there? Maybe that’s stupid of me. After all, the value of art is independent of its popularity, isn’t it? And in this particular case, there is a certain beauty in not knowing who the author of these mesmerizing words is.

Words can be used to portray love, hate, anger, sorrow, hope, lack of hope. It can heal wounds and at the same time create the deepest ones. You can connect and communicate with those around you, and even, as this is an example of, total strangers. There is something so scarily beautiful and powerful about that, that it draws great hords of people in.

For people like me, the stories told through words just are the stories we connect to the most. And I’m not sure why. But I know that if the words are chosen deliberately, a thousand words can indeed tell more than a picture. And stories that are written down create universes that we can escape to when our own are too hurtful for us to be able to deal with for a while.

And there are few moments I love more than that moment where I run across a sentence, a word, a paragraph, in a book that speaks to me so much, that it doesn’t just illustrate one problem I’m having at the time I read the words meant not just for me but so many others, but my whole life. Because songs may be stuck in our heads for a day or two, but lines in poems and books can stay with me for many months and years after I read them for the first time.

Other art forms may have the same effect on some people, but I’m sticking to words. For me, it has always been about words, and probably always will be.

Renaissance explorers with iPhones

Let’s say our bittersweet goodbyes and go
Stuff the useful and useless bits of your old life
into your dad’s worn-out rucksack
take one last look at the house you know so well

and run
not from
the monsters of our past
or the since long conquered and by now dull lands and faces of our homes
but to
the promise of more
of youth’s dreams fulfilled
and questions answered
of finding enchanting souls to fall in love with
and amongst those souls, finding your own
of mapping out our open world with memories
like renaissance explorers, but with iPhones

and we’ll learn strange words and habits
just to say that we did
we’ll learn from the power of big mistakes
and fail to learn from the small ones
(or is it the other way around?)

and we’ll exchange grand ideas
about every possible thing
except the things we have a clue about

and for what we think is the last time in our lives
we will, for a just couple seconds
know what it is to live in the present
and forget the petrifying uncertainty of our futures
“to travel is to live”
and to live is to forget

and we’ll learn the value of a “yes”
and how the world is terrifyingly big and at the same time the size of a pea
and we’ll learn how small we are and that we aren’t complete
we’ll run until we forget what it was like to stand still

so that,
just like the explorers of the past
we can put our pins on the spots we with love and dreams conquered
and with proud, reminiscent smiles
we can say
We were here.

On being a strong person (or “How to write a blog post with more questions than answers and refer to fictional characters for advice”)

Lately I have been in the situation where I know exactly what to do because of advice from friends and even myself, but can’t figure out how to go about it because I am overwhelmed with how much strength I will need to go through with it – strength I can’t imagine possessing. It’s the situation where you’re repairing a car (who am I kidding – when the mechanic is repairing the car, I wouldn’t know what to in the slightest) and you’ve got all the tools you need and you know exactly which ones to use and when, but you’re afraid they might break once you do, so yo need to repair the tools themselves. Going through something tough requires you to utilize a lot of the strength you’ve got in you, just like you need to know how to use your tools for fixing up a car so that you won’t break them in the process.

Strength can be found in any number of places. I see strength in the people that battle with various illnesses and refuse to lose hope, I see it in the people that have been able to turn their live around because they realized that it wasn’t working out. I see it in the student that is severely stressed out, but keeps on going. I see it in fictional characters I love, like Hermione Granger and how she was strong enough to let her parents go to fight alongside Harry. I see it in my mother, who is a mother of four and at the same time a PhD student with a job. I see it in the friends who lost a parent but do their best not to go into the dangerous “what if?” thinking mode. Sometimes just getting normally through the day requires a great deal of strength.

Strength can also be found in any shape and size and can’t be quantified. The strength to get through a bismal day and still be able to smile at the end of it isn’t less worthy because of the strength in dealing with loss as well as you possibly can. From one of my favourite books, The Fault in our Stars by the amazing John Green, I learned that pain is relative and it’s always just pain no matter its source. In it, the ruined author that the main character, Hazel, for most of the book blindly idolizes, Peter van Houten says: “‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?” And she replies “No, (…) [t]hat’s bullshit.” 

If pain is relative and always note-worthy, then surely, so is the strength you use to get over it.

Maybe strength is more closely related to courage and maintaining hope than we think it is. Maybe the thing that keeps a person going through a truly difficult time isn’t mental strength in itself, but the courage to keep going despite thinking that one’s chances are slim. The courage to face your fears, the courage to live your life despite not remembering how you used to do that before someone left it. The courage to make a life for yourself when you don’t get accepted into the universities you had applied to. The courage of starting a new business that no one has heard of yet and everyone tells you isn’t going to be a success. All those things also require strength to carry out.

In addition, when you suffer, you often tend to despair and can’t properly think of how things will ever possibly get better – so what’s really going on, is that you’re losing hope. And because hope of better days and the hope that all your pain and hard work will eventually be rewarded are ultimately what keeps you going, holding on to that hope is tremendously important. Once it’s fully gotten into your head that things won’t ever get better, you give up soon after.

But how do you become strong? Where do you get the strength you need from?

When I am having a tough time, it’s usually the small things that get me going. A pretty flower blossoming in the spring I see, a perfect cup of cappuccino, the smell of my favourite books, the sincere smile of a friend and seeing a happy family spending time together. Those things all bring smiles to my faces, which in turn put me that one step closer to feeling like I can take on my obstacles. Also a good laughing session that will leave me gasping for air, crying and my stomach hurting make my problems seem like little bit less of a threat.

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when the kids in Dumbledore’s Army ask Harry a bunch of questions about his battles and achievements, he brushes it all of and says that he wouldn’t have been able to do anything in those situations if it wasn’t for the help he’d gotten. I always just assumed he was being unnecessarily modest. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe our achievements are really less our achievements than a sort of group effort that one person was in the charge of but not solely responsible for. Maybe Ze Frank has got it right in his video An Invocation for Beginners: “Let me not be so vain as to think that I am the sole author of my victories.”

But you have to be able to let those things affect you. The first step is always you and if you’re too far sunken into despair, the smile of a friend can do nothing to you but remind you of what you cannot at the moment achieve because of your pain.

I just wish it was as easy as it is for Eragon and I could just save some strength (well, to be specific, I do believe it’s energy in his case) when I have enough to spare in balls that I can just take with me and then use when I need them.

However, from The Fault in our Stars I also learned that strength is just a human component of all of us. Hazel she hated how cancer patients always got praised because they were so strong through all of it, “right until the last moment”. She felt that people don’t get how there’s really not anything left to do sometimes but carry on, even if you can’t really see where you’re going.

So what have I learned?

Well, maybe strength is something in all of us, but there’s often more in us that we don’t maybe know about and can be trained. Sort of like a muscle we need to remind ourselves that we have, even if everything is screaming at us that just trying to fight back is useless. And if you try to be strong through something and it’s really tough, who says it can’t help you to get over something next time?