mind, drips

"Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it."

- Van Gogh

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"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison you are living in."

- Bill Hicks (1961–94)

(Source: flommus)

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"Respond to every call that excites your spirit."

- Rumi

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by9:

Any Road (by 55His.com)

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"Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace."

- Robert J. Sawyer

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"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

- Jean de La Fontaine

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What Moving On Is Like « Thought Catalog

Jan. 11, 2012

By Stephanie Georgopulos

Moving on is not like a birthday, you can’t count down the hours ‘til it arrives and you can’t mark it on a calendar and you can’t call up your friends to help you celebrate. You can’t plan for it and you can’t conclude it by blowing out a candle. When moving on happens there will be no announcements, no notifications, no congratulations. There will be no parade; only you will know. Moving on is like aging that way, if aging happened backward. If the passing of days made you new and young, if your condition only had room to improve. Instead of a throbbing pain in your right knee forcefully, increasingly making its presence known, first with a whisper and then with a mumble and then with a shout, ‘til you can’t move, ‘til you can’t walk; moving on is gradual like that except when it’s over, you can walk just fine. You can run, even.

Moving on is like this: one day you forget the taste. The next, you forget the smell. Then the touch. Then the laugh. Then the smile. Then the jokes. Then the eyes, the hair, the hands, the feet. You forget the socks. You forget the fingers, the toes, the sex. You forget the pulses, the beats, the rhythms and how you sometimes felt like they all belonged to you. You forget the words; finally, you forget the voice that spoke them. Moving on is like one day, you’re walking or reading or drinking the sun and one of those footprints, one of those artifacts will creep into your consciousness, “already seen,” the French call this, déjà vu, and you won’t know where it belongs or how it got there. All it takes is a familiar laugh, a recognizable word and you are transported to who knows where. You are a confused paleontologist now, scrambling to make sense of things left behind, trying to reunite the right dinosaur with the right bones. The scar from his burst appendix goes here, the part of his leg that doesn’t grow hair belongs there, I think this is his morning breath but maybe it belongs to someone who came before him; some other ghost, some other relic. His taste is an aftertaste now, his crow’s feet a souvenir with no place to call home. That’s what moving on is like.

Moving on is not like beginning a new chapter, it’s like beginning a new book — with each turned page, the last story you read fades into the background. A fairy tale that becomes just another book on a shelf; folded corners and underlined words the only reminder of how you used to touch and hold and love it. Moving on is when you begin to forget the intricacies of a character you knew intimately, you forget what he did for a living and the way he prepared grilled cheese and the nickname he had for his first girlfriend. You forget how he lost his virginity, you forget his middle name.

Moving on is waking up without a sour feeling in your stomach, looking at a familiar menu and ordering something different, taking the direct route to a destination and not the one that crosses a path you once set in stone. Moving on is when you think about him and don’t punish yourself for it, when he begins to evoke more of a scientific response than an emotional one, like “This is a 6’0” blonde-haired person who exists,” and not “This is a person I wish I’d never met; this is a person who has made me less of one.” Moving on is not to destroy or to combust or to set ablaze, it is simply to move, to advance through space and time, to leave behind the familiar dull of heartbreak for the new, the unknown, the strange. Moving on is a bird flying south for the winter who decides maybe the warmth isn’t so bad, who decides maybe he’ll stay there for awhile; moving on is like freedom, is what moving on is like.

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What Really Happens When You Don’t Follow Your Heart « Thought Catalog

This day will start out like any other day. You’ll be eating or working or jogging when an idea pops into your head: a grand idea to go somewhere great or do something crazy. You’ll dismiss it like you have a thousand other outlandish ideas and think that you won’t look back because, after all, it’s just another dream. And besides, you haven’t attached yourself to the idea yet; your heart isn’t in it. So you keep eating or working or jogging and try not to think about it anymore.

But it keeps coming back: it has landed itself in your mind and its tendrils are wrapping themselves around you, tightening around your brain and your body and your heart. It doesn’t matter what the idea was — a faraway trip, a creative project, a confession — whatever it is it will begin to consume you.

Days go by. Sometimes you indulge in dreaming about the possibilities of this idea, and other times you trap yourself in the impossibilities of it. Every day you try to rid yourself of it, to distract yourself with more eating or working or jogging, with other ideas to which your heart won’t hopelessly attach itself. When that doesn’t work, you surrender just a little bit and try to think of ways you could follow through on this idea without risking as much as you thought you’d have to. Perhaps you can wait a couple years to go on the trip, when you’ll be done with your current job. Maybe you can wait for some fancy grant money to come through to fund your project so you don’t have to worry about doing that and paying rent for the next six months. And that confession? Well, writing it down is almost just as good as saying it in person to that person… so why not just do that?

You spin these webs and congratulate yourself on being mature about the situation by taking inventory of all your options. But after several weeks you realize you’re getting stuck, and that the only way to get unstuck may be the most impossible thing to do. It is also the only thing to do: to follow your heart.

You think about this statement and what it really entails. You realize that “following your heart” holds much more weight and responsibility than your mom once implied on your birthday cards when you were growing up. You have grown up, and now following your heart means actually doing what your entire body and mind are begging you to do, no matter what the risks or consequences. You could lose your job. You could squander your savings. You could get seriously emotionally hurt.

And you’re there. You find yourself in the place of risk and possibility, of mustering the courage and fighting like hell to hold onto it. The adrenaline of making the decision to go for it pulses hot and thick through your body, and you can’t help but imagine gushing to all your friends and even call your parents to tell them. “I’m traveling to this place!” “I’m pursuing this project!” “I’m telling this person how I really feel!” Everyone will be excited for you, proud of you. You’re on your way, kid, and the whole world will know it.

Then your blood starts to cool.

You start trying to figure out the logistics of your plan. You see they might be a bit more complicated than you thought. You psych yourself out as the doubt of your decision creeps, more and more, into your life. You convince yourself more easily than you ever thought possible to back down, to allow cowardice masked as reason to break down the idea you’ve built up. You convince yourself you’re not giving up, just putting it on hold, and that this is the mature thing to do. You are proud of yourself for being so wise, so patient.

And just like that you’ve let it go. The agony of the past several weeks finally dissipates, and you feel relaxed. Content. You carry on with your life. Sometimes you revisit the idea, but only when you’re alone, and only from a distance.

You think everything is fine. But then something starts happening. It catches you off-guard and starts to throw you off balance. It’s something stirring deep in your gut. You don’t know what it is at first, and you try to ignore it. You take some deep breaths, drink a glass of water, and carry on with your day.

But it’s festering now, this stirring which now feels more like a twisting knot. It’s making you angry. You become short with your friends and stop calling your parents. You lash out at anyone who asks you how work is going, or when you plan to travel next, or if there is anything you want to get off your chest. You realize what’s happening, how every time someone asks one of these innocent questions your mind darts back to that moment that you could have quit your job, taken a trip, or made your confession — that moment that has long since passed.

Now there’s not much you can do. You see the grave error you’ve made and beat yourself bloody with guilt and shame for not being true to yourself. You carry on, keeping the worst episodes to yourself so people don’t think you’ve completely lost it. You tell yourself that everything will be okay, that this is not irrevocable. But weeks, months, years down the road, you will never forget that feeling of turning your back on yourself, of that time you stopped following your heart.

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