Dancing on the edges

Maybe a quite significant part of healing is to confront ourselves with the pain we expect to experience in the future. In doing so we realise, that life will neither be as bad nor as beautiful as we have imagined. The truth lays beyond imagination. The surprise of the unexpected causes us to totter, while simultaneously saves us from our own self. Whenever we claim that certain things were not meant to be, that they are not our destiny, then we are gambling. Truth is, we cannot know. Our overbearing manner makes us blind to the fact that we all commonly fear the insecurities of the future and in believing in destiny, we free ourselves from the responsibility to be the architects of our own fortune. We take the easy way out in submitting to higher powers that determine over us and we even pretend to stand above the law of nature in trying to translate the past into the future. We are convinced that everything repeats itself and that we saw things coming.

We are masters of deception. The self, that communicates our thoughts, expectations, fears, the always present part of ourselves, the screaming child inside each of us, our ego, the part of us that knows  it all, constitutes the self that always so willingly accepts our deception.
The self that, without opposition, believes everything we think.

But our reckless self tells only half of the story. There is our second self, the subtle one, the one we reach out to in moments when what we think and what we feel do not align. It is our so beautiful soul that for each of us manifests in the imagine of a landscape. It is the place we return to when our self has understood the lesson our soul has taught. We have been given the most beautiful image by birth, but yet we need to foster and nourish it, to counteract the draining forces of decomposition.

In trying to cultivate things we must accept, that we can offer so little to the fragile combination of circumstances growth needs. Growth, that is what mostly results from the confrontation of self and soul, more precisely, when the self says one thing and the soul thinks another.

It is when we learn that the larvae, we killed to protect our fruit would have become beautiful butterflies. Some things we cannot know, we cannot comprehend the consequences of our deeds or we cannot see it. I believe in dotted blindness. Nonetheless, I trust, that just like love, life always finds a way. Sometimes, because we fear taking the same old paths again, we forget, that even if we tried, there is an inherent impossibility to recreate a walk on the exact same path, or aberrance.

Sometimes we draw outside the lines. We then wish for an eraser because great sadness overcomes us when we look at our precious painting. We cannot stand the imperfection. From this point naturally, we will draw more carefully, especially when colouring the edges. Nonetheless, there are so many more layers of colour yet to come, that with time, we will be the only ones to remember that there once was this so upsetting imperfection.

When at times it might seem as if we were doomed to walk in the range of our landscape’s well-known paths and life seems to be nothing more than a painting book, then it is time to loose our map and to draw new paths. Take changes, make big gestures, put it all on the line and colour the edges. We wander around, with no destination, hyperactive in time and detached from space. But in the end, we cannot detach from our self entirely and permanently as in times of hunger we would knowingly eat rotten fruit to survive. Sometimes we know better than our self. We wish we could be meaningful, hyperactive, detached, and able to balance on the edges, not afraid to fall. But our landscape guides us, our landscape is our safety net. But when at times we feel like we’re falling, then our soul is there to catch us. Our soul has a melodic self-healing power that lays beyond comprehension. We are so focused on the big gestures, that sometimes we forget, that most of the time, life does not appear in big gestures but in little breezes. The big differences are being made by light wind that whispers a melody to us now and then, but in the right moments. The shtum melody accumulates.

Finally, if we cannot erase the past but need to trust in our ability to heal and re-colour our landscape, then I think the only remaining possibility is to face our fears in order to determine, whether we have already outgrown them.