Stagnation

Keep moving forward...

Those are the words that have been running around in my head recently.

No one seems to disagree that life is like a wheel. It is always turning, always revolving. In it, you will experience so many ups and downs, joy and sadness.

Sometimes you'll get hurt, and you will be broken. But if you choose to keep moving, those sad feelings will soon be replaced by joyful experiences.

Time heals almost everything.

The same rule applies to the contrary, however. We couldn't ignore the fact that happiness doesn't last forever. There's no such thing as "live happily ever after" like in a fairy tale stories. But it's not something to worry about though, because that's just how life works.

Stagnant

The words also reminds me of Linkin Park's song titled Easier to Run from Meteora album, which says about quite the opposite. Here's a part of the lyric:

Sometimes I think of letting go and never looking back
And never moving forward so there'd never be a past

I'd like to emphasize the phrase "never moving forward". It means to put a stop to the wheel. The person in this song feared the risk of trying to move on: the same awful thing repeats. He closed himself from taking chances, as if there was nothing left of him. It was such a devastating despair he encountered that he associated all of his past to it.

And then it continues in a fragment of the next song, Faint, from the same album:

Time won't heal this damage anymore

At this point, I actually don't know what to say anymore. Consider this as a draft. But if you are experiencing something like this, I guess it's okay to take a break from the moments. Just stop there, try to put yourself back up from pieces. And slowly, turn the wheel again, whenever you're ready.

Photo credit:  Siyan Ren

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Inevitable

We can close our eyes to the things we don't want to see.

We can hold our breath to the scent we don't want to smell.

However, we can't shut our ears to the things we don't want to hear.

Covering our ears with hand, or even expensive noise canceling in-ear headphone, would still let sound from the outside slipping in.

Why is that? Could there be a philosophy behind it?

Or is it just the way God created us?

Evolutionary reasons?

And there is one more thing.

We can't close our heart to the love that comes suddenly.

Or to put it more generally,

we can't close our hearts to the things we don't want to feel.

Feeling is just as inevitable as hearing,

but we can ignore it if we try hard enough, I guess.

(10/8)

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Just Write

It's been a while since my last post. I'm supposed to write thoughts, ideas, or anything here, but I've got so busy with my work and college. Those two are the most time-consuming activities in my daily life. In weekends I usually do homework and practicum reports. And there are many other things that seek my attention. I got no time write until semester break comes.

Not really. I just lost my desire to write, somehow. However, I always had many thoughts that came to mind. Maybe if I had the chance to cultivate those thoughts into something worthy of a blog post, then I would post them. In the end, I just keep them in my Evernote and never thought about making a blog post.

There is also one thing that holds me from writing: being a perfectionist. I knew I had this kind of personality long ago. You might wonder "What's the problem with it? Isn't perfect a good thing?". Well, it is very useful in certain situations because it could deliver "the best" of you. But on the other side, it consumes so much time and energy to achieve "perfection".

Let me quote from a lonerwolf's post:

Being a perfectionist is crippling. There is nothing as excruciating in the creative world as being a person bursting with passion, potential and ideas, but not being able to express this with unbridled freedom. The same goes for the rest of life: perfectionism cripples us in every arena, whether it be academic, artistic, scientific, personal or interpersonal.

Basically, I have the raw material, but to compose something from it takes a large amount of my own arguments. I want it to be perfect and flawless with zero-error tolerance (notice the hyperbolic here), right from the start till the end of the process. Allow me to quote from the same lonerwolf's post again in case you don't get what I mean:

The only problem was that whenever I began writing I would instantly stop after one sentence, read through it, re-read through it, delete it, write it again, re-write it again, delete it again, re-write it again … you get the picture.

With that being said, I would, sometime, thought to myself: "Just write! Just write like nobody cares. Nobody's gonna read it anyway.". Not that I expect people to read my posts (but if you are reading this, thank you), I just want to write for myself so that I can remember. And I also want to observe how I chain thoughts into words, how the creative process in the brain works, and how can I improve it. Thoughts run too fast before my lips could articulate them. Sometime I find it hard to express them verbally without losing context and meaning. There would be a little to no time to rephrase what you said in a verbal conversation. Thus by writing, I hope that I can formulate these thoughts into the exacts words I need. In fact, this post has been edited several times since it was published.

During my absence in blogging with Blogger, I discovered other blogging platforms that are more beautiful and powerful: Jekyll, Ghost and Buffalo. I did some experiments using the first two, but I have yet to decide which platform to use. Blogger is good, but not sophisticated enough. I didn't think of WordPress because it's more than just a blogging platform. It's a CMS with all the clutter-ness. Despite all of that, I do realize that I should give more focus on the writing rather than the look and feel. Content is as much important as the writing tool.

So, just write.

Photo credit: Luis Llerena

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