Do you ever have it within you - a vague yet strong call to action. A restless urge to participate in an important activity. An urge to shake things up, to do something small yet significant with such a frequency that it ripples inside your community. Which community? I don't know. It's like that ripple effect shall connect the community. It shall be the creation of it.

Do you ever have it within you - an expansive drive inside your womb to birth new movement into being. To tell someone something. To show that energy to the world. But where? To whom? How? Where shall it be born?

Do you ever have it within you - an urge to do more than talk. To embody it. To get your hands dirty. To see your hands work on something with other hands. To celebrate the birth of that creation. Shall it be communal? Shall it be collective?

This has been my struggle lately. 

I guess I am thankful that I was able to take a couple of weeks off, but now the crushing realization of my financial burdens are bearing their full weight. 

November 23, 2016  4:15 PM

I have to increase my patience. The field of artistry is nothing but the test of will and patience where many give up. I can write this quite confidently because I have read about the importance of patience in an artist’s life, also, in parts, have I experienced it. But the path towards success is full of struggle, and like everybody, I have my own. One of them being the Orbit of Creativity. 

I don’t know about others but I have pushed myself into a whirlpool of transformation. I have started to make a circle, an orbit, of creative elements around my daily life. Be it reading good books, watching good films/plays, reading the newspaper, learning instruments, pushing my writing acumen or watching ‘productive’ videos on social media. There is this orbit which stares at me everyday and it pleads for my attention. But the problem I face is the devotion of time to all these elements. I ever so want to design a fixed and a disciplined schedule customized and dedicated to these elements but somehow I fail. Time runs away while I am busy with one of these. This is where I feel I become insecure and start to have the feeling that time’s running out like light runs out of a bulb when switched off. 

There’s so much to do and yet I achieve less than half of it. Deep down I feel I lack the ability to define my targets for a particular period of time. The desire is boiling in my heart but in the course of paying heed to one of these, I lose track of others. And then some fine day I encounter them and feel regretful, remorseful, painful. And then creeps the curse of time, or the lack of it. 

Some times I feel all of this is too idealistic, but then my desire to discipline myself inhibits the casualness of the dropping the ideal and following the natural. You see, here I get baffled about my own natural capabilities and its present limitations. I know that there is are no limits for achievements but, I guess, I have to fill myself with remorse, no? Taking things step-by-step should be the approach rather than running errands around this mammoth orbit of mine. One at a time. One at a time. 

I don’t understand why people think I’m cool. People have expressed that in multiple ways at many different times, but it’s still a foreign concept to me. Why do people think that I’m “cool”. Or do people think that I think I’m cool. I’ve never considered myself popular or part of the “in” crowd, so this is mind-blowing.

Maybe it’s because I’m somewhat aloof and kind of do my own thing regardless of what other people are doing. I’m not great at compromising my own wants and desires in exchange for someone else’s. Maybe it’s my apparent charisma, but I don’t feel I have that. I’m seriously socially awkward and have anxiety issues when dealing with people, but maybe I just mask that well.

I have a lot of acquaintances, a dozen or two friends, and only a handful of what I’d consider close friends. It then puzzles me why people think I’m cool or something. I feel blessed to have the close friends I do, even though each of them is fundamentally flawed in one way or another. I’m someone who will take whatever I can get, rather than seeking out possibly better more loving and more interesting friends.

Change.

It's a pretty simple concept: things go from one state of being to another. It can be easily observed in almost anything, but the changes that have the biggest effect on us is probably the changes in people- especially the ones in ourselves. Changes in ourselves can affect how we treat the world and others, which in turn can affect how we are treated. 

I've noticed that, for myself at least, these types of changes within myself often seem to sneak up on me. Whether it's in one of my food preferences, or my opinions on people, or even one of my viewpoints on the world, I find myself wondering how these changes happened so radically without my knowledge. I guess another thing I was amazed at was how I seemed helpless against these changes. After a long enough time, these changes occurred to even the strongest (feeling-wise) of my viewpoints. 

This topic became a frequent subject of my thoughts in high school. From these thoughts, questions arose, like: "If I dont have control over these changes, how will I know where and how I end up?". The answer to that seemed to be that there was no way to know, and then I realized the implications.

When we talk about our greatest fears, we usually come up other people or objects or situations  that threaten our body or our emotions: spiders, clowns, murderers, rapists, public speaking, embarrassment, heights. The list is endless. These are things outside ourselves. I have heard of fears that people have about themselves, but they seem more concerned about their own status, such as becoming homeless, or dying alone, or remaining a virgin for the rest of their life. 

I think my greatest fear goes a little beyond that. My fear doesn't involve my future status, but my future nature. Not where I end up, but how. When I was back in high school, I conceived this:

My greatest fear is becoming someone who I would hate.

So who would I hate? A rapist that justifies rape to himself. A murderer who justifies murder to himself. A person who becomes so disconnected to the feelings of others that they are completely lacking empathy anywhere in their thought process.

The real scary part is, if I reach a point where my thoughts change so radically that I justify something horrible, this fear would have meant nothing. I would have already justified the murder to myself. It would be like: "I know I had something before against this, but whatever". So I guess, the essence of this fear comes from this sense of powerlessness against it.