You Always Tell Yourself Good Advice For Someone Else

What would it take to make me change my ways? Someone else is better at counting the ways, but I don’t tell myself that. That would feel like giving up, surrendering your will and freedom. I would listen to a generous voice that tries to say and not tell. I like to draw my own parallels from landscapes painted without me dead and centre in it. I want to discover too, and not just be marked on a map in the scheme of all things, like a spot to pass by, or a dot to connect to. I want to be — and not to be something other.

Part of the process sometimes involves disappearing. It’s amazing how silence helps too, silence of the hands, silence of the mouth, relative silence of all the thoughts and ruminations of the mind… While we say we let go, it’s probably just as simple to accept and forgive, not that it makes it any easier. Having that space, of not having to be what we think we are ourselves, gives us the opportunity to make the best of our selves, to find what really matters to life once more.

Sure, there’s a lot of me, me, me — but really, I‘d like to relate to the other. In getting out of myself, in setting my being beyond the boundaries of me, myself, and I, there’s a sense of being more “me” even as I embrace more of the other. Even when I’m painting, drawing, or creating a little pastiche of lines and circles, I’m not doing it for me but because it is me, and I am trying to relate to the other.

To change my ways is perhaps just an open question: to what? Maybe there’s never a destination for the journey to find that answer, but we could always hazard a guess as to which direction we should go for. Wisely enough, finding that direction is akin to waiting for the whisper from the wind that comes by without any fanfare or feeling. Sometimes it’s a memory, or maybe just a glimpse of a colour, or a slight feeling in the bones and head that something’s right or slightly off-balance. If we give our selves the space to wait and listen, we could be met and transformed beyond where we were to face where we really want to go.