Potpourri of Stimuli
A mixture of various thoughts
It’s harvest time.
Like the fig tree whose fruit takes months to ripen, that’s what happens to my reflections. They are thoughts inspired by a place and time, sown in a virtual page. A fig begins as a bud between leaf and trunk. For months it’s there, growing, tempting, and when it has an appropriate size you should touch it to know if it’s ready to eat. In that uncertainty, looking, at least with the potted varieties that I grow, doesn’t work. The change in color from raw to ripe is imperceptible. It takes tact and previous experience to know the moment of greatest sweetness.
Many times it’s like my journal entries, some have continued to grow in my subconscious. In my wandering through past notes my conscious mind finds them again. Some died shortly after sowing and in that reunion, all I perceive is a dry shell. But, some of them continued to grow and from time to time I play with them until they are ready to be published.
The Journal
As a friend who’s always available, so is my journal. Because of that, he heard me — a year ago.
It was a cloudy June 4, 2017, a Sunday of 68 degrees outside, and 3:43 in the afternoon when I started like this.
You hear me, but you don’t listen. Listening requires understanding and for the moment, regardless of the sophisticated algorithms you have that allows what I write to reach the clouds, you don’t have understanding.
You hear me, and that’s important because some things I’ll never tell anyone. And who cares? Will it make a difference what I write and then read many years later?
I don’t think so. I have pictures of my dad and me as far back as 55 years ago that sprout memories. A nostalgia for what could have been because my father died when I was 5 years old. But we don’t create time to turn it back. We have time to move forward and create the anguish of what could be.
I read somewhere that the primordial teaching of Buddhism is a natural law, that is, if I remember correctly, a law that always applies to all people. Like gravity or evolution. No matter time or culture, it has always been part of modern man as Homo Sapiens is conceived. And the Buddhist law is this: as long as there is fixation for earthly stuff, we’ll suffer.
This journal has been a witness for a short time in my life, and mostly the bad one. It started 18 months ago as a place to grab my sorrows by the neck and drown them in a pond. Will it ever be able to see good times?.
The past comes to bite me
I’m not here to point out facts. I’m here to vent.
I could be writing the rest of this day — a string of swear words in the original text — if I didn’t have to go to lunch. Shitty decisions of years back that come to smear the present. It’s my past biting the present so that in my future there will be less.
What does money mean to you?
Think about it. I won’t answer what it means to me — yet. And I’m not going to make it easy for you. The answer is one word, but you’ll have to, as if a detective, deduct from the next story.
Nineteen years ago it was a time of change for Carlos. His motivation to bring money home made him unhappy when he couldn’t get the amount he expected. Always pushing himself to buy in order to have.
It was easier to blame money or try to fix things with money or get distracted by the things that money could buy than to deal with situations that couldn’t be fixed with money. Money only served to delay the inevitable.
Carlos stopped paying a responsibility. Without immediate consequences, his mistake was that the debtor has an infinite memory. Tricks and forgetting delayed the outcome for 18 years. But the time has come to face the consequences. What should have been a growing equity became an increasingly heavy yoke. It was the reverse of what happens to an ox, which when young finds its yoke heavy but with the passage of time his muscles adjust the load and it becomes a habit. With Carlos, the yoke continued to grow faster than equity.
I’m a realist. Definition of an optimist for some, pessimist for others, my desire is to be in the middle. At 60 years old it’s impossible to do what should have been done in my 30s and 40s. Very late I realized it. I have never wanted money to keep track of my career, and so it spent very little time in the bank and not enough invested. I didn’t keep it in a mattress either, optimistic of the future. But my dependence on external obligations and responsibilities binds me and forces me to make hateful decisions. It’s like that.
Because having money, above all, is freedom.
Freedom from the yoke of difficult decisions.
Again!
But that’s life. We make stories to survive the bullshit that happens to us, but something we can never control is time.
It happens like clockwork every Thursday afternoon. With my self-imposed task of publishing. And autosuggestion that Mondays are impossible to be creative. Creative, as in using imagination to speed-up the beating of my heart. Because I’m dying from boredom. Rushed to find a passion. The rage to write passionately. What will it be? is the question — the answer is — unknown. If I knew, I wouldn’t be here in my journal. I’d be somewhere else.
I won’t please my urge by editing these few words into something publishable. Even if it would satisfy my desire to do something, my passion ain’t here now.
My passion is to write a 7 thousand word story. «Hahaha!», rings as a mental insult, while my crooked smile reflects on the monitor.
But I feel tired. I have noticed that it always comes after I finish a story to which I have dedicated most of the week. Without seeking a purpose, a point to write, I write without purpose. It’s no coincidence that those last four words came to me. I have used them previously in a title, but I didn’t realize until later.
Scoop
“Primicia” is a silly game I have with my diary. Opening a new page records its geographical location. When I have nothing else to do I entertain myself by looking at the world map from where I have written. When I write somewhere for the first time, I include “primicia” to find it in a word search.
To write, write, and write. That’s all I would like to do and thus disappear — body and soul — in my creations. The problem is that the soul can but the body stays. I would like my soul to disappear in a world of reason and respect. Where feelings are considered and madness and bad faith don’t exist.
But to get there I have to make the physical world that surrounds me disappear. Reconstruction begins with destruction, right? In my current situation, there’s no space for growth. To grow, to change, it won’t be enough. The problem, as in many things, is indecision.
Am I willing to pay the price for a result that is not guaranteed? Am I cheating, believing that I can do it?
Time is against me. If I decide to do it, my body will have to bear until it goes to the grave. The heavy and unfair thing is that money would solve it. Spend everything and then what? I don’t know what I would do if it happened, but I know what I wouldn’t do.
I wouldn’t live to have debts. I wouldn’t have so much furniture. I wouldn’t be doing things to please anyone. I wouldn’t have to compromise my desire to disappear. It sounds like a hermit, right?
Would you accept someone like me as a monk? Would I be happy as a monk? I think about it and it sounds attractive, although passionless. It would be an escape. Is that reason enough to do it?
Should I be encouraged to write the story of a monastery? The protagonist would be who I just described. The antagonist would be doubt. How to leave behind a whole life and seek fulfillment.
And in conclusion
“It’s not that you should write what you know, you should write what you don’t know about what you know.” — Grace Paley
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