Life is… sadness. It’s pain. But most importantly, it’s joy… happiness. It’s glee. It can be gloomy. It can be shadowy. It can be depressing. It can make you apathetic, it can make you jaded. It can make you care less. It can make you hateful, spiteful but it can also teach you how to love. It can be inspirational. Life is torment, instability, ambiguity… yet full of light, full of beauty, full of opportunity and full of beautiful people.
Life is all these things.
I wrote the following while listening to the composition Douze petits chorals by Erik Satie. I hope that you enjoy. It was written as an exercise but you may get some delight out of it.
Oh, to delight in whimsy and to experience all the travesties that come with life.
Everything’s come full circle. How suffocating it tends to be. How encumbering it is. The shifting of a moral paradigm. You begin to question, who you were all along and what exactly it is you sought. Nothing it seems. Chasing the wind. Dreams blown away like chaff. It ceases to be in that moment.
Now you have a new dream but please don’t be so dreadful about it. You are born again to the world. You are a new creature.
My mind… it plots against me. It’s one step ahead of me. I try to outwit it but it seems to know every move in advance like playing chess against a super computer.
What has my wings stitched together that I cannot spread them out to fly? What binds me? Give me your everlasting freedom. I want a taste. I yearn for it in the morning and at night when I lay my head to rest, it is my salvation.
Bring it forth to me so that I may delight in its splendor. Lest I be undone. Unraveled. Left naked and hopeless, lying in the wilderness.
A dreadful end indeed.
All day everyday I’m thinking about how I can improve myself as a person. I steadily observe my flaws and keep record of my shortcomings. Whether it’s detrimental I’m not sure but I feel as though if I never had this conscience weighing on me all day then I would never progress.
Or would I just change all on my own? I’ve seen it happen. There’s that old expression “people never change.” And I wondered if it was true for me. I thought I would never change for the better and then I did. Lots of things happened.
I think it’s because I know the capacity I have to be a loving, gentle person and someone who actually brings light to the world instead of darkness. If I thought I was worthless and didn’t account for much then I guess it doesn’t matter what kind of a person I am, right? After all I can’t make any kind of impact. This is the mentality of a lot of people.
Still, sometimes reading or hearing something I come to feel dismayed. I often feel exposed. The darkness lurking inside me that is, feels exposed. And so sometimes I rather not hear about all the things I’m doing wrong but rather what I’m doing right.
It’s easy to be a fault finder and nitpick all day. Which is what I’ve been doing. I compare my life to others’, my situation, my bank account, even my freedom. Which is my own.
Suffice it to say, it’s so easy to look at all the things going wrong but harder to remain on the positive. That’s our problem. You’ve heard the cliché someone always has it worse and it’s true. There’s people right now who are suffering and going through hard times and still keep their chin up and persevere in the face of tribulation. What do you think it is that keeps them strong?
I find peace after suffering for a very long time and I wonder if I deserve it. Maybe the key is not to think about whether or not I deserve it but just to accept it. After all, as good a person as I want to be, I won’t change anything or anybody if I myself have a lot of work to be done.
I don’t want to fight, I want to love.
I want to live everyday like its my last.
I want to go on adventures.
I want to get lost somewhere.
I want to discover new art.
I want to be recognized.
I want to be loved.
I want a perfect mind and body.
I want to travel the world.
I want to find my soulmate.
I want my passion to be my job.
I want to get high on life.
I want not to worry anymore.
Sounds pretty cliché, doesn’t it?
Music is something that’s very hard to put into words for me. It’s a topic I’ve written about before but is something that never ceases to astound me.
How much it transcends borders and is universal. The fact that it connects people together. I love when people come together to share their love for a particular song or piece of music. It’s as if for that moment they are under one flag, nationalities and such don’t matter.
The sheer power of music. How it uplifts the soul. None of it is by accident but I believe music was put here to heal troubled souls, uplift shaky spirits and reinvigorate passions.
It truly is a medicine of the sweetest kind. The idea that there is something out there for every person is perfect too. People can choose what music they listen to around their personal tastes and so it becomes something personal.
Sometimes I like to think I have a relationship with music. Almost like it’s an entity. And all the artists and musicians that make it up are the body. It’s something personal for me as music has been there for me a lot of times when no one was. It’s gotten me so inspired to the point where I take it upon myself to make my own music. Even working with other artists at times to bring forth a vision.
Music is a friend in times of need. Want to feel comforted and like someone feels your pain? There is music for that. Want music to enhance your mood or experience? Ditto. Want to reflect on times long gone when it seemed things were better? Again I repeat.
I read a comment sometime where someone said they couldn’t imagine a world without music. I hardly can either. For me it’s a driving force for the human race and has given a voice to the voiceless and given people platforms where otherwise they wouldn’t have one.
In all honesty, thank God for music.
Artistic Apathy 