Take a pause. Its the only honest advice I can wholeheartedly wish for you.
Take a pause like nobody is watching.
Take a pause. Inhale the sky. Let the waves of the oceans wash over your mind. Feel the colours of the sunset. Taste the texture of the air passing through you.
Take a pause. Be quiet for a generous moment. Notice how the nature subtly approaches you.
Take a pause. Relax your body without enforcing discipline upon it.
Take a pause. Observe the stillness coming before a storm that never arrives.
Take a pause. Enjoy the serenity of the mountains.
Take a pause not for the infinity your body will be rewarded.
Take a pause celebrating how swiftly you can reach nowhere.
Take a pause to thank your heart for its loyal beats.
Take a pause. Find comfort in how the universe informs the answers to your questions.
Take a pause. Experience your blood calmly dance to the music of your heart.
Take a pause not because its the only thing that is efficient.
Take a pause as your soul undergo a soothing rebirth.
Take a pause to honour the long journey that brought you here.
Take a pause. Preserve your heat like snowflakes coming together to protect the landscape from another cycle.
Take a pause to see your thoughs from a far.
Take a pause. Contemplate the language of the space that surrounds you.
Take a pause to appreciate the curve you were granted by time.
Take a pause. Sense life showering you with kindness.
Take a pause. Take a pause like your body, conciousness and innerself are friends finally reunited.
Take. A. Pause. Its the only place you can release you worries into the abyss without retaliation.
You can believe it to be contradictory but even within despair, in its heart of hearts, there lies hope.. Because a condition of despair… Still assumes a life to be lived and that means a chance of meaning to be meant.. and love to be loved. Life is always worth losing.. Because it is worth living.
PS: If you came here from social media the cover image is from a recently released music video I was a part of by Frederik Elsner.
Downside up and outside in I’m not laughing. You’re laughing. These giggles are not of joy. They’re giggles of sadness.
Background
I find a comforting freedom in the shadows. When I feel the society and the norm is periodically bordering insanity I find relief in turning things around and look at the opposite of conventional wisdom.
Also inverting some popcultural sayings and cliches can be super fun.
We don’t always need a positive outlook on life. Theres no valid rational nor irrational reason to keep the witchhunt on negative emotions going except to ackowledge that some people desperately are in dire need of that witchhunt for their own sake. That is okay as long as you remind yourself to resist needlessly punishing yourself for having negative emotions.
Many of us impart our views upon the world believing they are gonna hit with the force of mass extinctive astroid impacts.
More often than not they barely delivers the severity of a mosquito flying about while one tries to sleep.
Which is a good thing.
World views should at worst just briefly keep others up at night. It shouldn’t be something that envelops masses of the world in fear for their lives.
We still have a lot to learn when it comes to communicating humanely at the scale of a connected mankind.
One thing that we have yet to understand is the freedom we fuel evil every time we proclaim another human being to be a monster.
Call someone a monster enough times and sure enough the evil within anyone of us will find a breeding ground to roam more viciously and corrupt the growth of benign ideas.
“You have double of everything” they proclaim so sure of themselves
Two heritages Two mother tongues Two families Two homes Two places to belong
It’s the lie in any one of them that shatters the shelter of all the other lies meant to comfort
Time and time again they show you in words and in actions that you are never to belong to either
You vividly recall when you understood that it is always all or nothing and never both at the same time
Full of doubt and uncertainty you trade to get temporary freedom and peace as you choose a stance a loyalty a default
And with the pledge of allegiance worn as a faux mask you feel as if you’ve sold your soul for something that was just meant to hide the rage and agony
In the researching I do I try to beware of my own biases on the subject and what I bring with me that might cause something to be considered less or more favourably.
Confirmation bias is one that I’m extra cautious about and seems to be one of the easiest to notice once you start looking which isn’t without irony in itself.
We’ve all been there: that meeting where someone mentions some product or service you have known about for quite a while but hasn’t considered in a long time and after the meeting you suddenly start seeing ads for that product or service on social media or elsewhere on the internet thinking that your phone or the meeting software recorded your conversation.
You can easily get a bit paranoid but coming from both a tech and communications/marketing world you know it’s just our brain messing a bit with us. Either the ads were already there and you just weren’t noticing them because they were like elevator muzak to your mind, or in most cases today, you researched (or someone near you) researched something that brings forth that service in a sort-of-speak-of-the-Devil kind of way.
My recent searching has been in several directions as always but two directions that I thought lived on different paths somehow ended up colliding as if they lived on the same spherical planes.
It probably was just a mere coincidence more than it was my brain remembering something very distantly connected.
One of the directions was about some famous artists and great thinkers, like da Vinci and Einstein, and their way of thinking using external tools.
Bonus: I recently was in awe of this quote attributed Einstein but I could not verify it:
“My pencil and I are smarter than I am.”
Writing my first book in December I discovered the value of externalising my thinking and has since been fascinated by different kinds of thought visualisations and mental models.
For some reason all of these fascinations always seems to be rabbit-holes for me where I deep dive into an entirely new universe with their own weirdness and wonders all over that I mostly never looked upon in that light.
This thought probably was a bit struck by my new washing machine sounding like a game-menu-level-selector when you power it on because I got stuck while reading about Leonardo da Vinci and I started pondering who the other “turtles” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were named after.
I couldn’t remember what Michaelangelo was known for… But I got distracted as always and ended up reading about Sumerian kings on the list of Sumerian kings which apparently only has one known female monarch on it and that had a reference to [something] Uruk and then I pondered why a name in the earliest known civilisation had a name sounding primitive like Uruk-hai from Lord of the Rings kind of way. It was a “A rose by any other name […]”-moment and my confirmation bias alarm started ringing so I let it go.
The second direction was about cocktails which I really like for both their aesthetics and pocket philosophy. And taste, of course. And any disciple abundant of mechanical gadgets can be certain it’ll catch my attention.
Alcohol in Greenland as well as many places I guess is considered poisonous for you and consumption is portrayed as entirely self-irreverent.
I definitely believe it can be both, especially if you develop bad habits around alcohol during troubling times of your life. It’s deadly if you get to know it as a form of absolutism.
But I also know it can bring good things to life too. Cocktails for me is a way of acknowledging that it can be awesome if respected and cared for. It can show that if you approach it as a process rather than for its result it’ll be very rewarding.
Cocktails don’t even need to have alcohol content in them to be worthwhile. Something I offent get reaffirmed in, and recently by Ivy Mix when she mentioned a friend of hers had published a book called Drink What You Want. Her friend, John deBary, apparently started a brand called Proteau which makes cocktails that are zero-proof, ie. without any alcohol.
Anyway… I started playing with the name/word Mix in a visual way. I wanted to make an animation (which I am not very good at yet but I enjoy trying) with a cocktail getting filled. Researching what MIX in roman letters was I stumbled upon the Sumerian number system and even when searching for the name origin it seemed to be a shorthand of a deity-entity named Michael. Searching further on that I stumbled on a quote that really resonated with me:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
Michaelangelo
Either way, I ended up getting consumed by these thoughts and made a logo-like illustration that I might one day use for something.
The tagline is starting to grow on me. It seems to reflect my way of dwelling way too deep into something trivial or nonsensical. 😉
I know what you are thinking. I was there once too. I was silently thinking those thoughts. They’re not uncommon for anyone in your position… The time has come for me to intervene. Believe me, when I tell you, you’re destined for even more greatness than you pursuit.
I know… We don’t believe in fate, so it’s a bit ironic to claim this. Yet, history has shown that time and time again irony is inevitable. Irony is just a mere illusionary connection we believe to be relevant.
There’s nothing in your past that signifies believing that you will amount to anything near what I know you will achieve.
Which ever prism you choose to look at your past through you are an outlier and all odds are against you.
Look around you. You are an imposter. Just like everybody else.
That is irrelevant in itself but combined with your hunger for both more and less that’s exactly the necessary environment for this… It’s the catalyst for this… Process… It’s the cocktail you need to stay thirsty.
You have fallen so many times you stopped counting. I would be lying if I told you you’re done falling.
The fallings.. They’re coming for you. They’re not there to stop you, however. Sometimes… They’re there to hone you… And other times they’re there to take you a part so you can assemble yourself better.
How you decide which parts to keep and which parts to discard is important but whatever you get rid of will hold precisely the weight that keeps you from soaring.
I know you’re doubtful… And rightfully so. Trust the doubt. It’s the doubt that you need to drive you even further.
I know all of this to be true and I’m aware that you have no good reason to believe me. After all, I’m wrong all the time and so are you.
But it’s just like the math teachers who thought you were cheating because you had the correct answers upon request but couldn’t yet connect your answer to the formula.
You are exactly where you need to be. It’s not an easy place to be in but embrace what brought you here. Your life is preparing you like a chef working on getting their mise-en-place perfect.
All the variables that needs to be right before you get there are brute-forcing behind you like the surfers lining up anticipating their next good wave.
It’s not your decision when, how and why they will align. All you can do is keep preparing and pursuing it.
You’re right where you need to be… For now. You have much to learn still and one of them is this:
Success like failures are just outcomes. Both relies on many things. Most of which are not even in your control.
The chaos is unsettling. You can’t calm the chaos yet you must keep questioning what affords your unruliness.
It’s your disrupting questions and mind-at-battle that will bring your ducks in a row.
Your questions are not comfortable and you are not meant to be comforted by them. Stick with the preposterousness and snuggle the process till you’re able to walk the talk.
It won’t be easy. It will be worth it. Don’t hold back. For neither more or less.
Lastly I will say one last thing. I say this only because I’m confident we can endure it. It’s my parting gift till we talk again. Be wary as it’s a trembling thought:
You will instil to greatness and in the process you’ll achieve more than you think is possible. Will it matter?
You’ll meet a lot of people, who, to put it simply don’t know what they are talking about. In 1970, a CBS executive famously said that there were four things you would never ever see on television: A divorced person, a Jewish person, a person living in New York City and a man with a mustache. By 1980, every person show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck.
Develop your own compass and trust it. Take risks. Dare to fail.
Remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.
Embedded within languages are multitudes of interpretive perceptions describing our inner and outer space; any of which are worthwhile experiencing as they’re explored.
