I had been running to reach the calm after the storm, but only so far been scarred by the debris of the wind. (December 2, 2023)

I have been running so fast for so long. My thoughts left behind to ruminate in a stagnant world. The patient world where clarity begins to form as concerns precipitate amidst time standing still. I have been running in the impatient world where each insult agitates anything which tries to consolidate, an impatient world where each insult fuels the storm. I had been running through the whirlwinds of convolution in the hope to reach the calm after the storm, but only so far been scarred by the debris of the wind. 

I have been running so persistently that I have began to escape the hold of those close to me who would usually try and pull me back to a stagnant world where my uncertainties can be pinned down, dissected and neutralised through reflection. But I have ran so fast and so far that their help remains on the shore of their side of the ocean which I was crossing. I have been in a frenzy, continually running and flying from place to place. But there was a plane crash because I had ran out of fuel, perhaps a miscalculated destination. 

I descended upon a hostile sea that was a rude awakening from the luxurious concerns of the cloud world. I landed in the same sea where I had been scared to drown previously because I did not make waves big enough to keep myself afloat amidst waves created by others from the impatient world. I lost contact with those close to me on the final parts of my journey as I was losing fuel. I have been paddling through the cold and turbulent waters. The sea is murky. I am not too injured but I am tired. I am alive and breathing that breath of life, but to their knowledge I may be on the verge of lost. 

On the final legs of my journey, I had become so numb from running back and forth and flying from place to place in the grandeur. I had tried long to escape from the nondescript harshness that persisted in all directions from where I stood in the impatient world that I sought escape in the cloud world. I had become numb from my preoccupations of instant gratification, of my escapes drowning in the addictive volatile liquid. My skin had become thick from constant temperature changes and the harsh desert wind, from running, from flying . So much running and flying that the pain, the fatigue and the mortal expense of the stress inflicted upon myself had driven me to plunder. 

I tired in the hostile sea. I have hurt those close to me through my absence and my escape from own conscience and consciousness. I hurt them as I become lost, completely numb and disconnected from my being, disconnected from my thoughts that I had left behind in the stagnant world. There is a spill at the crash site and the poisons are leaking away, leaking and being dispersed by the churning waters. The whole surrounding sea becomes polluted, but an infinite dilution ensures any of this seems insignificant to my eyes and my body after a while. 

I have reached out in desperation, a final calling to be pulled by those close to me, back the stagnant world from drowning the fumes of the volatile liquid which was consuming me. They have responded to me as they have been waiting on the shore of the patient world. They seem more at ease with themselves in the patient world. I am paddling in the sea. The cold waters are sobering. 

I am paddling in the water, the waves becoming intimidated by the approaching shore. I can swim easier and my fatigue eases. The world seems more stagnant; the sea more still, and the water more clear. My thoughts begin to precipitate. I meet the thoughts I left to ruminate and I carry them from the seabed. The crystalline waters of the stagnant world greet me. I emerge onto the white-sand beach. The cold water soon runs off me, I am very rinsed but not completely cleansed.  

I gradually start running again, with less haste and less obligation, but with more will to run, to create something on this prosperous land. The prosperous land whose soil has been nurtured by the precipitated thoughts of those great and those close to me. I start running again, but through the patient world, through the world where I can carry my thoughts with me. 

I am running faster than I ever have before (June 10, 2023)

I'm running faster than I ever have ran before. Nothing can catch up with me, not even the thoughts I am creating. I am running, lost, in a frenzy from border to border, in the world that I created for myself.  The world I had created where I thought everything would be greener and greater than I encountered before. The only way to know that we have met greatness is to leave our everyday and to realise what actually takes us away.

I am flying from place to place in grandeur, to make use of the fuel that brought our society from the barbaric to the splendorous. I am spending in place and place in extravagance, to make use of the fortunes that that brought us from the poverty to the comfort. I am doing what they want. I am perpetuating the system. I am living how they all wish they could live. I am prodigal at the expense of the frugal world, I am shameless at the jealousy of the mortal world,I am forever-moving and never content. The only way to escape yourself is to move faster and faster until you cannot keep up with your consciousness. 

I thought that loneliness could be avoided by distraction, by busyness. I did not know that the eternal toil of convincing myself that no one is caring for me is what drives me to the true insanity, and which drives me to try and seek the attention that I believe could lift myself to self-liberation. My stories are so infinitesimally small that no one else could ever care. The idea of being cared for is greater than the attention brought upon myself by the people who actually care. The only way to avoid caring too much for other’s care is by actually caring for myself.

Did you know, that in some other life, where we would not have the same ceilings, we would have had the chance to create– and to be different  from the generations before us –to create something for which other people would actually remember us. But the ingenuity that we could have is constrained by our eternal schedule that binds us to our everyday. 

The only way to know one could be different is to make waves in the pond in which he was never welcomed. The only way to make waves in my world is to be great, and then it shall be only to make peaks and troughs to keep you afloat in the increasingly hostile sea. 

I am running faster than I have ever ran before. No one can catch up with me, not even the feelings I am upsetting. I am running, lost, more lost than ever before.

I wish I could find myself with you. But you are still, slightly more at peace with yourself. Your company will take me away from the race and to an escape in which I usually only sometimes, but increasingly more often, indulge myself. I hope that I could achieve some moderation in my own conscience.  

The nondescript harshness persists in all directions from where I stand, a sea of bland realisation that lingers into the beyond but also threatens to dissolve into the nothingness. I am scared to disappear into the precipice from which so few resolve.

I am compelled to journey hastily to the limits of my dreams, and back, in good time. I want do this over and over to avoid living out any of the false destinies that pull me forwards, or rather somewhere, so I may start new, although not fresh, each time, and time again, until the time I have becomes too finite. 

I am scared to commit to the fate that circumstance prescribes. I am reluctant to plunge into a future for which I cannot draw the paths . I am running because I want the beauty to return to the world I had envisaged.

I'm running faster than I ever have ran before. I am running fast, somewhere, to perhaps someplace beautiful and someplace new, but nowhere in particular. 

It would be easier, but less true to myself, to have never known better (April 21, 2023)

Not one day goes past without thinking of the relentless misery of the British existence. It is not just the weather. It is too the omnipresent, oppressive architecture whose age predates the  grand conflicts that have long gone by, and the depressing lives that occupy these buildings. 
 
One can travel hours in various directions and is still confronted by the haunting persistence of rows and rows of ‘terraced houses’. What a term to refer to the homes of the majority of the population who actually live in a townhouse outside of the town, in part of a house, and with no terrace. 
 
The concentration of prevailing wealth and beauty is osmotically drawn to one of few large dirty cities, with the overwhelming amount of vibrance pulled towards London. London that is otherwise a paper mâché financial diorama for the global super-rich coming from the arid world and the cold world to congregate and flaunt stolen money in front of the poor Cockney’s uneducated eyes. 
 
The marketplace is as monotone as the grim gothic architecture and suppressive of a potentially diverse economy through the systematic forced extinction of small businesses. And the employment system is so out of touch from the value that workers can offer the economy with a health and social care system ran by a single monopoly having absolute control over any opportunities for competition.
 
What appears to pacify the locals for the shortcomings is the nostalgic post-Victorian glory that the Kingdom was once part of a mighty empire that had more than its European counterparts by being able to get new and exciting goods from far away, but this now obsolete with the current trade limitations that it has forced upon itself.
 
Making the totality of the experience worse is the native’s unrelenting positivity for the status quo and the unforgetting reminiscence of the progress of the past. An unworldly self-sustaining people that is proud to call the old, shitty poor terraced houses their home; cycle through a weekly binge consumption culture of the local specialties of colourless beer, over-done meat and soulless bread; and promote the arduous prolongation of the inbred and futile monarchy which the place is reliant upon to provide idiosyncratic ‘charm’.  
 
What a blessing it would be to witness bulldozers go astray and do some mercy to flatten out the ancient and outlived structures and give the Britons the chance to build on their Kingdom’s soil some structures that would meet the standards encountered across the Channel, with infrastructure, or insultation, where they need not hear their neighbors washing machine running in the late of the night nor have the rain from above greet them in generous puddles at their feet when awaking to a glorious day on the island. 
 
Some hopes are unworthy, and for the British to be considered European, was surely one of them. I have lived and lived abroad, and collated other’s experience of witnessing the non-existence of a comfortable middle-income class in this nation that should afford the enjoyments in which their Western European ‘peers’ can readily indulge. But rather does the system indulge it its own informal flexibilities and complacence of half-modern comforts, that it may produce a mean gross domestic product that is brought close to that of its neighbours only though the foreign effects of the City. Nevertheless, I may let it be. It would be easier, but less true to myself, to have never known better. 

When you are suffering is when you are most real (July 20, 2021)

When you are suffering is when you are most real. When you are suffering the emotional turmoil that results from your unbalanced existence. The emotional turmoil that, today, arises at your realisation of the transience of the moment; the transience of being back in your hometown before disappearing back to your place of obligation. The hometown, whose unconditional beauty and whose primitive and earthly inconveniences, continues to captivate you and ensure that you resort to her ground no matter the love you cultivate elsewhere. 

The city is cold and distant, the sweltering heat has migrated away to leave behind grey and windy chills that haunt the concrete forest. The hustle and bustle persists but it is muted behind the persistent drizzle and your floating consciousness. You are hurrying to some place but no place in particular. 

The nondescript cacophony of city immerses you. You, who have little influence on the greater destinies that the metropolis establishes for itself. That over-inflated image of self which thrives in this dense and preoccupied exemplification of modern human values. 

What comes next you do not know of, but you know that your time here is limited. It is so harsh and yet so thriving. Nowhere else would thrust upon you so same pressures for greatness.  Nowhere else would unfold to offer your wildest desires. And nowhere else would be your home in the heart. 

Sino-American unrest that tosses us all. (July 2, 2020)

I would encourage to consider power in the world at a level above politics. The idea of a political system is a way in which social systems try to display governmental decisions, that are decisions of supposedly politicians and their people, managing themselves and their interactions with other countries.  I would also suggest to consider it in terms of the invisible multibillionaires, who are nameless and do not give words to the lay people directly, but who coordinate massive international infrastructures and resources, which are in this modern world more powerful than the perceived ‘unity of function’ that would make a country work. 

Those resources are seen by lay people as the countries that offer them, for example oil (the Middle East), workforces (China and India), and technology development (USA and China), but frameworks or companies serve to extract or exploit these resources, and the leaders of the frameworks that do this, are the real power. Governmental and international laws are in turn, shaped partly to what that society has been educated to believe is morally tolerable to avoid conflict with ‘people who read the news’ , but also shaped to what allows these frameworks and companies to maximise their efficiency and profitability for the handful of people at the very top to have the most as possible (the top being much higher than any president). The entire press of the world is the distraction to indulge populations in dialogue with themselves about ‘ethics’ and ‘end-user business’ and ‘emotive small stories’ as a function to make people believe that their concerns are realised by other people and that they have a freedom and transparency in their thoughts and actions, which the government serves as an illusion to sustain as well. 

This development of technologies is a large part of the capitalism, that every single object in the developed home is a product of commercialisation and increasing efficiency and quality, which are driven by competition and refinement to lower cost, which are encouraged by a “free economy” and increasing wealth, which makes these comforts common and available to more and more people; all true technological development which is applied in the world is a product of capitalistic pursuit and its marketing. It’s marketing that is the alternate form of the press to show us that we need these things to make our life better by consuming them. 

You may therefore be able to consider that everything you do upholds an order that is fundamentally controlled by a few few people at the very top. The balance of the world economy is the biggest and coolest toy that will make the thirsty people rise and fall, and the nonchalant people slowly persist, following their ‘intrinsic satisfactions’ which give a sense of ‘self fulfilment’ in a way that is seemingly unrelated to greater powers, but their naivety is actually a luxury with which they are vested. 

The world shift from royal power to money, which enabled people who were not born in great to achieve partial greatness, in time, is what enabled the opportunity for social hierarchy to be climbed, very slowly, and therefore have an incentive to want to develop because there was the chance. At the fundamental level, all true development seeks to make the lives of people more comfortable and to reduce physical “work done”. 

Political freedoms and a democracy construct is a luxury that emerged when people were not as poor anymore and could speak out about being caught lower on the hierarchy; “Germany could not afford to pretend to be socialist, if it had not previously underwent a capitalist revolution to ensure its people a fundamental wealth in the first place.” At the end of the day, the only real problem in the world is the extreme poverty and hunger of poor countries, and some humanitarian goal will be to either ensure these societies the same fundamental comforts of the developed world, which is almost impossible due to corruption, or simply see these people perish. 

I wished we could have travelled here together. (June 14, 2020)

I am standing at the edge of a mighty precipice overlooking the tundra. The dry wind is blowing through my hair, rising with the heat of the valley below. I stare into the clear distance for as far as my eyes can see. The canyon is vast and barren, with some bushes interspersed amidst the great expanse. The sun beats overhead with a merciless heat that shines through the thin, crisp air of this world. The rocks bask underneath the scorching day, while radiating their heat into the bitter night. 

I am lying on the grass of a solitary hill in the middle of the savannah. The dry wind carries with it the passing time which quickly races through me to some place far away. I gaze at the fragile clouds that float above me with uncertainty. The plains are endless to my comprehension but they must end somewhere in the distance I cannot see.

I am lying on the grass of the solitary hill, alone in the nothingness of the uncharted landscape that only knows desolation. I can feel your presence in this very spot. You were lying in this field when you stopped during your journey. The dried out blades of grass are crusheed and the soil underneath is compressed by your weight. I can feel your aura lingering over this patch of land otherwise lost in the endlessness of the bleak landscape.

I am staring at the ground where I can see you were, alone in the nothingness and unprotected from the wilderness. I can see you sitting where I wish I had been to embrace you, and catch each and every single tear as it slowly rolled down your soft face. I wanted to be there at the same time, but I could not. I wished we could have travelled here together, or never at all, but it was too late and we were in different worlds at the same time. 

I am feeling your existence next to me. A momentary remnant of your essence, liberated in the upset particles that rise through the air. Your form slowly precipitates in front of me and for a moment I reach out to touch you. For an instant, I feel your skin with my fingertips. I am caressing your precious being for that one second that you materialise in front of me. In that second, I stare once more into your brown eyes and into their depths. In the shiny lustre that glazes your eyes, I see reflected back at me the consciousness vested in my self in that moment and my eternal longing to feel you close to me. I reach further to wrap my arm around you but your being quickly dissolves into the non-existence of the air from which it first appeared. 

I am sitting on the dry land in the middle of this wasteland. I feel your incarnation next to me as you were writhing in despair. I was in this spot a long time ago before you were even here the first time. Now I can see the marks in the ground where you were flinching in pain. I wanted to be here when you were here. I never would have let you alone here in the mercilessness. But I did not know you were in this world and I could not have tried to save you. 

I am seeing a stream of clouds churning in the edge of the sky, a whirlwind of darkness dragged along on the meteorological conveyor belt. The wind that passes across me becomes cold as the light of the sky above me is pulled to the side. The world plunges into a relentless darkness. Each breath becomes more and more laboured in the weight of the thick gloom. The clouds begin to unleash a downpour that floods the wasteland. My shoulders are stiff from within. The raindrops beat on me. An unsettlement expands from my core and propagates through my body. I become drenched in a cold wetness.  My throat begins to tighten as I can feel myself struggling to breathe. My eyes water from being ravished by nature's forces and at the realisation that you drowned here. My whole body is tense with a paralysing unease. I am simultaneously drowning and starving in this world, rigid from being devoid of your touch. The land is flooded with torrential waters and I am struggling to stay afloat. 

I am awaking on the flat sand of a pristine white-sand beach. I feel the tiny waves gently lapping against my feet as I walk along the endless coastline. The air is still and the wind is absent. The ripples of the great expanse of crystalline water are glistening under the blinding sun. Time itself stands still in the calm after the storm. I spot footsteps in the soft sand. Your footsteps. Engraved into the sand and persisting immortally in the vacuum of this world. They are walking along the beach into the fading distance. 
I am following them to you.

End of Year 2019 (December 31, 2019)

I am thankful for another year of beautiful stories, of unique journeys that have taken me to familiar and new places. 

It has been a satisfying journey of rekindling the greatness that unites people through their common realisations, appreciating the refinement and scrutiny that makes someone value what they have; discussing the shortcomings of existence in a place that takes for granted the things for which you believed should be fought; keeping connections which have been threatened by persisting distance; delighting in the beauty of language; witnessing that some things that could go wrong will; perpetuating ever-present mortal desires in the everyday, driving endlessly with going nowhere, and realising the shortcomings of a mundane existence. 

I am glad to have achieved an internal closure that has facilitated sustainability. I have been intrigued by seeing the hidden beauty of small niches in the countryside. I have been fulfilled by being able to sustain a meaningful connection which will last indefinitely. I appreciate the transition that has unfolded. I value the knowledge and perceptions you will always give me. (T)

I am happy to have shared another beautiful year. I am happy with time spent in four countries and seeing some of those places in a new light. I have been immersed by discovering the depths of a faraway land by a false sea where the wind knows no mercy and where the nights are long. I am filled by what has transpired. I am moved by the convolution that has sometimes made it difficult and, at the same time, stronger. (L)

I am delighted to see the fate of the unexpected experiences together. I value the way in which a familiar place can be witnessed in a way that makes it seem even more beautiful than it originally seemed. I have been enchanted by the post-midnight dreamworld. I am engrossed by your intellectual and physical existence for time as I know it. (N)

“The stars are still being beautiful on the nights you cannot see them.”

“Some people don’t deserve the air they breathe”. ––Henrik

“We are simply better.” ––Natalie

“I want everything to end.” ––Lara

“You remind me that things have never changes and should never really” ––Yousef

“It’s underage so of course you like it” ––Lukas

“People like them don’t understand and never will.” ––Niklas

“I don’t have a driver’s license. I prefer to be driven.” ––Julien

“If I would have meant you, I would have said your name.” ––Tom

“The popularity of this world is as transient as it’s glory.”

“Take a moment to breathe the breath of life and realise that everything else does not matter; that the gift of your physiological and psychological balance is the gift of the universe, that tonight and tomorrow belong to you and to your fate, that your ambition is simultaneously precious and worthless, shaping what could be, and what could be in your way on your self-designated path of endless flagellation towards a distant and unattainable place called happiness.”