Do you ever feel inadequate, dear reader? Not inadequate at something but generally inadequate...? Incomprehensibly so. Like a bicycle that doesn't know how to move its wheels? I feel sometimes... like I can't function or the way I know how to function doesn't work. I know it's my imagination. I think it's not so much that I can't move my wheels but the people looking on... they make me suspect that I can't. I can't tell if they are people who don't understand bicycles or people who do and I am not running quite right...

I have been thinking about cultivating more silence in my life. Seems odd even as I write this because I speak quite little on a day to day because I hardly interact with people these days. But I don't mean silence as mere spoken words—or written words because I am pretty prolific on that count. But silence in place of objectifying my thinking in a given situation. It comes naturally to me this externalising my thinking... but I wonder if there's merit in moulding this attitude inward. I say moulding it as if I am as malleable as clay when I am quite the contrary! But as a thought experiment... I am thinking about what that would mean. Usually when confronted with an opinion/question in real life or virtual my tendency is to project my thinking. It's faster than a flash. I myself am not aware of any processing taking place. I wonder what would happen if I chewed on what is thrown my way on the inside? I wonder if there's more peace in not crowding myself in the external world? Inside, you are you, you are understood, you needn't justify, you needn't prove your intentions... outside feels chaotic, like noise, like cacophony... drowning the purity of thoughts and making it something grotesque in the bargain.

I don't know though how to shift my focus from the chaos, the noise, the chimera of outside... to serenity, peace, sublimity, silence of the inside. I wonder if the key lies in listening rather than speaking...  reflecting rather than reacting... being more in communion with myself than the trivialities of the outside? Maybe it also lies in a sort of general detachment... the more I am attached, the more I care, the more I want to be seen as someone who knows how to move her wheels, the more I seem to hang on the outside, cling to it like I might fall off a cliff if it didn't hold me. I suppose if I wasn't attached to it at all, if I saw it with faint amusement as one not involved in it at all, it would have no power over me? Because I have inside, there I am who I am and what I am, no one can take it away from me. It is rock solid and plentiful in itself... It is where I am truly free.

"God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfilment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering." ~ Sylvia Plath

I used to enjoy going shopping but these days it causes a strange restless angst in me. Like what am I doing here? What purpose does this serve... these clothes, these goods? How is it enriching my life in any way? It strikes me that these things one buys are to compensate for the meaninglessness of life. A nice buy makes you momentarily happy, it fills up your thought or heart space, you look forward to eating a nice meal or wearing a gorgeous dress, it takes your mind away from the things that have no answers, no solutions, no respite. When I was younger it worked but now it's as if the illusion doesn't hold. I see through it... all the shiny happy made up faces around me... blissfully unaware. I can't help but notice how enchanted they are, all these people. With the material world around them. Tons of varieties of bread, cakes, grapes, meat, it goes on...I am overpowered by the insignificance of this varied plenty. It all feels like a means of escape...a feeble one… of filling ourselves with emptiness galore only to feel emptier the more we fill it.

I enjoy just walking in nature nowadays than walking around in structures offering artificial or material gratification. These structures confront me with the question of meaning whereas the walk, nature... sort of seems to put me in touch with it... in some sublime sense.

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing ~ Elbert Hubbard

I have been thinking about how I can avoid some amount of fair or unfair criticism. It seems to me that only if you take risks you invite criticism of any kind; if you don't take risks, the question of criticism doesn't arise. So for instance, people who don't speak up at all or speak very little. You cannot really find fault with what they think or say because they don't express anything. You might even develop a good impression of them based on a few polite or political mutterings. As opposed to that, people who actually make their views known or stand up for something or defend something invite criticism or lay out food for criticism. They may earn admirers for their views but they may also earn brickbats. It is a risk after all to show yourself, reveal yourself, make yourself vulnerable in a sense...

I am not saying people who speak for something must not be criticised just because they take risks. Of course they should! Their views are not entitled to be accepted or validated just for being spoken and that is precisely the risk. But what does one who could do with a little less criticism do? It can be disheartening and soul crushing. Is it possible to learn how to say less, and not feel like you're not being true to yourself? How do you develop the art of it? I don't really know...

Who between us is host

And who hostage?

Maybe we are both

Pulled by each other's

Heartstrings

Unable to loosen

Or lose

Ourselves

From what contains us

And in what

We contain

~Me

All good things come to an end

Lilies, roses and gentlemen

So let not your heart be easy to befriend

Broken hearts are hard to mend

Wrote these lines when I was a teenager. For some reason I was reminded of them today.

I remember reading once that the best time to write poetry is in your 20s or earlier. It makes sense...I think you become far more jaded or lose touch with those delights of emotion as you grow older. It's like the wonder of a child that only a child can experience... even wondrous things don't strike us adults with that sort of wonder. Maybe because responsibility weighs us down. We think in terms of problems, implications, obligations what not. A child is oblivious to everything practical and flows through time/space in a sense...not having a coherent sense of it.

But speaking about poems, it's not that I don't experience profound emotions any more. It is a wonder I do...but I do. Maybe why this poem surfaced in my mind today...