Once Upon a Year Gone By

Oh 2014, I hardly knew you! Only one day to the very end of this year and I am just now tasting the shocking realisation that it has, in fact, been 12 months since the beginning of the year. It's been a blur. The 365 days have drifted by without my conscious awareness of their passing. I took the idea that the concept of time is man's creation quite literally. The distinction between night and day to me was not black and white, it was (still is) grey. I ate supper at midnight, I took vodka -sometimes- at two in the afternoon, I drank coffee at eight in the evening and eight in the morning became my ungodly hour. Time, after all, was my conception -the conception of my ancestors and, therefore, mine. And like the Idiosyncratic Hedonist that I am, I didn't follow the norm. It is no surprise then that 12 solid months have gone by and I feel that the year has just flown by.

It is not uncommon to look back at the years past and talk about something significant that happened in a particular year, for instance: school graduation; meeting a stranger who later becomes a lover; breaking up with the aforementioned lover; going through grief; moving out of the parents' home; starting a new job; these are just some of the major life events. I don't think I'll look back at 2014 and mention any of the above. However, I feel like I did grow tremendously in a short period of time and this growth has gone unnoticed by everyone but myself. I feel like in the space of 12 months, I have traversed so far from what I am used to. I find it difficult to put into words these bits and pieces of transition and transformation. The peace that I have felt, the wanderings -both imaginary and physical, getting lost and subsequently finding myself in a good book, being moved by great music, the magic of the night air, the stillness of the morning just before everyone wakes up, the letting go on my yoga mat, the sound of silence, the surprising emotional balance. These are things I might not be able to tell people in future, yet it is their combination that makes me feel completely and utterly metamorphosed. The abstractness of their very nature makes them difficult to explain.

Oh 2014, I hardly knew you, yet you gave me the time to know myself, and for that I am grateful.

The title of this post is from the song Paradise by Vanessa Carlton

What Kind of Paradise am I Looking For?

It's five o'clock on Monday morning and I am back at my place by the window with my first cup of coffee. I know, (because I have been told) that sounds depressing. I am not depressed. I am melancholic: I love sad things. Those of us with the melancholic disposition are inspired by misery. This is not to say I am a sad person. Quite the contrary, I am a happy soul. So, instead of sleeping, especially since I seldom get a full night's sleep -my sleep comes fitfully, with me dipping in and out of consciousness throughout the night- I find that staring out of the window is an interesting alternative, a better alternative so to speak. In this pre-dawn darkness, I find a solitary kind of happiness. I feel an illusion of aloneness, and despite knowing it is an illusion, or maybe because I know it is an illusion, I embrace the peace that can only be found when alone. I am staring into the proverbial nothingness, my mind's eye trying to form images the way I know them and with others, giving my imagination free rein as I form them the way I'd like them to be. But all too soon, in the light of day, I see everything the way it usually is.

I am a voracious reader. I devour books with a kind of hunger that I am certain can't and will never be satisfied. My Kindle, my laptop, my phone, my physical book shelves are all filled with books because the thought of ever lacking something to read scares me shitless. I spend more time reading than I do any other activity. It is in books that I make friends, travel around the world and acquire immense knowledge which translates to happiness. Every new book shifts my horizon. I find truths in books, especially fiction, because fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact. Books are my anchor: I read when I am happy; I read when I am sad. I read to experience everything across the full gamut of emotions. I feel emotions that I may probably never feel in real life; I become  someone I would never have become without books, and the best part is that I get to change the person that I am with every new book that I read. Someone once said, I forget who, but I agree with this fellow bookish soul, that my library is an archive of longings.

I am a dreamer. While pondering about dreams, Sile, one of the protagonists in Emma Donoghue's Landing, says that dreams pull so unpredictably on the fabric of time. She goes ahead to demystify the default, widespread yet misleading assumption that daytime is the real life. "In the night," she says, "people journeyed far from those they slept beside, they lived out infinitudes of time and in the morning,  they all behaved like adulterers, as if nothing happened." And I tend to agree. I have experienced so much in my dreams. I have been chased by indescribable creatures, I have traveled the world, I have interacted with people I might never meet in my life, I have attended international conferences, I have lived in my own house, I have experienced my worst fears, I have endured terrible pain and I have achieved my dreams. This other life that I have lived -sometimes stretching a whole lifetime and sometimes the brevity of it all makes me second guess myself- is only known to me. I might never experience all these things in my real life (whatever real life means) but I have felt them so strongly, it's as if  I have lived them. Fernando Pessoa says that life is fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. I find immense comfort in that thought.

In all these: sitting alone and staring in the dark; reading an inordinate number of books; and dreaming (living in my head) I believe I am looking for a paradise that is inevitably and eerily elusive. While on this other side of paradise -the preparadise- I try my best to conjure the image, to paint the picture of my paradise. I have imagined my paradise, made both minor and major changes and then done away with it. I am back at the drawing board, unsure of what kind of paradise I am looking for.

The title of this post is from the song Grey by Ani DiFranco.