“If a frog is placed into a pot of boiling water it will immediately try to jump out; but if it’s placed into a pot of cool water that’s gradually heated until boiling, it will stay put and never try to jump out.”
― Richard Beckham II, Frog in the Pot
When the world is falling apart, your quarter life crisis does not seem very important. I noticed it on Monday when I got the news and I immediately got very depressed. On Tuesday I tried to drown my problems in alcohol and the hangover on Wednesday helped me not to think about them. Which gave me the great idea to ignore my problems. So, on Thursday I worked, I vacuumed, I did the laundry, I worked out, went for a walk and at the end of the day one ends up sitting in bed with one owns thoughts. And no matter how hard you try to ignore them; they will not let you sleep. After five hours of very bad sleep, induced with lots of strange dreams, it was finally Friday.
A few weeks ago I started intermitting fasting in the weekly version of 24 hours water-only diet and it is amazing how much time one has left when one does not have to worry about what to eat, or to cook or to actually eat, hence my plan not to think about my problems went out the window very quickly. I even started my piano lessons – on the keyboard I borrowed from a friend – again. As my brain would not shut up about stupid questions like “what should I do with my life?” And “what’s the plan or the point of everything?” I remembered that I started learning gothic a year ago and now is the perfect time to continue with that wonderful and mostly artificially reconstructed language. As you may think, that did not help either; the problems were starting to drip slowly from in between the bricks of the nice and cosy wall I put up.
I asked a friend of mine how he knew what to do with his life after university or if he knew at all in which direction he should have gone and he replied that he still does not know, which somehow is helpful and somehow not at all. It is kind of comforting to know that not many have any idea what they are doing. Do they even stop to think about it? However, it is sad if you think about it. Going through life not knowing what we are doing, not changing anything and then we die. That is it? What is the point on spending all your life fighting for some idea you put in your head years ago if at the end you will not even be happy with it?
Chekhov’s law states that every element in a story must be necessary and all the others removed, hence if there is a gun in the first act of a play, the gun is going to go off at some point. I am sitting in my story and looking at what is necessary and what is not, and I cannot see it. I cannot see the story, the big picture. Now would be the time for the author to tell me what to do and for the director to tell me how to do that. But I am not an actor trying to play my part. I am the fictional character the actor is playing. I am the idea of what I built up in my head and what others think I am. Which makes me and the others also the author of my story. So where is it going? Why don’t I know? What should we do with a story we are not happy with? Change it? There is no way of changing the past. I am stuck with it, so what do I do with what I have got? Where are the irrelevant elements?
I am stuck in the story I am writing, and I am sure when the story is over, I will see all the elements but for now I cannot, so what now?
Aromatic deception 