In the latest travels, I am inadvertently retracing the steps of my flight. However, doing them in reverse: Asia to Europe to the Amazon. However, not in an attempt to turn back time and reclaim my life of old. As a parenthetical aside: what do you get when you play a country song backwards? Your truck back, your dog back and your wife back!
I was not the wreck I was when I left but did have a couple chemical backslides, once in Hong Kong and once in Paris. While fun, the moaning-after only reinforced that I do not want to go back to being that dark person twisted on the inside. The bad old me. The last two months have been of light rather than flight. I have flourished under the sun on my skin and soul. It felt like so much more than only a month and twenty days of clarity and cleanliness. Gears were turning that hadn’t turned for years. But in emotion and in physical being. The information gain has been more than in the entire twelve previous months.
Seeing the old places through new eyes also during new times. Normally when I am in Paris it is during its summer. With the accompanying plague of annoying tourists. I have been there so many times over so many years that I consider myself a semi-local. Rue Saint Louis en L’ile (my favourite street) was empty. Devoid of tourists. This allowed me to just quietly bop along in my own little world. Just how I like it.
Taking the train through France, lost in thought about my previous visit during the freefall of my darkest winter. Now visiting on the cusp of spring. Life blooming anew as I stared out at the leafless forests. Much like my soul, they were not dead but shimmered of the promise of life anew. Reflective of this, the clouds were not the institutional grey of winter with flat hard surfaces and but rather they were those of the turning: fractured deep soft pillows with veins of blue.
The essence of self identity is the most fundamental of a self exploration. It has been during this latest travel that I have discovered I am no longer me. Much like steel passed through a hot flame, I have been elementally changed by the inferno of the last two years. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. But it was quite starting to realise I have irrevocably mutated into another being. I need to now discover who this new person is; what makes him happy; what his dreams are. Only then can I make informed decisions as to the places I want to go; the profession I want to pursue; the person I want to be; who I want to be with. What external face do I present to the world? What internal face to present to myself?
The concept of body snatching is a tale as old as speech itself. To be possessed from without. Two books I read while on the travels addressed this from very different angles. The first, Revolutionary Road, delt with the snatching from within. In this case, the mimicking external behaviour (suburban lifestyle and job) resulting in the loss of self and love. The other book, The Host, dealt with the classic snatching from without (spinal worm who then mimics the external behaviour) but the true identity putting up a mental fight for the control of body. In both books the struggle is to keep from losing identity. The most insidious enemy is revealed to not be the external parasite but rather the internal compromiser.
In my struggle to keep from losing my self, I have remained true to but for survival I have had metamorph into the next stage of my evolution. I have snatched my own body in a sense. Before making any long term professional or personal commitments, I must find out who I am now. I am done with the analyses of the past though. Sooner or later a point must be reached where enough inner searching has been done, the gaze turned forward with a ‘fuckit’ shrug. Too much self-analysis after a while becomes mental masturbation. Whatever horrors are in the past, are exactly there. The past. Life must go on. I will learn who I am now in the only true way to learn: by living.
0 comments:
Post a Comment