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a few words before you go

The hardest thing is to start writing. You spend ages just waiting for that time to begin, until you know that you can't wait any longer and you just have to do it. Then you might need to struggle a bit more with the first few sentences before you actually get an idea of what the whole paragraph is about; and obviously, some times, it might be so needed that certain amendments must be made to the opening sentences, but it doesn't matter anymore because you've started already – the ball is rolling.

That's pretty much how it is with life, isn't it? Takes about nine months of waiting before life actually starts, and it does start quite painfully and with a lot of difficulty. After that, however, and after taking care of the first few sentences, the rest pretty much writes itself – there is no effort made in being, or existing.

Oh, how lucky. We are so lucky. We live in a fairytale which we write with our very own existence, each and every moment of our being. We are the fairytale. The wildest human imagination could not have come up with the simplest of nature's wonders – what a beautiful dance of splendidly interdependent and organic existences, spread around haphazardly on a giant wet gem floating in mid-air in the vastness of cold space around a big rock on fire, spinning round and round and round like a carnival balloon, like the windmills of your mind.

What is there, really, apart from now? Point to me to yesterday, place my hand on tomorrow. Time is not a tool, it's a convenience, a yardstick for measuring what we experience as the 'passing of that which allows things to have a linear order of execution, of cause and effect'. But there is no such quality inherent in things – time is like beauty, it's not intrinsic to the object in question but is a particular perceptual stimulation of the individual experiencing it. What is an 'hour' to a butterfly, a 10-year old boy, an oak tree, or a planet. It is merely a convenience, and it is certainly not money.

Take it easy – don't stress yourself over things that don't really matter. What doesn't really matter? I can't tell you that. Obviously, nothing will matter anymore when you're dead, at least not to you. When you die you will never regret not having worked a few hours extra, I'm pretty sure. So does something matter if it matters to some other person even after one has passed away? That's a bit silly; if something matters only because it matters, then it obviously doesn't matter. Dancing for dance's sake is meaningless – but how beautiful. Birdsongs are definitely not music – music is not something 'out there'; it's something 'in here', something that happens in our minds and our perception of sound. But they're beautiful.

Maybe life's meaning is not something 'out there', a list of tasks bestowed upon us by some remote divine figure, which we have to tick off the to-do list before receiving a one-way ticket to eternal bliss (or damnation, if you ticked the wrong boxes). Maybe it's something 'in here', what we make of it, and maybe we could just about create the most beautiful of worlds if we all agreed there was no meaning at all. What a beautiful world would it be if we could look at the world for what it is, and just be amazed, in awe, at the smallest things.

And of course there's life in this universe! It's such a blast, what a wonderful dance of light, rocks and titanic fireworks, and it somehow had to look at itself. As Alan Watts says, what is better than wearing shoes so comfortable that you think you're not wearing any shoes, is wearing such shoes and knowing you're wearing them. So live your life and know that you're living it, but feel as if life's not there to be lived, but that you just happen as things do happen sometimes, and there's not much more to it: you're a fluke, smile at it. Smile at life's smallest wonders, the littlest things you can find, things beautiful, things bizarre, things that make you go WOOP, and things that make you sing. Life's life, and welcome to the tautology club – where dance is merely dance, music is music, and you are. So just be, and smile at that too.

Promise?

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π' αγκάλιασες μ'αγάπη.

liberation


art is not about freedom of expression; art is about expression of freedom.

composition


how you transform


be conscious of the limits of
what you are doing,


exaggerate

rhythm is a physical element

(it's all in the voice
of the writer)

speak,


memory!



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