Month: January 2017

Good evening ladies and gentleman

With the recent events occurring in the USA, along with the subsequent events, protests and marches across America and much of the world, it seems like we have reached a strange point. We are at the end of a particular era of humanity, with new qualities and morals seeming to take more of a centre stage in the higher positions of what we are told to be “authority.” Whether you agree with what these people say or not, their effect is reverberating across the globe, the sounds of a change, be it for better or for worse.

This intellectual/emotional divide seems more relevant to the way modern society is functioning, which seems in a way, as many things do, to be limiting the way we think of own lives, away from the matters of the world. The way we think and feel as individuals seems so much less relevant to us, as the divide between “what I think” and “what we think” is ever growing. Divides seem to be a major part of life these days, all in their own way having an effect on the events, thoughts and feelings that make up who we are. Furthermore, the effect of the complex relationships these divides have can create such an impact on your thoughts and feelings, as we experience and feel the painful pleasures of life, things may never be the same again.

It is the general belief across society that pain and pleasure come from distinctly different places with certain events, thoughts and feelings to be avoided in order to not be in pain and in contrast certain events and experiences that could provide us the heights of pleasure that we should be running towards. We are going through our lives limiting ourselves purely to these pleasurable experiences, consumed by this idea that beyond our knowledge of the divide between pain and pleasure is as far as feeling anything will go. It’s as if the modern day divide between the two is limiting the ability to feel pleasure, for we don’t want to risk feeling pain, like we have put a roof on our ability to feel good, so spend as long as we can, as close as we can to this “roof.”

What is pain? What is pleasure? How, if at all, does their relationship affect us in our daily lives and how does it impact the way we feel about the world, as well as the people who are a part of our world? Pain is an issue, a  niggling sensation living in the back of your mind, something that feels near impossible to shake off.. I feel like in our own unique way, we want life to be painless, in that we experience pleasure without the fear of pain. If life was truly painless we would have no gauge for what pleasure means to us as individuals. Pain seems to be this great weight that sits on your shoulders, something you will often not tell anyone about, for its “your pain to bare.” I feel we are all pained by something and its something i feel like when its difficult to deal with, we learn instead to live with it. This way pain becomes comfortable, manageable.

In direct contrast to pleasure, which is a adrenaline fueled, blood pumping, heart in your mouth experience. Where pain seems a great weight to carry around with you, pleasure is for the instances in life that make you feel so much it creates a unique sensation that cannot truly be deconstructed or explained. Listening to an outstanding piece of music, imagining life the way you want it to be as you get closer and closer to it, laughing with people who mean so much to you, seeing places you have never been to, trying new food, having new experiences and spending life doing and feelings things that make you above all else, feel so outstanding and happy to just be there, in the moment.

How then do these two complex ideas, both of which having a remarkably different effect on our mental compositions effect the way we live our lives? The effects to me seem powerfully effective in influencing the way we think and our ability to move forward throughout modern life,  with the thoughts and feelings that can take us to such dizzying heights and lows that feel like you can barely catch a breath for all the weight pushing you into the murky waters of pain. However, in many ways beyond the divide, the feelings they create can be remarkably similar.

At this point i think you maybe thinking “that’s it he’s totally lost it.” Not yet people, just run with me for a second. Beyond the fairly generic definitions i gave for these ideas that are fairly universal in nature, what creates these feelings is unique to us. In a world obsessed in defining, understanding and overcoming literally EVERYTHING these days I feel like we can easily not appreciate the small instances of pleasure, or learn from the moments of pain that come with the trials and tribulations of everyday life, for they “don’t make sense.” Pain and pleasure is the most typical example of the negative/positive lifestyle we have become comfortable with, for the pleasure puts something into your life, where pain is taking something away or maybe the longing of something pleasurable to be a part of your life, or to maybe return to the forefront of your periphery.

This divide here becomes more difficult to define, for pleasure can cause pain and pain can cause pleasure. Pain can bring us pleasure for we know that if we push through, the good will come. Yet at the same time pleasure can be tinged with the fear of what we feel is the inevitable pain to come. This seemably infinite complex structure of layers upon layers of thoughts and feelings between pain, pleasure and their combination not only makes them constructive but destructive, good and bad. The combined efforts of both pleasure and pain, to me, is what creates your personality, the ability you have to think and decide how to move forward in your life. It’s as if this relationship is a cause and effect problem in that if we feel pleasure, we instantly suspect some form of pain isn’t far behind.

This is why i think pleasure and pain can often feel similar,  For they are always so close together.  We hope with all we have for pleasure, but when the pain comes we feel it was inevitable. Its this “inevitability” that creates the divide- the ever widening chasm that leaves us fixated on only one part of the relationship, so fearful that allowing both sides in could make us feel something so much more then you or I ever thought possible. And who knows whether any of us could handle that.

What do you think? Do pain and pleasure feel the same? Do they have a relationship? What causes you pain- and in contrast, what gives you pleasure? How do these feelings differentiate?

Yours, with love as always.

DR

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Good evening ladies and gentleman

In a recent development of what we have been thinking about, the fact remains that complex emotions makes us remarkably different to other beings, with our higher understanding of life helping to tell us apart from the apes in the trees or the lions basking in the sun. Our basic human nature may have similar basic behavioral traits, but the addition of such complex emotion and personality is where the lines of similarity start to blur. This idea of lines blurring between one side and the other, along with a consistent thought of how powerful, in both a positive and negative way emotions can be as the context of what we want right now and hope for in the future seems to skew away from what we expect, or what we are “supposed” to hope for.

It seems a challenge to undertake, a situation affected by complex emotions and feelings can often feel so infuriating, as you desperately hunt for an answer to something you don”t understand. This definitive lack of any sort of knowledge or understanding throughout your thinking, in a situation drenched in feelings, emotions and a strange feeling of powerlessness that makes you feel so much, but just don’t know how to deal with. This, i have found doesn’t have to be directly related to your life, it can be something you see in the life of someone close to you, someone as far away as on the other side of the world or even a character on a television show. They seem to feel so much at the same time and in the same way it may have happened to you, it can seem overwhelming. Emotions, thoughts and feelings are what makes you the uniquely, brilliantly minded person who is evolving through the experiences and happenings of each day. Even if sometimes these low feelings in the fiery depths of hell that are somewhat familiar don’t seem worth risking the leap of faith, as you may end up falling into the abyss below.

This need to know everything that is coming throughout all aspects of our lives, is to me making creativity seem wrong, seem unstable, as if “you’re doing something wrong.” We are forever being told how difficult it is to do anything with your creativity, how hard it is to make money and get a good job that gets your mind thinking in an imaginative way, allowing you to be the ultimate expression of yourself. The world seems to have given up accommodating the uniquely minded, creative brilliance so many people in the world feel the need to hide these days, for they worry about upsetting the balance of the delicate boat society has created. The world needs movement, but doesn’t need creativity. We need things to be cheaper but more intellectual, to earn more money to get the things that will make us happy, to do good business so people will buy more things that they don’t need in the hope that it will give them all the positivity they will ever need.

Maybe this is the line. That blurred line that the world wants to be oh so clear as crystal, this line between intellect and emotion. Emotions blur intellect, so the two should not intertwine, or we risk contamination and to risk contamination is to risk the cold hard clarity we have become convinced is the key to a successful and happy life.

Question- who chooses what is “right” as part of society and who chooses what is “wrong?” Who has the right? We all have the ability to ask questions, learn of the arguments for and against a certain idea. Yet, when things don’t go to plan, we still carry on when we feel we can, as we maneuver and overcome this obstacle. This to me, this is the point of creativity. We are forever being told that we should play it safe, work only to the visible angles and be able to choose the path with the route to inevitable happiness and success. If we know and see everything that could happen in life, this is not living, this is nothing more than rolling a loaded dice. If the world gets to that point then something beautiful will have been lost where when we live to the “right” and “wrong” of the generalizations in modern society more and more, then it would seem as creativity really does appear insane.

Everything we have ever done in any creative means was through emotions, seeing that line, however blurred and pushing through so much further than we ever thought possible, so much higher than anyone ever thought possible. This is how the world develops, technology, people, thinking, wanders and beliefs move forward. This fear of not knowing is the single most powerful thing you are using against you. If you or I ever want to live life, you have to make that choice, to move through and live for creativity, for it is you putting your stamp on the world. Its your ultimate “something” to be proud of.

Forget what we are supposed to do. We choose to think better feeling thoughts. So maybe use the fear of not knowing in a different way. If we fear not being able to see something, therefore not knowing how to react (ignoring how brilliantly creative your mind could be to deal with this if it wasn’t “necessary” to be kept away) we tend to avoid doing, or even thinking anything of it.  I have done this, and the results have been…profound.  Emotions are brilliantly terrible powerful ideas and if by using them to create something or be something so much more than we ever thought we could be makes us insane, then so be it.

Regardless of what they think, you do you. Find that flow, allow the passion, joy, pain, misery or whatever number of emotions are flowing through you and channel that to do your art! It doesn’t matter what it is just keep doing it until it feels right. It doesn’t matter if its beautiful or heartwarming or interesting to anyone else other than you. Be that powerful person that believes in the creations they make, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

Then i hope, as the brilliant creativists we could become- we can all be a part of a Thinking Evolution

Yours, with love as always

DR

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Good evening ladies and gentleman

So, in times of joy, in times of sadness, misery, happiness and utter glee, however few and far between they often feel in a world that seems almost saturated with emotional excess- what are we doing? What causes us to make the decisions in life? When at that particular junction where the path splits with the potential to change your daily life completely, what makes going left seem so much more appealing than right? Why do we do what we do? Love? Lust? Desire? perhaps we do what we do- because we feel we need to?

All of these rather vague words are meaningless, nothing more than phrases thrown about in love songs like a dance, modern society repeating the same message again and again, somehow convinced that if they fling enough of these far stretched ideas of fantasy, they might stick and hopefully that thing we are told is “happy” might become a part of our lives. This reality of emotional obsession in a rather emotionless world is missing the key figure to explain what we are, who we are and what we we do as without an understanding at least of the emotional context that in a way is the key to emotional “power” and in turn- emotional “powerlessness.”

This emotional context is the key, that fundamental difference between the mindless robots finding their function and occurring is programmed as the acceptable ideas of being people, human beings who have the ability to create unique and wonderful thoughts and feelings that cause adrenaline to surge so high you feel so powerful and in tune with who you want to be, but could also and very easily, hurt like hell.

Emotions are meaningless without thought. Thoughts of your past, present and future. This is why we need the ability to think about all three relatively simultaneously as it gives us the emotional context we crave to be understand how we think. When people sit in there safe space and wish they had someone to love it doesn’t really mean anything- not without context, for to place yourself in a situation where a bond could be shared with someone so strong and interlocking that you are totally vulnerable, but totally trusting of everything about them, for then- while you are experiencing only ten percent of what love can do to/for you. How? For you are giving love a face, a feeling, a flow of thoughts when you are with that person. The addition of context is powerful, for it can make you unpredictable. I’ve said it time and time before, we are constantly working to know it all, to be ahead so we can’t be caught off guard.

This is taking the emotional context out of the situation, and therefore meaning you cannot move any further forward by knowing this information, nor go any further backwards. You in fact remain perfectly still, not knowing or doing anything differently, watching from the river bank as these people who mean so much to you go floating on by, because you were “savvy” enough to jump aboard. This is where context plays its part again, its power so capable of making you so feel and experience so much to that end where you have never felt anything like it. In my experience, emotional context can be hugely shaken with the application of the smallest detail, someone who actually means something to me or a hook being placed in front of me from much higher up the mountain.

This hook, this smudge on the battlefield and key part of the planning documents that have gone missing among the  confusion, fear and anger of losing focus on what made you feel something so unique. Regardless of what created these feelings. Combine all of this and you get quite a remarkable concoction.

A concoction that changes your understanding of what you feel should define you as a person and furthermore what should go forward with you as you choose the path moving forward, making the decisions that you’re unsure to make and jumping for those goals that seem so far out of reach. However, more often than not these feelings of power, the confusing change of context away from this grand vision can be overwhelming, frightening almost. So we revert to type- work to this idea of this “beautiful life” at the top of the mountain Whatever that means to you, me I’ve never really been able to place this vision it changes constantly.

This constantly changing vision, the confusion as the context of life constantly changes is a difficult thing to deal with. The landscape of life is never standing still, which means our abilities to deal with a situation are strained nearly constantly. I’ve been obsessive over the idea that modern society is moving too fast to allow us to be happy just to be there in, part of a moment in the wander of joy. We all have the ability to feel good in the present,  yet for some reason this is often only temporarily. Those dreams you hold so dear, those people who, in their own messed up way, give the meaningless words and emotions of which your understanding comes from reading books and binge watching too many episodes of a particular drama on Netflix are overpowered, to the ideals and dreams we think we are supposed to have, somehow falling away to what we need to do- for this, somehow is the key to a successful and happy life..

To see this context and the powerful emotions it makes you feel in that present moment, regardless of your grand plans for the future is a difficult feeling to explain, yet to me can be a particularly harrowing experience. For the times you have experienced this before, it has always ended, the grander dreams always overpowering life, leaving you bewitched to them and seeing the brilliance of life as nothing more than a distraction. Endings are the biggest problem, for its this feeling, this shift in emotional context that truly hurts like hell..

What do you think? What gives your life meaning and how do certain emotions play a role? How does the context of a situation affect the way you think about it- if at all? Feel free to comment on here or social media what your thinking.

Yours, with love as always

DR

Random motivational picture

Good evening ladies and gentleman

So. Recently i found myself languishing deep in the midst of a strange thought process. This is something i haven’t really given any thought to until recently, given the time we have spent looking at the power of obsession, its relationship with love and what is (for me at least) the growing problem of the “reality bomb.” I found myself wanting to disappear, just to fade away and do my thing, away from everything. When i sit here writing, more calm and comfortable, set on what i am now and what i need to do, i can’t help seeing incredibly selfish that seems. Nonetheless, the urge to just give up, with my work, my friendships, with life as it is right now altogether, because it “didn’t work” seemed a problem i just couldn’t shake off.

I think i felt like the was no way out of the endless cycle of nothing more than a temporary release from the routines that I moved through often without thinking about it, again and again and again somehow “forced” to face a reality that couldn’t be further from interesting. Its remarkably strange feeling, to think you’re making no impact in life, or on the lives of the people you are closest to. This fear of not being noticed or liked that we’ve come to be familiar with seems to be taking a more sinister turn, in that you start to wander about whether you “matter” at all. This could be to those you are close to, or even to the world itself. “Would it make a difference if i wasn’t there?” “Does me being there give them something?” and so on and so forth. I spent 3 days thinking like this. Balancing between thinking about disappearing and wandering what happened to the desire to carry on.

The desire to give up the pursuit and stop fighting that i seemed to almost drop back to was quite scary. I wanted to feel and do nothing, for then nothing would light a fire and cause risks that could make for misery and that desire to “disappear” to come back.  I feel like in a way there is a fear, not just in my world, for misery, the fear of feeling less than so brilliantly wonderful that it might be “hard to handle.” The reality bomb in all its dreadful majesty is something i feel like plays its part in this fear, this niggling thought in the back of your mind that makes you wander what your pursuing and perhaps more importantly, why you are doing so.

I have said many a time here at Thinking Evolution that a fundamental part of getting to that point where we feel we can enjoy life, love and everything in between starts with a choice- a decision, to choose to think better feeling thoughts. To see both of the routes in your life and feel as if your capable, powerful enough to see what, in this particular moment, in that particular environment, will give you the means to feel good, to feel…happy. The urge to give up on life is everywhere, the desire to disappear, for the risk, the fear of what you can’t see. I believe these things cannot make you feel low and will certainly not do anything to make you feel good. Instead the third option, to me shrouded in a comfort of darkness, the feeling of nothing at all.

In this “nothing”- what are we giving up the pursuit of? What are we all moving towards? The choice to think better feeling thoughts seems like only half an answer, in that it is merely an event, a mental exercise that gives you the means to be the wonderfully positive powerful person you imagine yourself, I imagine myself, to be. What is the point? Why make the change at all? Why not stay here- in my little box of nothing, where i cannot get hurt? For the pursuit of happiness and being able to live what we feel is a “happy” life everyday, should surely be the point of life. To impact the life of those around you through the way you make decisions and live your life, for them to hopefully feel good and see some good in the world through what you have done. Those around you are all pursuing some form of happiness and as much as it does surprise me, its more of a team effort than i thought.

For these, wonderful, mental, powerful people make it all so much more worth the effort. They make you want to get up and learn, love and see the world in such a way that will make you want to dream, to feel good and get up to things, that in truth cannot really be explained, but make you feel a unique concoction of emotions few things could ever match. This strange collection of events that we call life, some will feel brilliant and fill your soul with such beautiful joy, and some will suck. They will just tear that soul from your inside and wander why it ever existed in the first place. This i feel, is where those wonderful people in your life come in. During the “issues” of earlier in the week i mentioned, my best friends, who seem to be getting mentioned more recently, both separately communicated with yours truly very early on throughout this time, just asking if “i was alright.”

Now, i must be honest i palmed them both off at the time, but sitting with your thoughts for 3 days as you wander why to carry on, the thoughts that you are “not needed,” the thoughts that there is no point to that “risk” becomes harder to rationalize. Impossible actually. These randomly brilliant humans seemed to be worried about my state of mind in this moment of darkness, i guess you could say they cared. Now, i admit that doesn’t make for much now, as i care about them a lot too- but in that sort of mood it creates a remarkably powerful response.

I felt truly awful for many hours, and have done probably hundreds of times before. Living in your mind wondering why to carry on at all, for my brilliant, beautiful best friends to simply just want to be there makes you think far beyond the emotionless misery of that moment. Far, far beyond the misery, the distance and the desire to disappear. You think about the times with these people where you felt amazing, filled with such utter joy, happy to be in what is a wonderful moment in the vast strange world we call life. Then off we go, to have new brilliant moments in life that make us feel so brilliantly unique, doing and seeing things we cannot explain with people we love, simply for the happiness it brings us.  With all this happening, you know that things don’t have to be “just this way” for things to work, for the world to change. Going it alone is only half the battle.

To pursue the happiness that makes us feel so good everyday. We can try and do it alone. I have tried. Yet i missed something. Happiness is a team effort, for its people that make us want to live our lives for the brilliant moments and experiences that make us want to feel good, to feel happy. As we push ourselves to jump just a little bit higher, to take that risk and make that decision, for as a collective, i think we all in our own way want to be happy.

Just as a side note. I love you two. You know who you are x

Yours, with love as always.
DR

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Good afternoon ladies and gentleman

So, as per usual, i have wandered off, meandering through the ideas and thoughts that modern life can throw at us. The problems of the “reality bomb,” the routine we often go to dramatic lengths to avoid come storming back, a debilitating feeling of, almost meaningless. In the repeated familiarity of “going through the motions”, after feeling and seeing so much in that moment that made you feel just so fucking amazing.

Through considering this almost obsessive need to avoid the routine we are all to comfortable to fall back into- i found myself having a conversation with one of my best friends, as we argued about the idea of sharing a “bond” with someone so powerful, to the end you would be able to deal with the all the negative, power absorbing, mentally draining behavior that could come with a dysfunctional relationship, for the eighty percent of the time you may feel miserable, scared of being alone and away from this person, so just deal with it the best you can for all the good that other twenty percent brings.

It could be argued its almost like a pay off, dealing with all the negativity of a poisonous relationship, for the twenty percent of the time when things are good, your not at each others throats over something that in the grand scheme of life itself seems utterly irrelevant. I suppose the best way to describe this is for that twenty percent of the time, you are happy.

She seems very particular about this ideology. Holding onto this feeling that the twenty percent will come more and more given time, patience and the love they obviously share for each other. However, the way she feels about her relationship, isn’t for this argument, particularly interesting. What i found particularly enticing was the use of the particular phrase that “love is an obsession.”

I have been throwing this phrase around in my head for a few days now, grappling with the idea of what love is, both in the unique sense to how people feel love as individuals and the more universal concepts and thoughts behind it. Through this, I feel like we might be able to make headway on this connection between “love” and “obsession.” The problem with this is that throughout modern society, in an age where mental health has started to become more relevant as a genuine problem for many people, from anxiety to schizophrenia to OCD, all of which are causing sufferers a great deal of distress and having a profoundly negative affect on their lives. This negativity, to me, is where we run into issues when associating “love” and “obsession.”

For many years previous and for many years coming as understanding of mental health develops, this idea of “obsession” has been forever seen as something of a harmful aspect of someone’s mental configuration, something wrong with you not to be helped, but to be ignored. “Just pretend your normal” and “nobody needs to see that” for we live in this fear we could be judged for the way we think. Yet at the same time, i have found this notoriously negative word associated with something that throughout society is related to utter joy, something supposed to be the height of happiness. We are forever being told that love is so powerful it has the capability to make us feel so wonderful, a unique sensation that will filter through to the tips of your fingers all the way to the tips of your toes.

So. To slam something notoriously negative and something as infamously positive as love, what is to come of it? Should these ideas be related at all? If so- how should they play a role, if any, in our fast and furious modern lives? I can’t help wandering that they are not associated, purely because, in a way, it is society and therefore us, looking at the same mental concept in a very different way, with a combined set of behaviors and thoughts associated with it.

Metaphorically speaking, there is a line in the sand, away from all the standards and expectations of society based on the way we are “supposed to think.” One side of this line, we find love. That feeling, that joy of experience that we are all convinced, in our own uniquely, mentally daunting way, is what “love” is or supposed to be. Although i wander more these days, do we ever love someone? Is it love we share with someone, or is it love we share for the lifestyle we have, when they are a part of it? Are we supposed to love people at all? We fall in love with some ideology, a dream we have for the life we expect of the future, a way of living that makes us feel something more than we ever thought we could. Yet its impossible to know who will be a part of that life, for as far as you know you could meet someone who winds up the most important person in your life tomorrow.

The other side of this same line, we find obsession. This is the stalkers, the obsessive compulsive behavior, the need to carry out rituals amid fears that if you don’t it will be your spectacular undoing. Again and again and again, the routine you hate but you can’t not do, as to relieve the debilitating anxiety that lives just beneath you. The idea of stalkers is where this comes from to me, this belief that either you won’t be good enough to go and talk to this person and form a genuine connection with them, or struggle with the line between reality and imagination, not expecting the real thing to be as good as you imagine. This obsessive behavior makes people dangerous because if the real thing doesn’t fit this dream, if they do not illicit the feelings of love that perfect ideology could muster, it can make someone quite emotionally unpredictable and without the control taken away by obsession, dangerous.

This line, while it splits two sets of completely different ideologies, thoughts and feelings is mentally speaking, steeped in very similar results. They both are steeped in emotion, yet the power of them can produce drastically different issues, be they positive or negative. This “crazy, stupid love” that can make us feel so outstanding, in modern society has developed a much darker side, yet the idea remains that at its core, they are the same animal.

As per the conversation with my best friend- is love an obsession? To me, no. Love is not an obsession. Love IS obsession.

What do you think of love? What is it? Does it relate to obsession- are they the same thing to you? Should love be an obsession? Do we love people. or simply the lifestyle that comes with being with them?

Yours, with love as always,

DR

Random motivation picture.

Good evening ladies and gentleman.

Now, something i have found to be causing more and more of a problem for yours truly, especially with the whole celebration of Christmas, the weird week in between and the incoming year of 2017. We find ourselves at this point all either back at school, work, university, all done with the yearly visits and the stress! The stress of buying all the presents, decorating the house, making sure the food is good, everyone is comfortable, and so on.

Still, even though this example is horribly cliche and simplistic in nature, especially these days, we love it. Not the stress (obviously) but how wonderful the end results feel. We feel happy, at peace with family, friends and loved ones as we laugh, enjoying each other’s company with no concern for your world and everything in it away from what is going on right there, in the moment.

This feeling is something i feel resonates across many situations in modern society, not just throughout the end of each year, but when with friends, on holiday, seeing something that bowls you over with its beauty, the brilliance of a good book you can lose yourself in, a drama that you can imagine yourself a part of or a piece of music so powerful it fills you with a feeling so brilliantly unique.

It is an utterly wonderful sensation, even if it is peculiar. Its as if we feel free, from the tedious rubbish that can so often fill our lives, doing all it can to drag us down. Modern society as a whole can feel like such a difficult place to live in, but still these moments find their way through the fog and make us feel…special. I have been obsessed by these moments for years and to this day believe these are the moments that make us who we are, or maybe even more so, who we want to be. Like we are being tested, to see if we have the guts to go for the glory or stay in the familiarity of routine.

Nonetheless, while there is so much good in life if we choose to see it, the brutal normality of life, the “need” to occur in certain behaviors or practices, the job you don’t like, the commute you “deal” with and so on always seem to happen. Maybe its not the behaviors of a sort cause this sour feeling, maybe its the fact they are the same as they were before. Nothing has changed, the same process, the same timings, so no real need to react to…anything. Maybe the routine that drives us forward through the days which so quickly can become weeks and months is playing a part in us feeling so good in these wonderful moments so impactful on our lives- for the reaction they evoke is so much more than any form of routine could?

Question: What happens when the moment passes and the situation that made you feel so utterly outstanding flows through the present and fades into the past? How do we deal with the world we are living in when what made you feel so uniquely outstanding is nothing more than a memory?  This switch between feeling so much and moving beyond this feeling is never something i have really ever known how to react to, for it can feel as if a part of you has been lost in that moment. It can feel as if a reality bomb has just covered the walls with the routine that you deemed necessary before as you concentrated on the beauty life was offering you in that moment.

This feeling is, to me, a horribly deflating sensation. Feeling free, away from the “necessary” routine, the mediocre problems that can so often feel much more important than they should be.  We work hard towards a moment that feels unique, so capable of making us feel so powerful, down to the harshest of reality checks as “normality” takes hold. The most powerful case, in my experience of the reality bomb was after a holiday a few months ago. For over a week, the sun had shone, the beach had remained beautiful, the food good and the weather so wonderful. It had been almost a break from life in the fact it was an ultimately calming, relaxed experience, in which for this period, things i can sometimes feel haunted by paled into insignificance.

Upon my return from said “time out” of life, i will never forget the sensations that i felt as i walked out of the airport, into the darkness. Climbing into the cab, staring out into the gloomy night as the rain fell and the endless lights of the motorway zipped by. I distinctly remember thinking “well that was nice- but now its over” It was terrible. To tell you the truth, what i was doing is in no way relevant, the feeling of loss was the major thing. It feels like a form of grieving almost, when moments pass. However, the unfortunate reality a lot of the time is when we are weaker from this loss, the reality of the situation, the repetitive, yet comfortably familiar routine surfaces and the majority of the time we continue on with it.

I feel like i cannot be the only one who is good at routine, but can’t help to hate it. I hate having a routine, yet i’m so good at it. I am good at being aware of a situation, knowing how long i have to deal with it before the next section of the day needs to occur. In my experience, routine as a whole can make for an emotionally drained life experience, for the routine is the same, so we always know what will happen. Therefore there is no feeling in it, no joy, sadness, wander. Simply nothing. This “nothing” sensation is something i think we fear, and in a way that makes us hate the nature of the “reality bomb” because every time it happens, we know whats going to happen. We know whats coming, the brilliance of life being slammed back down with what feels like a necessary THUD.

Whats worse, is the fear of the reality bomb and what it can do, can lead to the wander of the moments that make us feel so fucking good being tainted with the fear of the ending, and what comes on the other side.

Really gives a meaning to the “nothing’s sad until its over” idea.

Does the idea of the “reality bomb” resonate with you? What are the sort of moments that make you feel so good, and how do you feel if/when the moments pass and the “necessary” parts of life seem to take precedence again?

Yours, with love as always.
DR

Random motivational picture.