Month: May 2022

Good evening ladies and gentleman.

The ignorance of your art and the negative affects it has on your soul can be powerful, painful and put such limitations on your ability to be you. The demons inside you need to be fed, to be combat against and the only way to do that is connecting with it on a level you didn’t know you had. Fall further than you ever dared to before and find that part of you, forged in the depths of your own personal hell and gain the tools to power through, to reclaim your throne and in your own way, overcome anything.

This is all very well and done, on paper. I’m aware of this and have been for some time (honestly because i keep typing it.) Thing is, there’s a lot statements written on paper, words blurted out without context don’t consider- the noise.

The noise, the endless noise. It’s as if the world has got louder recently, as if someone turned the volume up. About everything. Its as if quiet is nothing but a beautiful memory. Everyone is shouting, be it about their opinions, or the TV show you “absolutely” should be watching, the “friends” that talk about you when you aren’t around, the social media filters that make you question the very nature of your own face and the trends shoved in your direction at every screen based moment.

The world runs on knowledge, but we live in a world saturated in information. In this age of instant and excessive information, who is ignored most of all-you.

Its almost as if we don’t notice that person in the mirror. You wake up, drenched in sweat, exhausted, having slept but far from rested. Drag yourself to the kitchen after an increasingly hotter shower just to get your body into what feels like a vaguely passable mode as you make a coffee and mentally prepare for the day thats coming. Flick through your phone and offer support and condolence to the friends who are struggling, being there for your friends through the good and bad because its just who you are. Everyone thinks your OK, because in the end so do you. This is life and you just have to “suck it up.”

What i wander is about the relationships we have, with family, with friends, with partners past and present. How we focus on them, how the vast majority if not all of your efforts will go into having a positive influence on their life, in the hope that in some small way you were able to make them feel good. In many ways it’s one of the reasons i keep writing. There are millions of people in the world, billions even. Even i can make one person smile, for just a moment or maybe cause a tear to fall down your cheek- then it’s worth doing.

We all focus on everyone else, yet will meet the idea of focusing on yourself almost with a confusion. Like its selfish, as if you aren’t the priority at that particular moment- at any moment actually.

Try it this way…

If you were your friend, would you be ok with how you treat yourself?

How you talk to yourself, the things you say, the things you believe?

Bruce Lee famously said:

“Don’t speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke. Your body doesn’t know the difference. Words are energy and cast spells- that’s why its called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life. What you’re not changing, you’re also choosing.”

Everything we do, everything we are and everything we think we are is born from a choice. A choice i think we sometimes cannot see, for the power of influence is stronger than ever. Influence over your personal perspective of who you, what you should look like and who you should want to be. You have a choice in your belief- even if you don’t see it.

You hold yourself to impossibly high standards and beat yourself up when you don’t reach them. You see a world covered in beautiful people but let alone believing yourself to be beautiful you believe any beauty people see in you as delusional. We are these days so incapable of self love thousands of people find themselves in situations and sometimes relationships with people they don’t like and don’t know how to love, because the alternative is to stare down the barrel of loneliness once again.

What if, in an attempt to combat this endless cycle of misery inducing sensations, we attacked it from a different angle, looked at it from a different perspective- if you will.

Imagine you were living your life in the third person. You are your best friend, you go to dinner with them, have a drink, sleep next to them and hit the alarm in the same spot every morning. Treat yourself as if you lived with that person, loved that person, hated them, envied them and cried next to them. Your best friend needs you.

Be there for them.

Your best friend wants someone to laugh with.

Laugh with them.

Be the only person you could ever need and you won’t need anyone else.

You need three people to have your back to survive what the world is becoming.

Me, Myself and I.

It puts you in a different level of thinking , because it puts you above the clouds, leaves the rose tinted spectacles of relationships long behind. You don’t need anyone, but you have the choice to want. Wanting someone in your life, in whatever capacity is beautiful beyond words because without asking, or even without trying i think, you make each others life just a little bit better. Maybe its for the hour a week you spend on the phone talking, or the quiet drink at the end of a long day at work. That moment is yours to share, to grow and evolve, to develop your life to build something outstanding.

It comes down to a phrase we were all taught as kids.

“Treat people as you wish to be treated”

Same applies to yourself. Treat yourself right, control the energy you allow into your life that comes from your mind and from your mouth.

Thats your best friend there. Thats Me, Myself and I.

Yours, with love as always.
D.R x

Good evening ladies and gentleman

What is life? What is death? Death is simply the end of life. Nothing more, nothing less. We all hear them say you only have one go around so don’t waste it. Over and over this same tired old rhetoric is passed from generation to generation, facilitating this debilitating fear that we aren’t doing enough. Life is the only path to death, but the balance beam you walk down on your way there, the steps you take are undecided and perhaps more scary- unknown. Everyday can be different, a breeze – or you could find yourself running down that train of thought through the caves, to where the lovely dark awaits, along with the voices, endlessly whispering in your ear.

If life were to be a balance beam we are all working so hard to not fall off of- what gives you the power to stay upright? Nobody is ever going to help you if you fall, they have their own issues staying balanced upon their own beam. Maybe your lines intertwine with another but each day is a separate life even when you are together. In the end you are still the architect of your own thoughts, be them to build you up or tear you down.

How do you balance your way through life? Step by step, day by day, how do we stop life from falling into the grips of a mere existence? The monotony of daily routine, actions for the same time of day, everyday, daring, hoping, yearning for something unexpected, something new, anything to just happen.

Anything.

This need is so powerful and i think reminds you of who you are. It reminds you of your intelligence, your mental strength and powerful perspective, for there is always more that can be done. What is to be done? What can feed that demon in your mind, the one that tells you that you’re not good enough or that your wasting your time…the one that often shouts so loud its near impossible to ignore.

What if, in a weird sort of way that voice was helping somehow, motivating you somehow? Motivating the creative soul within you to spring into life, to pour the life giving elixir as you drink deeply from the goblet handed to you as you bite into the apple from the forbidden tree.

Creativity can give your art, your pain, your joy, your love and passion a higher meaning, a power to you like nothing else . These things need to be expressed and your life should be an expression of you, so much more so than the soul crushing monotony a mere existence can bring.

The creativity thing is probably something you’ve heard before though. I know i have, hundreds of times over, that life imitates art. So if you can offer some sort of art to the world, then maybe you contributed to the world somehow, even if only to you. Maybe everybody sees it, maybe nobody does. But its there, however painful it was to get out.

That’s the point with being creative, that it burns. It burns your heart and your soul and your gut were you to leave it inside you, building, bubbling, brewing, raring to explode. This emotion- this pain, joy, happiness and misery all rolling around as your brain cells concocts a witches potion inside your mind and you, convinced you don’t need them, can’t help to watch as they continue to stir.

How do you break the cycle you find yourself in? How does one create the balance- to stay standing?

Drink the potion. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…right up to the point you dip your glass in and take a good slug of the stew. As it touches your lips, you feel the oily texture start to trickle down your throat, green and foul smelling but you continue on, the witches left in a state of shock.

We have been taught as a society to avoid shock, like we need to live a predictable life in order for it to be good. In order to bring order to the chaos, to step every now and again but not far enough away to gain that sense of unfamiliarity its so easy to fear. Surprise has become nothing but a mere coincidence these days, because you missed something rather than being present in the moment before.

Drinking the fluid can create more pain than any of us can possibly imagine, so much so you imagine falling off the beam and never ever being able to regain your balance. The hurt can be unimaginable, but so can the outstanding beauty.

As you accept what you feel as something you are conscious and understanding of, even as you start to respect it, you truly become your higher self. You listen to yourself and the creativity flows with it. The release of mental ailments you didn’t know you had fall onto the page, or across the canvas with a flick of a paintbrush. Everything we have ever done, every error you have made, any victory ever achieved is a part of who looked at you in the mirror this morning. Like what you see, or hate it more than anyone else- its still you.

I’ve always wandered about the rhetoric that is often thrown about creativity, pure and undiluted in its form. That sort of higher level thinking that when you’re in that headspace- there is nothing else. There is you and the keyboard, you and the brushes, the bruises, the failures, the victories and all the pain. It’s all there, like a story of you. There’s an argument in society that this need to create in whatever capacity is almost an illness, something that breaks you away from what the world makes you. We as humans are not a result of the world around us but instead the world is a result of us as humans.

Creativity makes you different. These days, different is clearly unwell because as time goes on people all look the same and are acting the same. All influenced by someone somewhere living in a world that doesn’t exist- filtered through the starry gaze of social media. Then you have the influencers being influenced by another influencer and the cycle continues. Trends come and go and change faster than the day of the week. We are not ill because of this urge to create art, to illustrate and express pain, pleasure, beauty and sorrow. The need to express in a society telling you to keep it to yourself is the issue in hand, for without that outlet, without that gas valve to express everything building inside a clouded mind, there’d be nothing but pieces left of you.

Creativity doesn’t help you stay on the beam, creativity wont necessarily even promote joy and healthy happiness in your life. In some cases it goes much deeper, in that your art isn’t making you ill, but to lose that connection you crave and to liven without your art would be a mental death sentence. The fear of losing yourself because you don’t give yourself the chance to figure out who you are is fear beyond words.

Standing still on the balance beam is going to reduce your chances of falling, but every time you stand still you lose more ground on where you want to be. Creativity makes the walk down the beam risky, but without it- its not you. What is life without risking the fall every once in a while?

Falls give you the strength to get back up after them. To brush yourself down, wash your face and fix your hair- still work to be done. The balance beam life has you walking down, understanding and respecting that connection you have, even if to just an idea. Good, bad or indifferent in the eyes of everyone else, the act of using that energy, that power, the profound connection you have is what gets you up again and again.

Because it’s basically who you are, working towards where you want to be. There is nothing more personal than that.

Onto the feet and keep going. You’ve fallen and will fall again, but the real you can be found in the strokes of that paintbrush and on the words of the page. They live within you, if you’re willing to listen.

The Beam carries on, whether you choose to forge a path down it, peril either side. It was never about it making it to the other end, it’s about how you respond when you fall. You have to get up, because you can.

Creativity and art isn’t the key to happiness. Creativity is the key to unlocking who you want to be.

And about as brave as you could ever be.

Yours, with love.

D.R x

Good evening ladies and gentleman.

We all wish we had more time- and society has responded to this time paranoia we all suffer with. I watched an advert the other day that exclaimed so whole heartedly, as if they had just cured cancer, that you could now sell them your car in 30 seconds. Whereas previously it would take out so much of your day- when it took 60 seconds. Now in the grand scheme of it, 30 seconds is nothing. In reality you probably spent at least 30 seconds daydreaming today, staring into space, thinking of nothing.

Previously, i’ve considered this compulsive need for instant progress, instant “satisfaction,” instant feelings and instant dismissal as a negative attribute to the human condition. The human condition- made less human, if you will.

I have been going on for years now about our need for life and society to get faster and faster, how we live in a world of instants, a need to get everything and anything faster and faster, be able to achieve so much while losing as little time as you can.

Time is a luxury, a commodity that we all trade away when we go to work, when you’re asleep and even when you’re in the shower. A constant companion, something we often waste, instead opting for the luxury of outrage.

Making a choice to be outraged by something, however large or minimal takes you away from who you are.. With power it’s given by you it preys on your individuality, like a virus looking for a new host. It’s like wrestling a gun of an armed robber and handing it back to them. I find such pointless mental adventures a waste of time and mental capacity, something we have all invested time and effort into when looking back we wish we hadn’t. Annoyed, outraged at the actions of someone else, upset about something you had no control over.

Your outrage adds nothing to make the situation better, the result is the result an no amount of regret is ever going to change it. You have to work with the hand you’ve been dealt, even if for the time being you’re acting like you’ve got a royal flush while working with a lot of nothing. It’s never been about what hand you get, you have no control over that. The element of control we all crave is in how we react. Outrage seems to come from this need for control, but in reality comes from a refusal to deal with a feeling or situation, through the fear of not being able to handle it, to be seen as weak or just not seen as strong.

Take a job. We all have either currently got a job or had one at some point. There have been days where you’ve woken up, maybe not slept too well. Let’s be honest, the last thing you want is to go to the office and have them same conversations and be told “you look tired” all day. It feels you with anger for a while that you’re going there again, disappointed in the hope you once had. You go into work angry and have a bad day, wandering where it all went wrong. You are outraged you’re being made to go here and do this job, for the money you have been getting. Everyone has had these days.

My point is the choice from here. You either accept life for the misery you have been pouring into it all day, or you can get to work on making your life better, improving things for the sake of your sanity. But so many people don’t. It’s as if people need to be outraged at their own situation, not seeing they’re the only ones who can change it. People can spend years miserable at their own existence, but only they can change it. Even if you don’t turn your world upside down, a small change can yield more than we can possibly imagine.

Sean Connery once said:-

“the simple action of typing can get us from page one to page two…”

True for writing and for life. The best way to make a change in your life isn’t to stew in outrage, to hope that improving your social standing will mean the voice in your head goes away. The only way is to make a change, to break the pattern you’ve been living again and again, for as long as you can remember. Doesn’t even have to be a big change, just a change. Often something as simple as going to bed 15 minutes earlier than normal and waking up that bit earlier too. Minimal in the grand scheme of things but has the potential to be so powerful.

In the end what is outrage for? We as a species are outraged a lot of the time to hide our true nature, hide something from ourselves that we don’t really understand. We mask this lack of knowledge under a cloak of outrage, hopeful to slip under the radar without detection. I said that time is a luxury so why waste it on outrage? Be offended, be upset, cry powerfully but use it, this energy is more powerful than the strongest coffee. We choose not to act on what upsets us, what causes us to feel angry or scared because we think we have no way to overcome this part of our life.

When you think your only option is to accept life as what you see in front of you, that can be a bitter pill to swallow. Everything happens for a reason and there is always another way, its simply a question of perspective and if you are brave enough to look within yourself to find it. Most people are so scared of who they truly are and what they’re capable of so will hide under outrage, even from themselves. No wander you’re so tired. This is the story you’ve told yourself, about yourself.

I may not be old to most, but i am too old for the luxury of outrage. You let it into your mind and it latches on and burrows down. Outrage is corrosive, you can see it just behind someone’s eyes. I’ve seen it in my own.

Outrage will destroy everything you worked for and tell you it was the right thing to do. Change is the only way. Overcome a problem before being upset that there is no other way, because the truth is that could last an eternity. An eternity lost to the Luxury of Outrage.

Yours, with love as always.

D.R x