'I have only a few things that matter in my
life.' I like it because of the implication of simplicity of life, that life
can be concluded by only a few things. Like Orkham's Razor stated, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily", in other words, the truth is often very simple. This
statement might not be true for what life should be, but at least it is the
truth for me. Regardless the simplicity of the statement, unfortunately it
appears to be dangerous according to my own experience.
The danger is when you lose all those things
that matter, even losing just some of them, the consequence will be drastic.
Because they are important in one's life, they will eventually define your
life, and fighting for them makes life worth-living and beautiful. It is also
because they matter a lot that it makes you vulnerable. By losing them, your
whole world will crumble. You will eventually losing gasp of what matters what
doesn't.
There is a moment in my life when i lost count
of days. Monday to Sunday system didn't apply to me anymore, day became night,
night became day. I hadn't talk to people for so long that i felt i had lost my
ability of communicating. Living without a motivation, a clear purpose, is proved to
be very hard. Diverted from normal life even made me doubted my sanity once.
It is also during this moment that i used to
had a bike ride in downtown every night around 3 to 4 am. I found it really
calming. I usually fell asleep without any trouble after the bike ride. It is a
period of time when it is too late at night for even the drunks have already
fallen asleep, and yet too early in the morning since nobody wakes up at this
time. This is the time i felt total freedom and loneliness, the kind of
loneliness that i wanted, that i wasn't bonded to the social obligation to
speak to people.
The town is entirely mine.
What is normal, what is abnormal anyway ? Norms differ throughout the history, differ according to different people.
Suddenly whatever Tyler Durden said is so strangely beautiful to me.
During the daily bike ride, i have noticed
many details that i missed out before. For exmple, what time the police patrol car passes by the avenue daily, what time the the lawn infront of the Hotel de Ville is watered by the automated water spray, and so on.
I have noticed one thing, in every town in France, there will always be a SDF who is always there. He wanders around but never leaves the town. Well in my town, there is also one. He always sits down in front of the cinema. I have never seen him in other places of the town yet. I always passed by the cinema whenever i did my bike ride at night. I really wanted to ask him his purpose of life, his point of view at the world around him. He became SDF by desperation? How desperate was he? Is it by choice just like Diogenes of Sinope, using his lifestyle to criticize the social values and institutions?
I don't know why but i didn't ask him in the end.
Everything always has both good side and bad side. As my confusions grow, I eventually seek for the professionals to guide me through, to help me organize the total mess in my mind. This mess was also the reason i couldn't sleep at night. Well it wasn't entirely a bad thing after all. Whenever i couldn't sleep, my inspirations flow in like Niagara fall. During this time, i had written a lot of poems. May be Arthur Rimbaud is right. He once said,
I say that one must be seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. ........ For he arrives at the unknown!
May be i have met some of the qualities of a poet, by Rimbaud's standard.
By going through all those things, i have better understandings of my own, understandings to many aspects of life. I am just glad that i didn't deal with the problems in extreme ways.
