No Point to Make

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alive, beauty, book, emotion, fantasy, fleeting, fleeting thought, happiness, insecurity, knowing, life, loneliness, love, passion, people, questions, reflection, safety, Story, thought, weakness

No Point to Make

He sits at the coffee shop with a silver pen and a cheap notebook on the table. He is at it again: Ready to write the story that would uncover the reason to all being. The one that would solve all the mysteries of life… No wonder most of his stories go unfinished and untold.

He grabs his pen and opens his notebook with a point to make… For ten minutes, he sits there tapping the back of his pen onto the ceramic table top. He puts his pen back on the table and puts his head in his hands… He concedes that he does not have a point to make… Not this time… He concedes that he does not, and probably never will, have this all figured out. He concedes that there is no light at the end of the tunnel… That there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow… That it is, what it is.

He becomes very well aware of his weaknesses and insecurities. He thinks back to all the mistakes he made… to all the decisions, that he would argue with you to the death, that he never, not for once, regretted making… None of it seemed to matter… None of it seemed to bother him… He found himself basking in the glow of his own vulnerability. He embraced his own fragility. He appreciated the lack of control he had over his own life. He savored that feeling of fear that accompanied that notion. His own visions and convictions no longer weigh him down.

He was just happy sitting there, tapping his pen on the table and smiling at how it all happened.

He was alive, and, for once in a very long time, very aware of that fact…

Fleeting Thought #44

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alive, fleeting, fleeting thought, knowing, lessons, life, passion, people, thought, vulnerability

Your vulnerability keeps you alive.

On Modern Art

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art, artists, beauty, contemporary art, getty, lacma, manet, modern art, monet, museum, painting, rembrandt

 

“Burn, baby, burn” by Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren

Written in a blue notebook from Staples, on April 23rd, 2012, on a wooden bench in front of painting “Burn, baby, burn” by Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren at Los Angeles County Museum of Art after an earlier visit to the Getty museum:

Looking at older forms of art , I couldn’t help but notice how most of it is
descriptive; scenes, portraits… All so real.To me, modern/contemporary art looked abstract, confused and deformed. It sometimes even looked absurd and meaningless, yet, it was moving somehow. I felt that I could relate to it. I too am confused, sporadic and easily distracted. I too cannot find the time to find beauty to describe in this day and age.

It was quite astonishing to see the level of detail in older paintings by Rembrandt, Manet, Monet and Nicholas Poussin just to name a few and how modern artists did not dedicate nearly half that level of attention to detail to their work..

I think photography, as a modern “art”, exemplifies how the window to find beauty and capture it is only a milli-second. If you miss it, it’s gone… And it doesn’t come around so often too.

Fleeting thought #43

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failure, fleeting, fleeting thought, knowing, lessons, life, motivation, people, success, thought

If your success hinges upon the motivation of others, you have already failed.

Fleeting thought #42

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fleeting, fleeting thought, happiness, life, satisfaction, thought, within, without

Satisfaction comes from within, happiness comes from without.

Our generation

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death, generation, jobs, knowing, lessons, life, people, questions, right, school, skill, uncertainty, work, wrong

Our generation has no stories to tell. All the stories we can tell you are not ours. We did not write them. We can tell you about what’s happening to us, but little about what we made happen. Our generation has no certainty in anything. No certainty in what’s right and what is wrong but we’re certain that almost always there is no right or wrong. Talking to the elders, I could not help but notice how strong their beliefs and principles about what’s right and what’s wrong are. Regardless if the right is actually right or the wrong is actually wrong, they were certain which is which. For us, however, firm foundations of right and wrong have dissolved inside vague terms such as democracy, difference in opinion and freedom. Every wrong is only weighed against another wrong.

We do not know what we want to do. We went to school because we were told to. We went to college because we were told this is the correct path. We sought profitable work to make money, get married, start a family and bring on the next generation of uncertain children. We did not, and do not, have enough certainty or faith in anything to make our own decisions.

We are stuck at jobs that do not CREATE: jobs that require no real skill but are just glamorous enough to keep us sedated.

For us, death is the only truth whereas life is just another nagging uncertainty…

Embrace death, it is the one thing you can count on.

Kundera on Nostalgia

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exerpt, ignorance, knowing, lessons, life, milan kundera, nostalgia, old, people, time, youth

“The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious, and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. It is important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia: that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of the life gone by is quite small”

Milan Kundera

On Anger

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anger, emotion, fleeting, fleeting thought, inhibitions, knowing, lessons, life, passion, people, thought

For a couple of seconds you forget about everything you thought normal or rational. You forget about your surroundings, you let go of your inhibitions. You do not worry about the consequences of your actions. Your heart starts pounding louder than the voice of reason. If there ever was an emotion that exemplifies living in the moment, it is anger. It is passionate; it is truly THE blind emotion.

On knowing oneself

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excerpt, freedom, happiness, knowing, lessons, life, oneself, paul auster, people, questions, stories, Story, the locked room

From Paul Auster’s “The Locked Room”

“We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were children. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself”

Fleeting thought # 41

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democracy, fleeting, fleeting thought, hard work, lessons, patience, patriotism, people, perseverance, pride, questions, thought

I will never understand people who take blind pride in belonging to a certain country/nationality using slogans such as “Proud to be Egyptian” or “Proud to be American”. Not because pride is a sin in itself or that pride often leads to prejudice, but doesn’t one feel proud when one has achieved something he worked for and sought after. Pride is a product of hard work, perseverance, patience, determination and eventually fulfillment; none of which were exerted by you to make you Egyptian for instance. You were born Egyptian.

Patriotism is a silly joke and it is the root of many things evil.