The sun hangs low in the sky for most of the late fall days, just about at eye level, forming pedestrians in the narrow street into silhouettes, obscuring everything. Walking forward into brightness, unable to see the sidewalk ahead, I wonder how much the late autumn sun is a symbol for my emotions. A friend recently pointed out to me, that when you settle into your life in one city, to find adventure in that city, you have to seek it out. However, when you’re always moving transiently from place to place, in each city, it’s adventure that seeks you out. The adventure is always welcome… But there comes a point when I long for tranquility and these experiences seem to be on the verge of short-circuiting my ability to feel.
I’ve felt rather aware of my mortality lately, I suppose because I’ve been raging from day to day in cities by the sea that revitalize my conscience but fail to provide me with a proper income or any certain future plans. I’m burning away my savings and to distract me from the reason in my head softly whispering “responsibility”, I’ve been breathing the air of the present so thick my lungs will almost burst. On trains, in motor-cars on busses, zooming back and forth from the French Alps to Barcelona and back home again to Marseille, the kind of jet-set lifestyle one would expect of the wealthy, and in exchange I can’t afford to buy myself a decent sweater, deodorant, a light-bulb to replace the dark corner in my room.
What it all comes down to is I think that I’m happy. Fundamentally so, though rationality or society tells me I ought not to be. I’m working almost for free but I think I love my job… If I don’t think too much, I love it. In the end, what is it all for? Nothing I suppose. In the end, “this too shall pass,” says the ring on my finger in Hebrew I’ve been wearing continuously for the past five years. I wonder about this phrase and this concept and wonder if I’ve only come to embody it so much because I carried it around with me everywhere. When I lose my thoughts or sense, I look down and there it is. “This too shall pass.” If I’m sad, I try to have patience. If I’m happy, I try to soak up the day to day fully and not lose this precious now by planning the future… But I don’t know now… I think it’s time I got a new phrase… Something less existential and more inspiring… Something like, "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it! / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." (Goethe) I don’t regret a moment of my life and my experiences, but now I think I ought to make a shift from the passively absorbing my surroundings to actively creating them.
And here I am writing anyway. Writers are such slackers… Sitting back, observing, then thinking we’re being active by writing about what we witness.
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The Road Not Taken
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost
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