Every month I post on this blog and I feel good about it. I keep it true to myself, not commercial, as much as I can. As I learn how to practice self-love and love others through it, I also like this small and very personal product of imagination. A place for creative inquiry, it helps finding myself in words, seeing where I am in life.
When I compare some of the old posts with recent ones, I feel proud. I remember the sense of embarrassment I felt almost 5 years ago, when I posted for the first time. Life is made of big and small things and I am developing a taste for minimalism. To take pleasure in all manifestations of Nature, all forms of life, is a very useful practice and the Tantric way. Writing on here for me is pleasure.
It can also be seen as a form of attachment. Any kind of of long term commitment to something material or immaterial can appear as a limitation of freedom. A voluntary, positive limitation but nonetheless a limitation. And a responsibility.
When you feel responsible for something, your life is relevant in that context. Having to do a job or a deed carries consequence. Responsibilities can be a source of meaning. Your existence is required, almost validated by the expectations of others who depend on you doing something or being someone. That’s why people like to feel useful.
It’s a way to keep us from Nihilism, an unpopular but too common philosophy and state of mind where nothing has any sense, meaning or significance. In a big picture context, relative to the whole world and across all times, our individual lives are a blip, a grain of sand in a desert, a drop of water in the ocean. You and I are two individuals among 8 billion now or 100 billion since the beginning of mankind and very small change, very inconsequential in the great scheme of things.
This is possibly true but also mortifying. There is no one as dangerous as someone with nothing to lose. Hence societies came up with elaborated ethical constructs, religions and other cultural products manufacturing moral frameworks, something for people to anchor on. Narratives and value systems to give us something to live for.
Elaborated fictional stories keep us engaged. Do your duty and you will be rewarded. Willingly sacrifice the present for something worth striving for. Follow such and such rules and when you die you’ll be sent to paradise, or reincarnated into a higher being. When you retire, you’ll have time to dedicate yourself to your true passions, travel the world. Maybe.
I won’t tell you about Yoga, Nutrition or Lifestyle, this month. No help for stress, tips on cooking, meditation or the art of living with uncertainty. Everything can be good and bad, it all depends. So wanting to put good things in words, every month on here, could also be a bad form of attachment I am letting go today. Today I choose to write of Nothing.
This post has no positive subject, no proposition, no advice, no inspiration, NOTHING. It is made of words and sentences but there is no message underneath, no function. It’s a Joycean stream of consciousness, a sequence of characters with no significance. A projection of my subconscious, a manifestation of the void within, the Galaxy’s black hole, the atheist’s death, an ending with no new beginning.
Or maybe, my choice to write of Nothing today is a victory of freedom, a positive statement of independence. I am whole, self sufficient as I am, I don’t need to inspire you, sell anything to anyone, I don’t need you to love me to make me feel complete. I don’t need my family around, my girlfriend, a job or career, a real or manufactured sense of meaning. Luca the ex manager, the nutritionist, the Yoga teacher, the tropical island dweller. No label, no creative fruit of labour, absolutely nothing. No blog either. Nothing.
If you want to learn the whole, how can you ignore the void? Through ugliness we appreciate beauty. As we are able to create, human beings are able to destroy. Everyone, every single man and woman on Earth feels this sense of emptiness at times. A feeling of darkness, an instinct of destruction, self-destruction maybe. At the end of a bad day, mindlessly stuffing yourself with junk food, beyond pleasure, until it hurts. I remember doing it with alcohol, many years ago. On Friday night I would go to a bar after work and drink in excess. And then some more.
Fear, hope, awe, joy, sadness and desire are all common, encompassing emotions. In the short moment my nervous system perceives a new chemical wave of neurotransmitters, I visualise a memory, retrieve a smell, a taste for something and it’s gone. My consciousness, like a swing, pushes me from the past, to the future and back to the past again, never still, never whole. Now I am present, just for a second, before it’s gone. Today, Sunday 10th March 2019, when I confronted it, when I chose to write of Nothing.
