August 4th

Photos that seemed like good choices






This is an auspicious day for me. The reason is that 4 years ago I left for Japan on this date, and last year I arrived back in Canada on the same date. A day to look at where I'm at, where I'm going, where I've been.

I want to stop settling in as of tomorrow, stop re-assessing myself constantly, stop overthinking everything. Even today, I want to stop doing that. I would like to attribute my recent tendency to that kind of self-nagging as an automatic throwback response to old habits, bred of my experience of life in Canada.

I would like to accept where I'm at, go in the direction I'm going, see what goes on around me clearly, face things squarely and savour all experiences. Sometimes I have a few hours of feeling like that, then find I slide back into a sort of anxiety about all the things I should be doing, which immediately makes me feel no interest at all in doing any of them.

I started looking at the 'Learning to love you more' website yesterday and got obsessed with it again. I am essentially an ' anti-establishment' type of person I have recently realized. I love LTLYM because its so free from the rules of learning, art, etc. and is so essentially about exploring the world and finding delight in its endless details. Its a bit of a problem for me actually ( the anti-establishment thing) because no matter what the area of life I consider, I start to find it constrictive and stuffy as soon as it gets commandeered by ' the experts'. Its not that I don't see the use of that kind of thing, but that as soon as some committee establishes some kind of guidelines to their chosen field, it immediately loses its luster and imaginative possibilities. Plus, I feel its a real shortcoming in our society that there are so many experts within specific fields, and noone looking at the big picture. I know I just need to shut out those frustrations and focus on what inspires me, and thats what I intend to do - starting tomorrow.

I think the key to feeling right about what you are doing is a kind of partitioning. You must section off the irritating details of life when you are trying to find inspiration, and you must section off the frustration at not having time to follow your inspiration when you have to worry about the irritating details.

Regardless of all that, its time for me to take a walk in the warm night. To think of plane trips and time cycles and peeling off the last year, jumping into the next.