Inner Peace

The main problem many of us have is finding inner peace I think. For the last few weeks my life has been going very well because I'm chilled about things. If there is any worrying to be done I just don't do it. I'm the laziest person I know so this is the first time I can apply my super sloth skills to something good, I wake up in the morning and start worrying about a host of random things and before it gets out of hand I decide I'm just too lazy to worry about stuff.

All the great teachers recommend silence as a cure to the bustle of modern life and it really works, I've been trying silence for some time now and it gives me the chance to relax and contemplate obscure things like why the love affair between Josh and Lucy on that weird soapie I watch would just not work out. Sundays are my favourite quiet days. I wake up, go to church and then spend the rest of the day reading. It's holidays for most varsity students so there's a lot of chill out time. Party like mad but have a time-out whenever you can, you will absolutely love the inner peace it gives you.

Lady Leigh of the Meadows

Source

Of all the Great Ones who dwell in this world the elves hold Varda most in reverence and love. Elbereth they name her, and they call upon her name out of the shadows of Middle-earth, and uplift it in song at the rising of the stars.

– J.R.R. Tolkien

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

There must be a certain magic in the air when you meet people that you love with your whole being. These people come into your life and fill a void that you didn’t even know existed and when they have to leave for Europe you just know that life will be strange without them. I met one such a person, Lady Leigh of the Meadows, my most beloved of friends. I wish you well on all your endeavours and I'll see you again, either when you return or when you come visit me in Japan in 2010. Have fun travelling through Europe (which I know for a fact is a scary place because it's not home), make many friends, eat strange food, swear at people in Xhosa and steal any good books that you come across.

I'll see you again very soon :)

Life's a Game

I had the shock of my life over the weekend!

I was playing Oblivion because I was tired of reading (and this is saying something) and I had nothing else to play. As I was trying to level my character's destruction magic level so I can use my newly acquired Fingers of the Mountain spell to electrocute those pesky wolves that just seem to pop up everywhere in the wilderness, I had a scary thought. "Real" life is a lot like and RPG - you get born and start to level up. Take for example the things I want to do next year; get my drivers' license, work as an English tutor, work as a linguistics tutor, finally complete my degree, work on a super cool thesis for Honours the following year, go to lots of rock shows and so on. I seriously want to do all these things but when I list them they smack of leveling up in society don't they. I'm crazy scared of having achieved a list of things but never having enjoyed them. That's what counts for me, the life lived in those achievements and failures.

When I first played Oblivion everything was okay and I enjoyed it, especially the Dark Brotherhood quests and then I realised that all you ever do is go on quests in this game. Many of these quests are cool, especially if you have a high level character who can bash the nonsense out of bandits or hurl deadly Wizard's Fire at unsuspecting necromancers, but they get repetitive very quickly. I was so sick of exploring caves and elven ruins by the end of the game that I almost threw up. If real life is like this I will most definitely throw up. I was speaking to a very dear friend on the phone last night and we were discussing how predictable life often is; school, work, retirement. I already lead a half strange life so I'm happy that my path through life is not a graceful arc but a herky jerky line like Jimmy Tock's (minus the clowns and the violence). People who lead these perfect lives where everything happens as planned are probably sad. I sometimes hate my life, I sometimes love it and sometimes I wonder about the weirdness of it all. I prefer my schizo life to 'perfection' though, I think it's fun.

My advice to you: be strange and don't be like a character in Oblivion who does nothing but level up but has no real joy.

Check out this video for some inspiration: Dragonflies & Astronauts

The Power of Words

studentsofenglish.blogspot.com/2006/01/muses.html

I don’t recommend that you spend fifteen minutes doing introspection because at the end of it all the only thing you will learn is you are not as awesome as you think. I’ve spent the last decade or so thinking that I have an overactive imagination and I prided myself in being able to out-imagine other people. Fifteen minutes of self-contemplation and all my pride is gone. I have a normal (okay, maybe just a notch above normal) imagination it turns out – everything else is borrowed from all the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve seen. The writers of the books I’ve read and the people behind the movies I watch have great imaginations. I simply have all their great visions in my head.

Words, they have a power. A good book or movie can help you see the world from a different angle. Words can clarify things that were always vague but words can also deconstruct. Eminem says that words are a mother[humper], they can be great, they can degrade or even worse, they can teach hate. One of the reasons Hitler was such a powerful character was because he had a way with words – he certainly wasn’t a kung-fu master or anything cool like that. Great people like Ghandi and Mandela also fought many of their epic battles using words. The ancient Greeks thought words to be so important that they sent people to university to learn the art of rhetoric. In Greek society only people who could use word to influence others remained in power for very long. Strength of arms was secondary to rhetoric.

Back to what I was saying in the beginning, words are cool because even though my imagination is limited I can piggyback on the imagination of Tolkien, Shakespeare, Gabe Newell or Steven Spielberg.

P.S. Don’t bother with introspection because you’ll just burst you own bubble.

GravityGunSlingers & Exams

I've been writing exams for the past few days and it's been rough. All I do is write essays for three hours every sitting. I'm not complaining though, because I'm rather good at writing essays and thus far all my papers have been good. Exams aside there has been something exciting happening. Sleuth and I play Half-Life 2 Deathmatch after each of our exams. We only play with the gravity gun, no other weapons are allowed. It's such a blast hitting Sleuth with boat or a fence. It just makes me feel so ghetto. The coolest thing is chucking around toilets though, that just totally kills me :)