Red Shoes

I lost my mind quite some time ago.

Sure at least some other people share the same sentiment. I know a few of us, and was asked by another mad individual: what made me go off the rails? Since me being crazy, as I experience it, is not suffering from any form of psychopathological issue in the clinical sense. It's rather about being daring enough to create my own vision against the tide of fashionable indifference and challenge and rethink whatever I do in order to get an exclusive lifelong experience. People keep saying that I'm weird, and that's the only proof I got that my theoretical approach is more or less consistent with my behavior. This doesn't bring me to any better position than anyone else, which is also one of the reasons why I think I'm crazy. Life is just something my arrogantly aspiring human intellect cannot clutch, and trying to do so makes it slip a bit askew. What this ambition to have a peculiar living practice does bring me, though, are stories. I keep hearing people don't tell stories as much as some previous generations supposedly did; that kids swipe away content on demand on Their screens instead of venturing into the wondrous world of the mind's eye.

Occasionally, I saw some people living talelessly, but I have to admit I saw more of the contrary. Spring has come and with it the time came for me to put on my red shoes again. I walked, hopped and tapped a lot of merry beats in them in the last two or so years. While wearing this crimson pair, I partook in many anecdotes in the making - obviously I was surrounded with adventurous people and couldn't see much of those living without stories.

Are You out there, people without stories?

Dream Distillery: Africa, You Voodoo

I present another "series" on this blog. The one I already started is focused on clarifying principles from psychology. While this new one won't be outside of the mentioned scientific field, it is about exploring an area which I find to be missing a crucial angle of research. What I will be writing here are the re-imaginations and mash-ups of my most memorable dreams.

Oneirology, the scientific study of dreams, found many answers, definitions and ways to interpret dreams. Today we even have a machine that can record dreams. The way I see it, we are only accessing our nightly involvements from the waking world, from the outside. Far from that being bad practice in itself, it still misses a fundamental element: comprehending dreams for what they are, from within the dream side. Hardly could we call such an approach empirical by consensus, which is probably the reason behind the notable lack of this method.

These "dream semi-journals / short stories" won't be an attempt to unlock the secrets of the sleeping living. They will rather serve as expeditions into the intangible contents of my own symbolism, fur the sheer fun of it. The everyday common sense and logic may break under the conditions of my inspiration. These glances to a reality out of conventional time and space will have structural meanings of their own. Please, bear this in mind when reading. Comparing the inner rules to those of the external phenomena would, at best, be a philosophical effort. Instead, let's find out if we can leave our common sense behind for the sake of a different setup of reason.

This series of posts is labeled as Dream Distillery. Let me begin...

Into the Land of the Molded

A lot was going on for me last week. One of the events that occurred is that I started a one-year volunteering program in the Netherlands. To celebrate it in a way, I thought of writing about volunteerism. It was fairly easy finding info which praises the communal and personal benefits of being a volunteer, but that's not the whole story. At least not the way I see it.

During the last couple of months, I had the chance to observe how people (at least those from the country I was born in) react to the idea of volunteering. Our worldwide economic system is not economical anymore and as such it shapes certain expectations we have in our lives. Let's call these conforming expectations social molds, which make us feel the need to shape everyone and Their lives (including our own) into a predictable sequence of incidents. One of the most recognizable and encompassing of social molds is probably the one which sponsors the following pattern:

1. Be born.
2. Learn. Go to school. Get molded.
3. Find a partner for life.
4. Get a job.
5. Buy a house, loan Yourself for life in the process.
6. Et cetera...

The list goes on, of course, but the rest is irrelevant for the purpose of this post. Anyway, when people asked me about my plans in life, I replied that I was going abroad. Then, without exception, They all got excited. There were two common questions which I received: "are you going there to find a job" or "are continuing Your studies there?"

The answer to both of those questions needs a bit of explaining, because yes, I did come here to work and also to learn and improve my skills. The problem is that these two questions have a molding agenda: they expect certain answers ("everything is going according to plan") with obvious contextual assumptions (that I'm getting paid and/or receiving a title along with a diploma here). Obviously, replying to these questions would have required higher efforts if I didn't want to mislead my conversational partners. I usually replied with: "I'm going there to be a volunteer." In the moments that followed my answer, I could typically see the sparkles of interest fade away from Their eyes.