I took a nap right before dinner and life had felt strangely… picturesque since. Admittedly, I had only realized the sensation while on my post-dinner walk. It may simply be because of the said walk (a most powerful of all human abilities, to walk) or a combination of that and the simple yet hearty family dinner.
Either way, who knows? Was my joyous, satisfied laughter after the last spoonful of my meal a cause or a symptom? Again, who knows, right? What matters more is that which is obvious: upon starting the walk, I looked at my reflection from the blackened television screen and—although nothing anywhere has changed since the last time I had been on that exact spot—I saw that everything, finally, was perfect. That everything is as they should be at that moment.
I don’t know why for a while now (also unsure if I mean since days or weeks or what prior), things have felt out-of-place. Perhaps it’s a side effect of the current unstructured sort of system I have set myself in? While I have no name nor description, I put this feeling under the umbrella of “unease,” which, writing that now, feels even stranger. This system I am attempting (such act as yet another irony) to train myself in has its roots on the ideas of ease and effortlessness. Yet those very concepts bring the apparent stress that results in paradoxical outcomes. Or so it seems.
Or so it seems: because upon waking up from the evening nap, finishing my plate of vegetables, rice, and kimchi, and starting on the walk, I then recognize the sensation that had filled me and my blurred reflection on the TV screen: effortlessness.
How is it possible that everything could remain the same and yet that also all had just gone a full 180?
It’s as mysterious to me as the fact that I could write easily and more neatly in the early morning of a long struggle with sleep even after days of not writing by hand than now when all the possible difficulties have been eliminated leaving only obvious variables unchanged: same pen, same notebook, same study.
Maybe it is the food. Or the difference with the kind of physical exercise I had done. Or the sleep (or lack thereof). Or maybe the dreams: the one prior to dinner had been short yet all too sweet, which makes my non-recollection a tad bitter. I don’t remember the dream but something tells me it’s an imagination of Nietzsche’s Sils-Maria room, of which I was reading about right before falling asleep.
Maybe it’s none of those. Maybe it’s all of those.
But again: who knows? And what does it matter? Maybe that’s just how it is to exist: that existence is the wind drifting on its own currents and man is but one tree in the middle of the storm, sometimes like oak desperately clinging on its roots of old, sometimes like bamboo dancing with each wave anew.
Journal entry, 2 November 2020
Project Renaissance diaries: Embracing Chaos
