I woke up still thinking about Hemingway’s quote about “living life”. It’s a subject I’ve been obsessed with for a long time; the true nature of living… This is also what fueled my father’s endless search in finding answers to his ever-perplexing existential questions before finding his way in Jesus’ teaching. He not only died at peace, but happy, which, while it was a relief to witness just how wonderfully ready he was to “go”, has always left me with some inquiries of my own. I believe my instinctive inclination to create from whatever invisible matter I want to lose myself in came from his journey. “Question everything,” he always told me. He kept telling me the same after he became an unreligious Christian devotee… I understand why we need absolute; we all have a sort of religion, a mantra, a cause, a lifestyle, or whatever we want to call it. It’s human nature to have a foundation to build yourself on, to turn evolving feelings into immutable truths. It’s our way to design meaning for our tiny, micro person facing the always expanding amplitude of the universe. I do have absolutes of my own; pain, sorrows, suffering, and specters have been faithful fixtures throughout my whole life, as much as emotional elements such as looking for the place where I belong, finding a way to free myself from past stigmata, and emancipating my spirit from the constant fear of failure. I would rather be vegan or a yoga master, it seems like a much safer ground to set my existence on. Mine is a little more inconvenient, I suppose. I’m constantly overthinking… It’s like being a highly functional alcoholic. No wonder they all told me about cerebral trauma at the hospital… I can’t stop thinking about it now. One thing for sure is that it’s not helping me to follow their “give your brain some vacation” kind of prescription. On the contrary. But in all fairness, I’ve been like that most of my life. My first words as a child were probably “Wait, is it really…?” 😉

Living… What a quest of its own. It’s incredible to think that the book you saw in my previous post was a gift Ben gave me in 2016 — March 19, 2016, to be exact. I guess it’s even more confusing to know that I’ve been carrying that notebook everywhere I’ve been for years, and only recently took it off from its original wrapping. Of all the notebooks, moleskins, notepads, and other varieties of journals I use daily, this particular one has been left untouched, not even opened once. Musing about this today, I came up with a bit of a theory; it’s probably something I made up to avoid acknowledging how a bit crazy or neurotic I am. Nevertheless, it made some sense in the general sense of the word. My non-scientific thesis goes like this: I have never been afraid or hesitant to generously and frantically daub all over my other notebooks but suddenly became self-conscious when it came to “officially” writing about life, as if it had to be right, perfect, flawless, the holy book of my existential views and understandings, a sort of final equation to my life summary instead of the excitement defining the ensemble of all the journeys that ultimately made the person I am today — yet not entirely what I will be tomorrow. It’s so strange that I even have to think about it, especially since such a book should have been covered with my usual whys, reflections, and other aforementioned absurd ludicrousness ages ago. I should have hundreds of those, life being life. I have probably lived hundreds of those since I was born. In not-so-much of a figure of speech, I have…

To go back to the only “why” that has always obsessed me… Why am I so emotionally afraid of actually living without having to overthink every second of it? It’s puzzling… and every one of my therapist friends wants to take me in, knowing they would make a fortune in the long run with me circling around and around. “Keep going, Alex, it’s fascinating and very lucrative to have you here 4 times a week for the last century.” Oh well…