Dear Diary,
At the end of last week I shared with you the thought that either you yourself shine outward, or the outside begins to shine on you, but shines in such a specific way that with that light a rather tangible amount of pain and sadness reaches you, as a result of which your sense of wholeness only shrinks and diminishes, and following it you shrink and diminish yourself.
That thought was so well-liked that I laced up my worn-out Zamberlans and went out into the city to search for those bad lights and investigate them. And, you know, I didn’t find any… Not even at the first intersection, when a traffic light signal lit up right in front of my nose with a standing, upright red man. Well yes, it was shining, but was the energy of those LED bulbs really enough to pierce through the border zone of my inner world and cause a slight bitterness in the first one, accompanied by an equally slight inner monologue on the theme “oh you frog”? Not enough. So then what?
And then it began to dawn on me. Here, for the most part, it’s not traffic lights, people, objects or situations that cast that murky light on us and spoil our mood. Yes, the light returns, but its source is not the abundance of external elements I listed. Its source, it turns out, is me. I direct my attention, like a lantern, at the red traffic light that just lit up before my nose, the red traffic light reflects it and it returns to me, causing that aforementioned “oh you frog”. And, to my great surprise, this happens with practically everything. A corrupt politician, a lost match of your favorite team, a crush who doesn’t respond to the call of your heart, a nasty neighbor, a combative coworker, a car that’s not shiny enough, a not thick enough bundle of euros in your pocket – all of it only starts to sadden you when you yourself direct your attention, your own light, toward it. Without your intervention, none of it can cause you discomfort, just as the moon cannot, without reflecting the sun, illuminate a path through the forest.
And the perception of this, the seeing of it, brings a certain indescribable lightness, joy and a sense of control. As if your whole life you’ve been walking through a long dark tunnel, at the front of which you can see the exit, bright light, a patch of green field and the sounds of singing birds, yet you keep stopping at every depression in its wall, illuminating with your powerful lantern a dried rat lying in it, a fresh little pile of droppings or a sleeping bat, and incessantly repeating your disgust-filled “oh you frog…”. Simply. Turn off. The lantern.
By the way. My neighbor is very beautiful, my crush does respond, and I see no problem stopping at red – while standing it’s much more convenient to wave at a passing green-and-white bus and its smiling passengers :-). Have a meaningful Friday!
