Mentalechoes

My Venezualan soul brother Balduino came over for a visit tonight. It’s been about six weeks since I last saw the Spanish speaking Love Gun (as he’s known in my apartment), which is really too long a time apart for a friend like he. There is something infectious about his enthusiasm for life and his passion for art, music and culture. It was late when he arrived, as he has started a new job working in a high class restaurant in a chic part of Amsterdam. When he arrived he brought a bottle of red wine and a small bar of Galli 100% pure cocoa dark on white chocolate. It’s no wonder the man has a certain influence over women; who wouldn’t be impressed with an entrance like that.

We took our usual place in the kitchen; whenever he comes around we always sit in the kitchen at my dinner table, and put the wine in between us. Immediately we fell into that easy rhythm of chat that is the hallmark of our friendship. There was a lot to catch up on, even for such a short space of time. He’d been busy with small theatre projects, learning how to cook and wait tables in his new job, as well as his art instruction with children at a local youth center. Of course being Balduino there were these funny side stories about new people that he had met recently and about his family and life left behind in Venezuala. At times I could barely keep slapping the table and laughing at the trouble he manages to get himself into and out of. Then he asked about how I was doing. It was funny you know, I felt before he arrived I had some serious stuff to tell him. But then, after a half a bottle of red wine, and being surrounded by these fantastic tunes from disc one of the Ministry of Sound, Ibiza Annual MOSCD2, all of my recent heavy emotional state seemed to simply fade away into the background of the moment. I’m not sure if it was because of how good I felt at having him there talking, or if it was simply because I have dealt with it now, but I felt no need to sit there and reiterate the last 10 days. So I gave him the movie trailers version, skipping most of the really heavy stuff and just giving him the high – low – lights. He just laughed at me and said in that accent of his, “Oh Andrew, you spend too much time carrying that big rock of yours, one day my friend, you’ll learn to just let it go”. As he said that, the Piano Pimps were hitting the big uplifting chorus to their anthem Everybody, and I realised he was right! Well I knew that already, but it was nice to hear him say it; that was a defining moment I had been waiting for.

I figured that it deserved to be remembered so I asked Balduino if he would do another tattoo for me, something special to mark the moment. Well yeah of course he was totally overjoyed at the idea. His reaction was the same as if he had been commissioned by Queen Beatrix to make some art for the Dutch royal residence. To say he was excited was an understatement.

This peice of body art is going to be a real committment too, because it’s going to be situated on my left forearm mostly on the inner side, swirling outwards to the top and bottom. It’s going to look beautiful when it’s done, I am sure. But I know now that it will mean never being able to wear short sleeve shirts again to my office jobs. But it will be a small price to pay for the Buddhist Pali inscription I have choosen surrounded by Balduino’s utterly fine tribal artwork.

The Piano Pimps played on repeat for a while – I was going off at their chorus each time – and we chatted until just recently about how we’re going to make the year coming our big year, our anthem year! And all the while I just kept smiling a never ending smile!

He’s gone now, but still the soft vibe of the guys presence remains. It makes me think that the world can’t be such a bad place when such good people live in it.

Man, I did get lucky with my friends!

Peace everyone!

Padwanna!

PS: And make sure you download the Original Pimp Mix of Everybody by the Piano Pimps. It’s an old skool anthem that just makes you feel grrreat!

You know it’s very easy to dive into a deep hole, and surround yourself in darkness, if you want to. Sometimes the darkness can be comforting like a blanket because at least it means you feel something, in a world where you can all too quickly feel nothing at all, because everything can loose its sense of meaning. But it’s not a place you want to be for long, because after a while it begins to be normal, and you forget that what we are actually meant to be is happy.

So I looked into my own abyss and I saw darkness, warm and laced with pain like blunt razor blades being dragged over your arm. All I had to do was fall into it… Just let go.

At that moment, I realised there was nothing to be gained by going back there again. Everything is different this time around. My whole world is different, and my life is good. To surrender to the pain of depression would simply be doing so out habit; an old habit that I had discarded like a pair of jeans worn and tattered beyond use. There would be nothing to be gained, and hence no reason to go there. Not now, and I have come to realise, not ever again. The realisation came like the morning after a night of rain; the dark times are well and truly over, and the light of a new day now shines.

Poetic words to be sure, but the flowery nature of their meaning conveys well what has been going on in my head over the last ten days. I decided that instead of giving in to these feelings of being lost and helpless, I could instead change these things that were in turn causing me to feel confused and powerless. As funny as it will sound, I took a day off work to make a long weekend and completely cleaned up my flat. I did three years worth of – badly – overdue filing work on an four foot pile of unsorted letters and official correspondance. As the great Buddhist master Milarepa said, if you don’t have order in the home, then you won’t have order in the mind. True enough, this cleansing of my own space became a deeply relaxing activity, almost meditative really, for as I tamed the physical space of my surroundings, I also purged those negative feelings which had so heavily clung to my mind. Each small peice of paper put into place in a folder mirrored itself in my mind with a bad thought or feeling put right. The sense of satisfaction at the end resonated deeply within me, as I become suffused with a new sense of calm that I haven’t known in the last period of my grown up life.

At the end of this time, I look back now and realise that if we can look at our lives with honest and appreciative eyes we will find things of happiness, and we will find a road ahead of us that will be meaningful and worth taking.

Padwanna!

I can feel the approaching depression like a mist slowly starting to gather around me. Faces that are familiar and friendly start to blur and become strangers, my flat stops feeling comfortable and becomes an object of frustration and annoyance. The small every day things that used to make me smile seem like purile distractions at best, giving no real pleasure. This is the entrance to a hole that goes a long way down, and takes a long time to crawl out of.

Yet again I stand here, and I wonder, why?

Padwanna!

Not to complain or anything, but sometimes living in a foreign country can be very fucking trying, let me tell you. This whole dutch thing is crushing me a bit right now. I think it’s because I had a really good mate from home stay over for a long weekend with me, and we had a ball. However it also made me realise just how different this culture is from my own. I’ve been away from home so long now, I’m really starting to forget my roots, my identity, and who I am in a lot of ways. I’m never going to be dutch, at best I will probably be able to stop feeling like a square peg in a round hole, but this place is always going to be foreign and I will always be a foreigner in this country. I’ve started thinking maybe it’s time to go home. I remember feeling this way a year ago, so it’s not something new, but a cycle that has come full circle once again.

I often wonder though, is it me not working hard enough to fit in here. Fuck I don’t know. I really don’t ask questions like this anymore because I just don’t know the answer, and even if I did, I just don’t know how relevant it is. Sometimes I even start to wonder if I have lost the ability to meet new people and make friends. This place seems to be having this affect on me right now. Dutch culture is so clique oriented it’s almost a cliche. Our friday work borrels (work drinks) are a classic example, all the departments turn up and then stand around in groups together, not talking to anybody else from outside their work unit. It’s like when you were kids at a party and all the girls stood together then there was a gap, and then all the boys would be standing around together. For some reason, that same kind of attitude just pervades itself throughout this whole society. Perhaps I’m just some kind of social retard and there is something deeper happening in this society that I’m just not aware of, but to me, that just isn’t normal.

I think perhaps this feeling of being an outsider has been exacerbated by hearing about how other friends of mine are living the high life in London, in a way that I haven’t been able to acheive over here. Truth be told, there are times when it’s good fun to be a foreigner, because it makes everything interesting, even the mundane stuff, like travelling to work and back. But sometimes it can really get to you, this feeling of being a fringe dweller, where you are an outsider and left out in the dark.

I think maybe I need to take the rest of the week off and chill for a bit. My head seems to be a bit out of place right now.

Padwanna.

You know, it’s just amazing how much effort it takes to keep life going in a single direction. Maybe I feel this way because this is the first time in what feels like my whole life that I am really working towards a goal with projects I am doing. Like I’ve started something with the end in mind, and am not just seeing where something takes me.

I’ve realised that if you are going to do something, you have to do it heart and soul, and that really means knuckling down and working at it, even during those times when you don’t feel like it. I’ve never really planned out stuff like I am doing now, but I can see that if I don’t then the dream won’t be realised; you don’t get somewhere by giving up half way or going where the wind blows.

Probably for the first time in my life, I also feel like I can actually acheive what I am aiming for. Self confidence was never something I had a lot of, so it has always been difficult for me to feel like I could start something and pull it off like I had envisioned. But this is different, I can see that I can make this work, and that gives me a lot of energy right now.

Still for all that, I do need to get some sort of more structured lifestyle in order. Sustained energy over time is what is needed now, so I have to plan my time in order to use it more effectively. After all, time is the most precious thing we have, and it shouldn’t be wasted.

Padwanna!