Mentalechoes

So I’m back again after a period of absence. I guess you could call it self imposed; I just let myself drop out when stuff to do with work started piling up and drowning me. Funny thing is, I’ve seen this cycle before, and so know where it leads. Not that it makes much difference knowing ahead of time, as it seems an inevitablity to enter a cycle when you’re sitting at the entrance.

As I sat in my flat today I was doing some idle browsing around YouTube. Not with any intent or purpose, but just randomly looking at images and letting them fill my head. Without even consciously thinking about it, I typed in Mike Oldfield - one of my favourite muscians - and found his Tubular Bells video. This really captured a feeling inside of me on so many levels it’s almost impossible to describe the flow of thoughts as they occurred. Seriously this would have to be one of the most amazing and intense peices of music ever composed, and to listen to it over and over again gave me goose bumps each time. I think to have been there at the concert would have been taking part in a very special event at that time and that place. And it was thinking about what it must have been like to have been there, that I realised events will always move as time moves, and we will always be travelling through a cycle of life.

I guess we are always reinventing ourselves in cycles as well. As people we aren’t constant, we are in a constant state of flux; evolving with each contact of the minutae of our environment. Some of these we can consciously effect, but many we can’t. This is what makes some changes within ourselves more visible than others.

I suppose for me this return to my blogging is important because it means coming out of isolation. It doesn’t matter that noone reads what I write, what is important is that I write it. After all, the feeling of reaching out and having an effect on someone the way Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells had an effect on me, is really why I write. I’ve been touched by some extraordinarily good writing by a couple of bloggers, and I like to think that my writing could do the same for at least one other person out there in the internet.

Coming back, I’m not going to go by my alias anymore. I feel to some extent, I’ve outgrown it. Originally it was there because I wanted to maintain some sense of privacy, because I like to write about work sensitive stuff like drugs and, well drugs. But anyone who really wanted to could find out who I am, so there is no point trying to hide behind a name. So now, I’m just going to go by my name; Andy. And you can all - all four of you who read me - get to know just that much more intimately!

Andy.