End of week 5 - A slow awakening

5 weeks have gone by and what’s up? I have learned a lot of things yet so few that I know now that I didn’t know before. Is any of it useful? Some yes, some less, some life-changing, some self-evident. It is like becoming aware in a fraction of a second that we all do learn everyday and we do slightly ever evolve into the person we are though we seldom stop and reflect on these tiny little learned things and even on the bigger ones that have impacted us, join up to make this river that is the impetuous flow of our lives.

I know that I am not motivated anymore by taking dance classes though I absolutely love swing dancing at social events.

I know that when you are closer in a continuous manner you see them less than when you pop up in the city from time to time.

I know that although I could have cruised through a highly busy and professional career feeling stable and strong, doing nothing puts you in front of your doubts, your insecurities.

I know that when I face it, I have a bloody battered soul with unfinished business oozing through opened wounds and that it looks pretty ugly and I imagine we are a lot of people like this, bleeding emotionally without even acknowledging it and that if we could all wear our life battle scars physically, this city would probably turn into an episode of Walking Dead.

I know I don’t have an infinite budget and I need to rein in my whims and wishes in order to keep enough to enjoy life, go to the odd restaurant and spend a good amount, have fun during a night out, travel unexpectedly rather than planning my expenses with big milestones.

I know therefore I need to boil my wishes down to the next one and stop at this to let room for the randomness and beauty of chance to come my way.

I know that I am conditioned and heavily brainwashed as I feel the guilt rushing through my veins and releasing the adrenaline when I spend time doing nothing or when I realize I haven’t written a line or done something “worthy” that day.

I know that if I don’t put my ideas down in writing as soon as I think about them, I end up in front of the blank page when I decide “Now is the time to write - after I have settled everything properly” and I have no inspiration whatsoever.

I know that Tinder is fun, that Happn is messy and that Once is racist and that I want to make an article about all of it but haven’t found yet the angle that will make it fun to write for me.

I know now that I start writing sometimes for the wrong reasons, to produce something, to be read, when the act of creation should in itself be fun and constitute a happy moment in itself like now, listening to Jazz in the middle of my messy messy room.

I know that I love making my mother laugh and that I am happy I get to spend time with her because I went through life avoiding to spend much time with my parents and now my father isn’t there and I realize how ephemeral my parents are/were.

I know that sharing the dance passion with my mother helps a lot to diffuse any kind of tension and I cannot remember why I found it so difficult before to spend time with her. I wonder if that means I grew up or she got older or that we were changed by our experience of the loss of the third member of our family nucleus.

I know that I want to do something, to learn something that will help better the world at my own little individual scale but I have yet to figure out what and that I want it to be compatible with my own inclinations.

I know I want to leave Paris for a while, even though I realized how much I love this place, being close to my friends and feeling the frenzy of it all and the incredible dynamism of the Swing scene here. I want to leave it all and go where it is more silent, where I can start healing instead of patching things up and moving forward.

I know that I don’t know what will happen during this year and that makes me all at once happy, exhilarated and scared out of my mind which is a weird combination that sometimes leaves me breathless with a big question mark on my mind.

And I definitely know that this is not the next post I wanted to write but sometimes it is just like this and I just need to forget any preconceived ideas about that blog I guess.

I know so much more than yesterday and I am yet all the more clueless - The saying is true - the more you know and are aware about, the less certainty you have, yet I find my current state of mind strangely comforting because it has a quality of openness and potential discovery that I haven’t felt before - as if I have been living in a world deprived of senses for years, working head down in my deserted arid and narrow little world. It does feel like waking up I have to say - though the awakening is slow.