The enemy within

01 Sep

The enemy within. Fear. I feel fear sometimes and so do we all. We cannot escape fear, but we can acknowledge it and accept that it exists, there within you sometimes. It is how we deal with it that is important, not that we have it. Myself, I refuse to give in to fear. I will not back down because of fear. Not giving in is what takes us the furthest or the highest.

Fear is actually a good thing. Without it we would do even more stupid things than we actually do. We would take unnecessary risks. Most of the times, though, fear is to be overcome. This is how we grow as human beings and what makes us stronger and makes us believe in ourselves and in others.

I fight this fear in one way or another each and every day. Sometimes it is small and sometimes big, but I will not give in to the enemy within. Fear is the opposite of love and I won’t have my life governed by fear when the opposite is so much better. Overcoming fear is love and love is what takes you the distance. To the place you want to be in life. To the place where we all want to be: inside of love.

How do I fight the fear I have? I do not really know. I embrace it and tell it “Hey! I see you, but I have other things to do. I have a life to live and love to give. I have seen where I can go when you are not here, so take a hike, be gone!”, and it usually does so. It comes back sometimes and I have to say it again and it goes away, and the more I tell it to go somewhere where the sun does not shine, the less often it comes back and I really like that. It gives me more space for love and life.

Fear can teach you things about yourself. Ask yourself why you are scared and if you answer honestly, you will find knowledge about yourself that you did not know you had in you. Do not simply ignore fear, because that does not work. Ignoring fear is just like telling it “hey! do you mind if I stick my head in the ground, because I find you really, really ugly”. Telling it that won’t keep it away, it will only wait until you withdraw your head from the ground again. Embrace it and ask it what it is that it is doing there and why? The answer you will get is often quite an experience for you. Do this, and you will find that this uninvited guest will show up less often. Just do not think that it will disappear completely, because it will not. That is just the way it is, or so I believe.

Am I scared right now? Yes, I am. Immensely. But I deal with it. I have no time, space or much care for fear, so instead I try to live and love the best that I know how to. I am still learning how to deal with fear and I suspect that it will take a long time to master, but meanwhile I will not give in to fear – I have no space for it inside of me. When fear comes, my body always seems a bit to crowded – something has got to go and it is not me.

My home is wherever you happen to be

26 Aug

Something about a mother’s love that I picked up from the local newspaper and wanted to share:

After nine months, my mother came for a short visit to Malmo, to see me, her daughter. The meaning of home for her too is fluid. I tell her that I want to make the best of our time together and take her to see the beautiful sites in Malmo. “Where should we go?” She asks. “I have come to see you. My home is wherever you happen to be.”

PARVIN ARDALAN

You can read the whole article here: http://www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur-och-nojen/article1208306/In-English-Home-is-where-the-Heart-is.html

As we push on

25 Aug

The light always seems too bright when you have spent a long time in the dark. It hurts your eyes. There is an actual pain and you want to avert your eyes, even if you do not really want to, it is what you do to avoid the immediate pain, and then, you turn your gaze back onto the light and again off and on, until you can see more clearly. Should the light then disappear and you find yourself in the dark again, you do no longer feel at home in the dark like you did before – it is worse than before, because for a while now you will be blind and you long for the light to return. Suddenly you feel cold and alone in the dark.

You know you did not start out that way; once you were in the light, once, a very long time ago, but somewhere along the road it got darker and darker until the light was all gone. That was a long time ago and all you can remember, if anything, was that something is missing.

Love. The light of the heart, the reason for everything, the very reason of life. You remember it vaguely. Like some all but forgotten dream you had a long time ago. You sit there in the dark, because now you are blind and there is much reason to not walk blindly down the road. Not just now anyway. You need to get adjusted to the dark before you move on again.

After a while you feel you need to decide if you push on or if you stay. Most of us push on, but some stay. Some stay in the general area, too scared to go on like the blind. Some stay permanently right where they lost the light. Some more than others. Permanently, only leaving their breath, their short lived imprints on the ground, there, somewhere in the dark. Fragments remembered by only a few and ever slowly fading into the full darkness, where no one will ever find what once were and is no more.

The few that remember go on carrying the imprints in the light of their hearts, but the imprints are stained, like the broken glass on the ground at an old abandoned house. You remember the old times, the old familiar feelings about them. Near, but never near enough to touch and you feel saddened by it and you push it away as far as possible. As though you do not want to be cut by the glass, you push it to the side with your shoe and you look at it again and tell yourself that it was a long time ago, another life, another world entirely. You walk away. And they stay.

For the ones that do push on in the darkness there is still hope for the light again. That is why they push on. They cannot stay, not there, in the dark, all alone and cold. There is always hope, even if faint at best at times, that they will see the light again. Love. Life. The reason for moving. The reason for all movement in the universe.

Being the reason for all movement in the universe, love finds the ones that seek it. It does not stay, because it is the reason for everything, the reason for movement. The cause of it.

We may not always have a clear vision and sometimes it will hurt our eyes for a while, especially if we lose track of where it is. The turns we can, might and will take are plenty and not always is the path clear, and at times our view of the stars are obscured by the clouds or some fog that lie heavily and thick before us. Those are the times we must rely on our instincts, on our faith that our movement will lead us back to the light, to love. We never give up that hope, and it is our hope that keeps us moving and it is our moving that gives us hope.

We may not always know the direction exactly and we may even be way off course, but we push on, because we know that there is light out there somewhere. The ones that do not seek it might not find it and even the ones that seek might not always find the kind of light sought for on the first try or even on the eleventh one, but if your heart is in it, and you keep your faith in it, the light will shine upon you and you will find yourself, after a while, looking straight into it again and it will be the light the guides you home.

Home. I remember home. Faint, but more and more for each day that passes in the light. I can almost make it out, there, ahead of me. There, before my eyes, where the light shines.

For the ones that was not born into the light and never got a chance to see it, I weep. For the ones that stayed in the dark, I weep. And so does all that seek the light.

The light. Love. The very cause of movement. The cause of all life. I remember life. I am moved by it. It caused me and through me more life and more love and more light. Love is not still, it moves and causes more love, more light, more life – and life is what you are and by that: love. You are love, you are life and you are light. You have never been anything else. Remember that.

And remember that the ones that stayed in the dark were no different from you. Sometimes we forget that, when we stumble over them and pass them in the dark.

I am home

16 Aug

The book that I am writing, although mostly still only in my heart, is being re-written and again written on new, fresh pages. The story is as new as it is old and it takes me there, to a place I once was familiar with, a place that I used to know and lived in. My travels brought me far away from the place I once called home.

I am going back there now, to the place which once was home, and I find that the path is slightly different than I remembered – it’s still the same, but different, as though I see it with the eyes of the child for the first time.

The sea is calm and draws me nearer my birth place in a slow but steady pace. The winds are favourable and view is clear. I can see the shores where I once used to run as a child. The child that is still within me, me the man, the newly born soul with the open heart.

There is a beacon beckoning me home, steering me right. I can hear it sing through the air, brought by the winds, the voice of the almost forgotten. There is a promise of peace again. I can feel it as it flows through my once uneasy body.

As I land and feel the sand under my feet, I know that this adventure has only just started and I lay down right then and there, just to stay in that moment for a little while longer. I am, strangely as it may still seem to me, home again. I start to cry. I am home.

The fusion of minds

02 Aug

I find myself in bewildered amazement. And it is a good thing. The fusion of minds is a wondrous thing. Not easy, but wondrous.

In awe, I am

28 Jul

In the absence I am distracted to a tremble by every sound and by the heat of it all. How strange turns a path sometimes holds for us. It can question the map you hold in your hand and rightly so, for who are we to know the complexity of truth? There are explanations to everything, but I do accept that I will not always have or get them. In awe, I am.

… and my heart is not at home

24 Jul

Some journeys start before you realize it. You just find yourself on the road to somewhere you did not know you were headed. There are times you think you are going somewhere just to find on the way that you not at all going in the direction you thought you were.  Those are the moments I find confusing. It must be like having Alzheimer’s; you suddenly forget what you are doing out there and can for your life not remember how it all started. There’s a road ahead of you and it looks like it could be interesting over there, and peeking over your shoulder there is no way going back, because you do not recognize the road behind you, so you go on.

All will be well. That’s all I know – or rather, that is what is always my guiding light. All kinds of crap might (or usually) come my way, but for some very and probably naïve reason, I still keep this faith, that all will be well. I will be very upset the day I come to the end of the road and find that it isn’t so. But then I guess it won’t matter anymore. Still, I’ll be very vexed.

I do not know why I always find myself on these roads leading somewhere. The older I get, the more I keep thinking that they do not really seem to lead anywhere. Am I going away from something or am I heading towards something? Sometimes I think that I am looking for home. I have no idea where home is. I haven’t felt at home in a very long time – if ever. I used to be longing for distant shores, but now I’m not as inclined. I just want to be at home. Again, it’s like Alzheimer’s; I forget where it is and maybe even more important: what it is.

Is that what travelling is? Looking for home? To find the pieces of the puzzle that eventually will make up one’s home? Whether it is geographical journeys or on the roads of life, I never seem to get wherever it is my home is. Every time I think I am there, it always seems to be someone else’s home and I have to turn at the door, returning to wherever it was I came from – the place I do not recognize, the place that says “home”, but looks as strange to me as it would to any stranger.

I do not know how many more roads there are ahead of me, but home better be closer than I think, because these shoes are getting worn and my feet hurt. And when I find my home I will lay down my hat, take off these shoes and rest for a while. Having done that, I will pick up where I left off and go on out again, but this time I will know where I came from and return before I get too weary. Going somewhere is easy when you have a home to return to.

Home is where my heart is and my heart is not at home…

Vårt ointressanta språk

18 Jul

Jag har inte läst en enda skönlitterär bok på svenska under de senaste 10-12 åren. Det svenska språket är helt enkelt för fattigt och tråkigt. Det menar jag förstås inte, vad jag menar är att det svenska språkbruket idag är genuint ointressant och i det närmaste oanvändbart för litterärt användande. Det är inte så konstigt att svenska författare inte fångar mitt intresse – de har inget att säga och även om de skulle ha det, så har de inte språk nog att säga något med.

När förlagen beställer översättningar av engelska ungdomsböcker så vill man inte ha korrekta översättningar; man vill ha förenklade översättningar med motiveringen att svenska barn och ungdomar “inte har det ordförrådet och skulle inte tala så själva”. Idioter. Hur tror de att folk ska kunna skaffa sig ett ordförråd om de aldrig stöter på för dem okända ord? Förlagen tar inget språkligt ansvar. Nej, det ska vara lättläst och lättsålt. Idioter.

Att läsa en bok översatt till svenska är för mig ganska frustrerande; jag märker ganska snart när man försökt förenkla eller när man inte lyckats översätta idiom eller kulturspecifika referenser och begrepp. Det blir bara fånigt att översätta sådana saker till svenska. Motiveringen att de gör det är att “svenskar känner inte till dessa saker”. Trams. Det spelar ingen som helst roll. Om jag läser en bok på engelska och det finns referenser till samhälls- och kulturspecifika saker och personer i den som jag inte känner till, så gör det inget. Jag förstår tillräckligt för att veta att det är just så det ligger till och att det därför är roligt och intressant – och dessutom är det inte så svårt att söka information om detta om man nu verkligen vill ha reda på exakt varför författaren nämnt det i boken. Ta inte för givet att att läsarna är ointelligenta – och skulle de ändå vara ointelligenta, så blir de inte smartare av att läsa förenklade böcker. Det säger sig självt.

Jag har länge haft en teori som blev verifierad för några dagar sedan av forskare någonstans: vårt språk definierar vårt sätt att vara – vårt beteende. Man hade undersökt beteendet hos tvåspråkiga personer för att se om de gav olika respons på olika språk. Inte överraskande för mig så var det så att de faktiskt reagerade olika på olika språk. På det ena språket kunde man reagera mer aggressivt än på det andra. Varför det är så får vi väl fortsätta att spekulera i, men min poäng med att nämna det är att språket är viktigt. Det är mycket viktigare än folk kanske inser, för det handlar inte bara om ordförråd och att kunna uttrycka sig; det ligger mycket djupare i oss än så – vi är de vi är genom vårt språk. Så sluta förenkla och utarma språket. Förstår du inte ett ord, så fråga om det – det gjorde jag när jag läste som barn och jag gör det fortfarande. Om vårt språk är fattigt och ointressant, så är även vi, vi som talar språket, fattiga och ointressanta.

I guess I must be

15 Jul

A new day. People are still crazy and I am still around: all the fixings for a good novel and a never boring life. I would like to say that living in this world is like watching the blind leading the blind, but that would be an insult to blind people. Complete crazy leading the complete crazy is more accurate. Sometimes I consider myself both blind and crazy to put up with this. I guess I must be.

God dag, herrar, fruar och fröknar Fogdar!

09 Jul

Malmö den 9 juli 2010

Till: Kronofogden

Angående: Mina ekonomiska missförhållanden

God dag, herrar, fruar och fröknar Fogdar!

Jag vet inte vilka kvalifikationer man behöver ha för att få jobb hos er, men uppenbarligen så är inte matematik och fakta några av de viktigaste. I ett brev från er står det att ni utmäter någon form av lön som jag enligt uppgift (från er) ska få från Försäkringskassan. Om det är så att de tänker betala ut lön till mig så är det glädjande nyheter. De 40 kronor ni vill ta från den dagliga avkastningen därifrån kan ni med gott samvete behålla. Tyvärr misstänker jag att de inte vet att de enligt er ska betala mig något, så om ni vore vänliga att påpeka för dem detta missförhållande vore jag er väldigt tacksam.

Ytterligare har ni bett mig fylla i en blankett, vilket jag felat göra med den ursäkten att jag inte äger någon penna. Jag har gång på gång försökt skriva med svartvinbärssaft och tandpetare, men min darrhänthet ligger mig till last och blanketten ser numera tyvärr ut som om jag haft ihjäl en igelkott på den. Så jag tänker här redogöra för mitt liv och mina ekonomiska förehavanden:

Jag startade företag med bidrag från Staten i höstas och bidraget sträckte sig till mitten på april – eller om det var maj (mitt minne är en smula suddigt på den punkten). Företaget ynglade inte alls av sig i vare sig i form av mynt eller i sedlar, något jag fortfarande är förbluffad över – jag har ju både hemsida och fullt fungerande telefon. Företaget är nolltaxerat hos Skatteverket för närvarande och det lär nog vara så en bra tid framöver om man iakttar statistiken så här långt. Som ni kanske förstår var nolltaxering inte i mina planer, tvärtom hade jag planer på att åtminstone kunna ta ut en lön på 20 000 kronor per månad – uppenbarligen är mina matematiska kunskaper helt i linje med era egna.

Då jag inte känner folk som vill ge mig pengar av ingen som helst anledning, har jag fram tills nu lyckats låna pengar för att klara mitt och min dotters uppehälle. Förhoppningsvis kan jag låna ytterligare till nästa hyra, men jag skulle nog inte sätta min högra fot i pant på det – en fot som för övrigt nog kommer att amputeras efter sommaren ändå, då jag inte har råd att hämta ut mina mediciner. Förresten, om ni kan övertala Försäkringskassan att ge mig pengar så kan ni nog glömma de där 40 kronorna ändå – mediciner är dyra.

Så, för att summera:

Jag har ingen inkomst. Jag har ansvar för min dotters uppehälle. Jag äger inget av värde och gjorde jag det skulle jag behöva sälja det för att få pengar att leva för.

Mitt råd till er (som egentligen inte är så mycket ett råd som en order) är att ni genast ska ta bort eventuellt löneavdrag från varifrån ni nu tror jag ska få pengar. Jag vill inte kalla er för vad jag vill kalla er för, men ni vet säkert vad jag menar. Se nu till och skärp er. Och skicka inga fler blanketter – ni kan ringa som alla andra jävlar.

Med vänliga hälsningar

Gent H Larsson

Before I forget…

by Gent H Larsson