A Mind

Far away, a man sits in silence. He doesn’t smile, he doesn’t frown, he doesn’t express a single emotion. He thinks, long and hard, about the worlds within his mind. He speaks to the void:
“I am a world, and all worlds. I am the universe and the space between two cells. I hold everyone I have ever met, everyone I have ever seen, everyone I have formed a picture of in a space the size of a single rose. My head is finite, my mind infinite. A civilisation can rise and fall and rise again in the space of a breath, and never touch more than the imagined lives held within my mind. I am God, I am man, I am the creator and the destroyer. The only thing that does not exist within my mind is that which I have not yet imagined.
There are more unexplored regions in the depth of my mind than there are stars in all the universe. When I die, how can all this within me not explode into an eternity of life, and form galaxies that never end?”

Stand In A Room

Stand in a room,
Be one with peace.
No sound to disturb,
No noise, all has ceased.
Stand in a room,
Be one on your own,
No friends to stand by,
No lover to own.

Sit in a room,
Be still and reserved.
No need to feel lost,
No voices, not heard.
Sit in a room,
Be quiet and soft.
No thoughts in the mind,
No wander, not lost.

Lie in a room,
Be corpse-like and pause.
No mourners will come,
No tears, no applause.
Lie in a room,
Be missed and forgot.
No life anymore,
No joy, that’s your lot.

Snapshot 4

This is what I saw: I work from home, balancing the guilt of feeling as though I am not productive enough, with the desire to see just how little I can get away with doing.  From where I sit at my desk, I have a view through to a bedroom window of a nondescript three bedroom house.  Most days, all I see is the drawn or undrawn curtains, occasionally a view of a person  of indeterminate gender.

This day, with the perfect storm of a clear day and the sun in just the right portion of the sky, the window appeared to me as though highlighted by a stage footlight.  And there, stood looking out through the glass, was a woman. Simply stood, posed like a picture on an advent calender. And she was crying. 

Not the dramatic, hysterical crying of a mourning mother, but a calm, almost serene outpouring of grief.  The reason for this woman’s tears was of course unclear.  But for a few minutes,  I was captivated. To be so still, frozen in place,  but to be feeling something evidently powerful enough to invoke tears…  What was it?  Sadness? Misery? Happiness? 

I wanted to know about her life,  I wanted to sit at her kitchen table, an unseen guest, and learn the tale of this woman’s sorrow. Why is it, other people’s lives can seem so much more fascinating and glamorous than our own?   Why do we often think that? And why do we fail to appreciate, even when we’re at our lowest, that our lives will seem infinitely more interesting to others?