What will others think? How is their thing so good? How can my things compare? Are my things as good as I need them to be? How can I compete? Why do I want to make things a competition? Why do I need approval? Why do I want to be recognised? Why is that a dream even though a lot of what it entails is off-putting? When will I be satisfied? Will I ever be satisfied? Why do I want attention when I find the deeper happiness when no one is watching? Is it only a short overwhelming rush? Who do I really want to impress? Whose opinions truly matter to me? How can I overcome the context? Why do I want to play for people? What’s changed since the days I was happy playing just for myself? How far away is the place where I just simply enjoy playing with the other musicians? Why do I let the world make me feel so small? Why can’t I be happy being simple and small? Why can’t I enjoy the fact that no one cares? Why is that not so sweet in itself? Is the only version of this life that can matter to me mine? Can I only ever live through my own eyes? Is my small patch of people and places big enough for me to be content? Could I expand it for myself without worrying about who else will see? Why do I want to be seen through eyes I can’t see through myself? How can I let go of wanting to do things for the attention of others? How can I be content doing my things for my own enjoyment? Running my own agenda and doing things for the people I know, not the faceless mass that I don’t? Why do I compare myself to people I don’t know? Why do I let comparisons strangle? Why can’t I take joy and not intimidation from the things that move me? How can I fuel myself on the things I love and not be held back by them? How can I forget the things that I don’t love and not feel that I have spent my time cursing? Why do I feel that I don’t shape up? Why do I feel it’s unfair when I don’t feel that others shape up to me? Why do I want the things other people have and feel slighted that I don’t have them? Isn’t the entire reason I love this that it isn’t any kind of competition?
Singing Songs In Flat 7
I am relieved that I could finally pull together a song about moving on from the old apartment. It’s not always easy to find things to write about, especially when you live a pretty solitary lifestyle. You usually have to look a little deeper at the things that really mean something to you. If a lot of those things seem kind of mundane, you have to stare into them until you penetrate through to some meaning. It really doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. As long as you are close enough to something, you might be able to show an insight. Anything can be wonderful if it can be truly personal and real. And told in the right way.
Moving house is one of those things that is both a big change and also a pretty widely experienced event. Yet, there aren’t too many songs about it. There’s maybe ‘Sun In An Empty Room’ and then…
I spent a long time thinking about picking up and heading out in the months and weeks leading up to our moving. All the wide facts snaking through my brain in thick cables, orbited by every subtle implication, spinning off, discovered, and waiting to be. Very difficult to maneuver through with any grace, and so easy to slip through cracks and get lost in. This is how I mostly experience and process of change. I am unable to dodge or run from the infinite reflection. It’s only healthy to think stuff through and look back for a while. To avoid that responsibility to yourself is dangerous in its own way. My problem is that my mind over-indulges in reflection, going far past the point of usefulness, and sometimes so unnecessarily deep that the light starts to thin and the scale of things can warp out of proportion. I was so deeply worried, I didn’t want to forget anything about the place that had been the one consistent backdrop for the last couple of years of my life. It’s not the place, so much as the years of your life that feel so truly precious, and that’s what I get sentimental over. Not that I can’t live here anymore, but that those years of my life are drifting away and across a break in setting, over a threshold where just the place can no longer be looked at on its own to extract memories from.
Maybe this is what familiarity is, a continuity that ties you together.
The place meant a lot to me through the lens of everyday life, the mundane and un-noteworthy ninety percent of seeing, feeling, breathing, and living. No less than the exciting remainder, blasé only in that there is just so much of this beautiful side of life that we sometimes forget how to enjoy it. A sheer plane that you need to glimpse the edge of sometimes to even know it’s there. When you approach the edges of the everyday, that is when you make out the definition. Moving house is one of these such edges, a miniature death of a version of you that in its last motions sees its entire life flash before its eyes, mourning itself before it is even gone.
Quit Vision 