Letting go

Letting go

I quit! You know what, I’m tired of my job. I want to start something completely new. I’m tired of knowing everyday what is going to happen, of being able to easily predict the future. Seeing the same people, having the same conversations, every day the same. Insane.

It’s been more than 25 five years I’ve been living with this same constant routine.

The thought of repeating this process, endlessly, terrifies me.

I had ideals, dreams, high ambitions, but none of them came true. To become a professor at a University, paint and play music; have the freedom to study and teach whatever inspired me the most, in the moment. And instead, for all these years, I’ve just been a miserable researcher; always doing the work for someone else, satisfying someone else’s desires. For what then?

I would have liked getting married, to have a family, and live in a beautiful solid and decorated house. But all those potential men that I’ve met, always said that I’m too perfect, too kind for them to deserve a person as me. They’d take advantage of everything I gifted, then they’d let me go.

Alone, as now, at the squared age of 44 years old I could say that my life, compared to my expectations, is a complete failure. HA!

I wonder, though, what would have happened if they did come true?

The color of the leaves where changing. Different shades of red, but outside was cold, and now I’m here, naked, on my bed talking to this person that I have just met.

He was supine, relaxed with that thin sly smile on his face. Everything seemed going smooth and perfect on his side. Lucky him, I thought.

From top to bottom a tan marbled skin, soft and hard at the same time. I was galvanized at the idea of touching him.

But I didn’t understand why he was there with me, what he wanted to do, tonight. For he was there, but never manifested any interest towards me. This dilemma kept me intrigued in staying awake with him all night.

Only at the end, I finally understood what he was: he had a cryptic but heavenly message to give. He didn’t speak much. Whether for the language barrier or for what I was saying, I do not know. In fact, he wasn’t even listening and giving much weight to my words. Mais oui, mais oui… He’d say as to silent me, but accompanied it with a long and prolonged chanting voice. Not only, he didn’t even know French. So, all the communication between us was manifested more through actions and intentions, rather than words.

Though, for all time, I never was able to understand what passed within his head. To decipher his gestures and ecstatic expressions.

It felt as a moment of grace, I was graced, and grateful to have this beautifully modeled body, there in front of me. For contemplation. My hands, trembling in desire. But again, he didn’t even care about me at all. Neither about my presence. Just as when I met him tonight. He was there, sitting alone, in divine indifference from all his surroundings. But, why did he decide to come at my house?

Suddenly, he talked: what would you do, if your dreams were to come true? A shiver across all my body, crossing my spinal cord with vertical rapidity and extending with all its light convulsive pressure, sigh!, through all the veins, petrifying me. Red wine on the table. I was as a statue, standing in astonishment. What would I do? Well, that was quite embarrassing; since even now, having him available all for me, I didn’t do anything.

I felt as if, at bottom, it was truly me who didn’t want my dreams to come true. Perhaps, I was just in love with the idea of dreaming, for the sake of dreaming itself. I remember, back as an undergraduate student, the advice of my supervisor: for your thesis, choose your second favorite topic; this will make you continue dreaming about the first, while actually working on the second. Perhaps, what he meant to say was that I would have worked more fluidly on the second, my expectations being tempered. Though, I didn’t follow him. And my work has been an agony. I was never able to finish. I chastised my whole life, in dedication for an entire year just in crafting words for that research.

So. What would I do now? What would I do if I had in front of me the object that I’ve always desired?

That would certainly cease my dreams. Maybe, they wouldn’t be as ideal as my expectations. Or maybe, it’s just in the nature of things; that we desire, that we tend and work towards something, and exactly when we’re there, very very very close in achieving it, all that accumulated energy that motivated and propelled us to continue in our tasks, exhausts. And everything stops. In silence, and we become indifferent. Too easy, so I no longer want it. So, I quit.

Isn’t it funny? Maybe that is the nature of this guy. That is what allows him to talk, walk and move so freely, with that divine indifference, as if he were a prince among all men.

Not for conquering, though he could have whatever he wanted; rather, of letting go. Quitting and quitting and quitting. A life dedicated to the practice of letting go, leaving traces but without any patents. Living in transition. He works in a manifold of projects, and doesn’t care about his achievements. Perhaps, that consents him to live, constantly, in that precise point of tension. On the wave of tension and transition. Arriving there, calmly, following the exfoliating undulations of reality. In that way, he’d preserve energy, to then leap on his next game.

He wouldn’t speak: these words would just present themselves in the form of a revelation, from the mere fact of having him be in front of me. Who are you?, I’d ask myself.

A soft breeze, he started blowing in the void. That void that I was soon to become. I finally started understanding and seeing more clearly. In a cascade effect, all the illusions – which are chains that prevent me from my freedom – started manifesting themselves; flowing out from my body; making me lighter. I have to let go this, that and that other thing. Not only quit my job, but also all of my certainties: my friends, my family, my country; my traditions, my language, my culture; my knowledge, my common sense and sense of judgment. I felt fragile, weak, like an empty shell thrown in the Ocean. Full of fear for the unknown.

Could I feel reassured by this constant, subtle, new melody?