So, this is what’s happening:
I went to Nürnberg to check it out and see if I might want to move there. I think I will, it was pretty nice.
Then I went to Augsburg to meet up with some friends. (And Augsburg was like really cool, just a lot of fun to be honest, and good conversations and good people. Here’s photos of that.)
Breakfast in bed
From a field, where you could put money in a box and pick flowers.
It was raining softly. A girl with a lip piercing and two rolled up sleeping mats sticking out of her backpack stepped out from under the cover of the station and into the grey sky. A young man rolled a suitcase next to her and an elderly couple stood waiting on the other side of the road, decked out in umbrellas and plastic ponchos over their functional jackets. A bus whizzed by. Birds flew high. And for a second the rain took a breather – letting only mist cover us – as we stepped out from the overhang we had covered under. The sky was open. Grey but bright and warm with dots of birds covering it, rainwater dripping down the spires of old church towers. Slow and eternal as the traffic lights turned green.
On the morning of my friends wedding all the other bridesmaids were sitting reading their bibles. I felt slightly bad, but I also did not want to – you know, get up – from the very comfy chair I was sitting in. So I thought instead about John 5 – that I’d been reading the previous day – and I started reiterating it to myself, closing my eyes and reading in my own head.
The story in the beginning of John 5 follows a man that I don’t think gets enough credit. Or at least is used far too often as a warning example instead of a pointer to something relatable and inexplicably human within ourselves. The man in question had been an invalid for 38 years and was laying on the ground close to a pool of water, where every know and then the water was said to be stirred by angels and heal whoever bathed in it. I was going through the lines of the story in my head, and when I said to myself, as the man did to Jesus: “I have no one to help me get to the water,” it hit me square in the chest. (To be honest I looked it up, and that’s not exactly how he says it in any translation, in the NIV for example it says: “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.”) But as I said those words out loud – in my head (so not really out loud), I found myself saying it as if it was me, talking to Jesus out of my own current circumstances. Which leads me to my first point:
(Little set of 2)
(+1
“Hey,” my friend texts me, “I’m 10 minutes away, do you want to go with me and swim in the rain?” ❤️
In other words: Summer has arrived. Really really. I go to bed after the sun has just dipped below the horizon and is rising again. The birds start singing at 2 am. (This makes me happy.)
A documentation of the sky. This is my new diary, a documentation of different skies – although it’s the same sky, I suppose, like Monet’s water lilies. Painted in different seasons and different light.
I want to put them in a little case because they’re becoming too many, carry them with me. Maybe put them in a journal, one on each page.
(We’ll see)
(Meaningless art; A new series I want to do, because I’ve been so preoccupied with art being useful that I’ve forgotten how to make stuff just cause I feel like it. I’ve been stuck in What do I do with this? How can I sell this? How do I use this? And I want to go back to just making some stuff, not really for any specific purpose. Meaning: not really for any commercial purpose. Sometimes not even specifically for it to be good.)
So, first out, here’s a digital version of an old photo I stumbled upon when looking through this blog. The photo’s originally from this post.
I’ve always been more motivated by what I don’t want than by what I do want.
This fear has served me well. It has sent me out of the ordinary, out of where I don’t want to be. I think about the Twenty pilots song Leave the city that admits to not knowing where you’ll end up, or Brené Browns book Braving the wilderness, about leaving our clearly pronounced structures and stern belief systems.
And it reminds me of what a lot of people seem to be going through at the moment, or have been going through for a while. Churches, ministries, or just people. We know we’re not exactly where we should be, and so we lay things down, move out, take the first step in trust even if we don’t know where we’ll end up. The wilderness, or trench, as Twenty One Pilots call it, is scary, because it’s where we don’t have all the answers. And now we’re out here, not knowing the answers.
It’s made me to think about my competitiveness. If you’ll stay with me for a moment:
I’m extremely competitive. Always have been. But it’s much more important to me to not lose, than it is to win. It’s bad, I think. People motivated by winning and succeeding will do anything for it, they’re fighters and victors. But for me: if there’s a chance I’ll lose I might not even want to try in the first place.
This is obvious in other parts of my life as well. I’m very motivated by what I don’t want. What kind of life I don’t want, what I don’t want to do, who I don’t want to be. The most motivating sentence to me has always been: “But what if I’m not?” in response to “What if I’m too scared to do all the things I’ve ever wanted.” My point: I am fully aware of what I’m moving away from.
Too aware.
Truth is, anyone can be a rebel. And our courage has served us well. So has our eagerness to obey God, to move out into uncertainty. But I’ve been out in the wilderness for a while now, and the problem with it not being a place for answers is that there still seems to be no answers. And so what I’ve decided is this: There comes a moment, out in the dust – with that city looming in the background – when we have to stop looking back at what we left and turn our heads to where we want to go.
It is time to stop being motivated by what we don’t want and start being motivated by what we do want. If it hasn’t yet, the looking back, the awareness of what you don’t want, will make you desperate. What takes actual maturity is to look forward. To make a choice and move towards it. To be brave enough for what you want, even if you think you don’t know (Which, you do, you actually do, otherwise you wouldn’t have left that other place behind. It might just not be in the shape you think a dream should be.) Grow up, look forward. Maybe it’s a mirage, that city you see in the distance, I can’t promise that it’s not. There’s no way to see from this distance.
But I know you’ll never know if you don’t start moving towards it.
eirians 