Category Archives: Longer thoughts

How to notice the difference

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”
-C.S.Lewis

This, I think, is one of the most underestimated truths.

You can’t look at the difference, you can just look and look again and notice that today is not yesterday.

We do not understand change. We think it’s a moment, the clock striking twelve on New years eve or when you realise you love someone… when in reality that’s just it, you realise the change but that is not the moment it happens. It already has, over and over again, in the choices you keep on making.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that so many good things were once bad – diamonds out of pressed coal – because like the birds rising at dawn, they do not sing about the night.

I realised this while heading out to my room, the little cabin in my garden. It was snowing the other night and this is one of those changes you do notice. But these following pictures are of just that, of the snow and how the light makes everything slightly golden and warm, and how the sun seems to never set in the summer and the flowers make my home rest in a meadow. Nature doesn’t remember the wind from last week. I will not remember how it made everything creak or when the autumn leaves turned muddy and gross, and how even though it was completely dark without the snow, the full moon still managed to create moving shadows everywhere. That is not what I photographed.

The snow doesn’t remember the heat, nor the summer the autumn colours. The flower doesn’t remember the bud or it would never bloom. We think that our problem is that we live in the past, and it is. But our problem is not that we remember. Because we don’t. We see self-chosen memories, not truths, and so we can pick and choose. And we so rarely choose the time in between.

IMG_0551 IMG_5016

Thank you

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

There is literally not a lot more I can do than be grateful. I’ve always liked that we’re sort of “allowed” to be angry with God but I’ve never quite managed it. I write one angry sentence in a prayer and then go on to always, sooner or later, realizing that my text instead has turned into gratefulness. As I write, I realize how small it is, or how everything worked out for the best, or in any way how God was always right there in the situation. I thank you, thank you for your love. For the people you’ve put into my life, and for the life I’m allowed to live, so lucky in comparison to such a big part of the world. I thank you for every single person I’ve loved, every single person I’ve met, close to me or now far away. And I thank you for the peace you put in my heart so that I have a core strong as stone when you send me out on adventures.

How to live now (or Thoughts from the gym – a treadmill lesson)

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

Why is it so much easier working out in a gym than it is to put on those workout clothes at home? To me it’s partly because the gym makes me feel awfully cool. But there’s something else to.

When I go cross-country skiing for more than perhaps 20 kilometers, I always have this problem with breathing. And so I break down. And my tactic to get back up again is to focus on what is going on at the exact moment. Look ahead of me, but keep all of my attention at what my body is doing and not on the road that’s still to go.

I think that’s the reason I like the treadmill. I am always right there, I can never put my eyes on the road 20 meters away and think about how much it’s going to take to get me there. I do love running outside but it’s harder for me.

The same lesson applies to life. Focus on the now and you’ll get a future, focus on the future and you’ll live your entire life in something that’s not happening. Start everyday with thinking through what you have to do, then sort out the things you can actually do today from all the things that perhaps needs to be done tomorrow or the day after that. Then push the things you’re not gonna do today out of your mind. Do not worry about them until their time comes. Stop resting the world on your shoulders and stop procrastinating.

Take a deep breath and do what you need to do today.

No media before breakfast

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

I’m trying this out. I’ve always hated mornings with a burning passion and it bothers me that they’re so necessary, that the start of the day shapes the rest of it. Not completely, but I wish it had zero impact. To me, the point of the No media before breakfast rule is to start out stable. We hear so much, listen to so much and choose to look at so much without caring as much about not letting it be the ruler of us. Not caring about how much impact it has on us. I want to start the day off knowing who I am, knowing who God is and just enjoy reality for a while. Then I allow myself to escape it, but I always try to love reality the most. Because when I don’t, it wrecks me. When I don’t, I just spiral down further into the unrealistic dream of actually managing to escape reality. But we can’t. And reality is where I find the actual happiness anyway, the type that is free from pain.

Procrastination and self doubt

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

I never quite realized the connection between those two, procrastination and self doubt. I guess it’s obvious though, self-doubt; as in believing (or not) that you can do it, and procrastination; as in doing it (or not). I suppose I’ve just always seen myself as so confident. In a way not, because I was always the shy little kid, but still, because I was the one who didn’t want to hang out with them, because whenever people didn’t like me, my unconscious though process went: Wow, what’s wrong with them? Always them, never me, and I’ve always thought that was the main difference between confident and non confident people. Either you think Wow what’s wrong with them, when they don’t like you, or you think Wow, what did I suddenly do right? when they do.

Childhood stories and my unsuccessful try at psychology aside, I’ve kind of realized that I’ve always thought of myself as the complete opposite to self doubting (okay, not really psychology aside). So to the point that even when I do doubt myself, I don’t realize it. I don’t realize that the reason behind sudden dips in my mood might be a sudden disbelief in myself. And now, looking back, I wonder how many times that’s happened without me even noticing it.

Now, though, it has showed up in my homework. My ability (well, disability) to get it done. The school I’m in now is so much tougher, the people I hang out spends about 37,8 % of their time worrying about their grades, and I think that’s getting to me. Me always agreeing that yeah, the tasks are impossible, when I used to honestly believe that I could be fine with studying to a test for about one hour. But you can’t just say that to people that it wouldn’t work for. And let’s not blame this only on that development, because I don’t know (and don’t want to know) where my grades would have ended up without those extra few hours of studying, but now I’m one of the people never doing things, until the point where I stop believing I can. Or maybe that’s the reason why I’m not doing it, I don’t even know.

I’ve postponed my essays because I don’t think I could write them if I tried, not because I think I don’t need to spend that much time on them. But I’ve noticed that the big, tremendous difference lies in how I look at the blinking cursor. And looking at it while thinking about how good I am at this, trying to scare my self doubt away to the dark corners of my brain, and then starving it back to death, is how I’ve written this post. So now I’m gonna go try it on some homework.

Never settle for less than the best

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

Several of my closest friends have done things similar to this, and I hate it. It annoys me to no end. They settle down with people they think they kinda like. Settle down might be a slight exaggeration, but they think that’s enough. It’s like an article I read recently, that told you to marry the equivalent of your best friend, not of the colleague you can have a beer with after work. They settle with people that aren’t the best. And this is nothing negative to their beloved ones, because this has got nothing to do with those, but is instead about the way they work together. They shouldn’t settle for someone they don’t feel enough for.

How to follow through

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

When I really want something I’m almost afraid of saying it out loud. It goes with things I want to quit, want to start or want to be really successful in. But I’ve noticed that it doesn’t work like that and that it destroys my goals rather than builds them. As human beings we need community, we need to share and show and talk about things and I want to shout at God for creating us that way at the same time as I want to thank him.

I want to be able to do everything by myself. I really do. But lately I’ve told a few people about a few things that were really important to me. Some of them I never even realized I’d kept as secrets, while some of them were things I’d thought I’d never tell a living soul. And that’s the only thing that worked. Things I’ve thought about quitting for years, my secret dreams of what I would really like to do when I quit school and grow up. If there is one thing I’ve heard way to many times, it is that you should share goals you really want to keep. With family, friends, or someone on the internet. But it was one of those quotes I never thought applied to me until I noticed that it really does.

Words and dictatorship

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

Media is king and we’re its peasants, master the internet and you master the world. Since perhaps ten years back. The world is changing, and it’s no longer the authors that control it. And perhaps we’re free in a way, it’s no longer the few people rich enough to afford books that know things, but we all have information and news at our fingertips. I thought about my friend with dyslexia and how she finds so much joy in being able to master the internet with photos and paintings. She doesn’t need words to say how she feels. But then I thought about her difficulties in school. Or when it comes to reading music, it still affects her in a lot of areas in her life.

And I realized that we’ve only changed the way we use our words, not how much they own us. Today, every person with a blog is a writer and we share our lives and feelings on social media without pause, we just usually don’t care as much about how we say it and how we use our words as an art form to express ourselves. Instead they’re a necessary mean that is about what we say and do, instead of how we say it. The art of the written word has been pushed away into the dark corners of the internet. And the art of the spoken word is in many ways since long forgotten.

Or has it just moved into a quiet dictatorship? If you master your words well, and for that you can be a rapper as well as a poet, you can have the world under your feet without people even noticing that it’s you they’re listening to.

Even though the dusty old poetry books are a source of magic, the source of the art of every single written and spoken word, rests within all of us. Anyone who cares about getting their point across, or want to be able to tell a story in a way that will make people laugh, have their hope in mastering talking. Anyone who wants their essays to be the very best, who want to blog with a voice that people listens to, have their hope in mastering writing. And anyone who wants to be able to ask the right questions by sorting through the 90% bullshit in every conversation and get to the core of what actually matters, have their hope in understanding what words are, how we use them and how other people use them.

The word is dead when the world shuts up.

Let me breathe

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

The world is collapsing in on me, suffocating me and pressing me down, collapsing me in on myself. I spend too much time in the presence of only my own simple being, and my latest theory, the one that I came up with on the bus on my way home, is that it’s ruining me. It’s breaking me because it’s making my world smaller. I realized that I haven’t been out of the house without reason for a long time. I make my way to school, I make my way to the bus and back from the bus and a few times every day I go out to my house, since I live in a little cabin in our backyard. And every time I go there, I take a few seconds to just stand in our garden and look up at the clouded sky. And I never realized that I need more of that, it’s droplets when I crave rivers.

Today it’s hate-weather, the type that makes my friends sigh, but I suddenly realized the freedom of it. The sky is clouded but the spring is closing in and the days aren’t as dark anymore. Small drops of rain are falling from the sky, but it’s fresh. And I suddenly realized that I need a freaking walk. I need to leave my headphones at home and just walk through the forest. And I realized that I like this weather because the world feels so empty. Empty, yet open. I need to go outside of all the things we humans have built for ourselves and I need to make the world feel like mine and let nature feel like I belong to it. I need to breathe.

The hidden days

Posted on by under Longer thoughts

Sometimes I question why I live in Sweden. Half the year, the sun barely makes it over the horizon, and when it does it’s like it’s still having trouble finding out how to actually warm something up. I love winter, sometimes I just think about my friend in France who can live close to the alps and close to the snow while still not having that dark season.

Then I remember the hidden days. You might have heard about the midnight sun. In the north of Sweden the sun doesn’t set at all in the middle of summer, it just sinks down to touch the horizon until it rises again. It’s not that extreme where I live, but still. I mostly think about it when travelling, when I see places where it’s not like that. And then I realize how much it’s worth to me, that extra amount of day you get when the sun diminishes the night into nothing. The hidden days, hiding after what would be sunset in the wintertime, but now is laid open for us, free to invade with late walks, midnight swimming and laughter while looking for berries and inhaling the fresh forest air.

There’s a bittersweetness about the swedish summer that used to make my teenage heart uneasy, longing instead for more exotic adventures and freedom from family, but I realize that I was falling for it during all that time. Falling in love with the hidden days, so fleeting in their passing and so easily broken by winter, but smelling like grass and wild strawberries and oh so sweet childhood memories. They’ve nestled into my heart together with the people I used to experience them with and now they’ll always be home to me.