Tag: understanding

Life’s Pot Of Gold

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

My eye hurts and I’ve felt a little sore the last two days. I think I need a holiday. Summer is drawing to a close, the numbers of visitors to this little village are ever so slightly decreasing and it feels like a period of time is drawing to a close. With Autumn comes the shedding of leaves as we move into a season of rest and recovery. The hibernation is upon us and with it like it’s time to step back out into the world. It is both daunting and exciting to make another change in life when you have been within one version of existence for so long. I was supposed to only be in this village for two months and that was last October. I won’t be giving my friends the satisfaction of having stayed for a full year but at eleven months it’s not exactly been a fly by visit. I understand more now and have gained an appreciation for a life in one place which I didn’t have before, as well as life already lived strangely enough. Despite being desperate for a holiday and being able to see something new I now know I am capable of returning to a state of existence previously beyond me. Will I miss it when I’m move one. Probably actually yes. But not this exact version.

When in a few years from now the stories of peoples time in lockdown are all out I look forward to reading about them. Of course there will be people who just drank beer, had BBQ’s and got bored but there will be as many who learnt new things and ways of being. When I speak to people here invariably they all say the same thing that they hated lockdown after a while and were just desperate to get back to work. Maybe I have been asking the wrong people but it is also one of the reason’s I know I can’t stay here. I love it very much but I need more, I need to be surrounded by people who want more. Maybe more is unfair because I’m probably just repeating previous mistakes in my understanding and valuing others, I just want different. Something else, something other than this version of existence. The constant search through the permanent existential crisis of life. But nothing is permanent, not even crisis and certainly not ones involving purpose and worth. Yet we continue struggling through them, determined to find an elusive answer we’ve promised ourselves exists. Was the pot of gold not buried below the very tree he was sitting under as he first devised how best to leave in search of prosperity. Despite everything; knowing, understanding and being still remain divided. Can they ever come together?

Yet it is more positive than it sounds. If anything has become obvious from recent events it’s that in life you just keep going. We find joy and happiness in the unexpected but we must be open to seeing and embracing these unexpected. To understand that everyone has a pot of gold out there somewhere but that they themselves already have both the map and the spade is key. First though we must stop trying to use others maps and others tools. With this all becomes exciting once more. It actually is possible. It’s always been possible. It’s just down to us to make it probable.

Instinctively Morbid Curiosity

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Two ambulances just raced past my window. If this were a busy city and not a seaside village, and if it had been just one ambulance and not two, I would have thought nothing of it. Two ambulances racing passed in a slightly out of the way spot raises the curiosity alarm. Are they heading towards the beach? If so you’d imagine there would be a coastguard follow close behind, but maybe the coastguard is already there. Perhaps there’s been a crash on the road, even though there are small and slow roads around here idiots still treat it like there’re in a rally that only they know about. I’m sure there are endless possibilities and I should stop this bizarrely morbid curiosity i’ve got going on. We’re strange though human beings, we do want to know. We want to know what has happened. We want to jump in our cars and follow them. We want to drive by and slow down under the pretence of driving carefully and respectfully passed the incident even though we forget the road and don’t once take our eyes off the scene. I drove passed a fresh accident in Portugal once, the body of a once living, talking and breathing human being was just lying there beside the road in the rain with a white sheet over it. I won’t forget that scene, it also makes me slightly less tempted to drive slowly passed any other accidents. But I still will because I’m curious and human.

I suspect it is probably related to some survival instinct within us. The same thing that leads us to search out for the bad news instead of the good. We want to know what the danger is. Perhaps those two ambulances just raced off to an incident which I should know about because knowing about it will in some way help me to stay safe. Perhaps it’s part of some snowballing incident which I must see so I know to get out of it’s way. Most likely not but something instinctive within me wants to know and there is always a rational explanation we can use if we want to take the fun out of anything. It is far more satisfying to imagine we’re somehow uniquely curious beings, alone with our Sherlock Holmes levels of observation, understanding and discovery. But we’re probably not. We’re just scared animals wanting to know if what we just saw may in any way lead to something that could hurt us, or something that we could learn from so to prevent ourselves one day hurting ourselves in the same situation. Having broken it down slightly it does make me feel silly for wanting to jump in my car and follow them. Let’s be honest it’s pretty ludicrous behaviour. It’s so unfortunate that my instincts are therefore irrational. But irrational keeps us alive then. Or maybe not. I’m sure I can probably work out a rational argument to disprove that either way.

A Tall Tree In A Dark Forest

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I was lying in bed this morning feeling frustrated. I’ve not been sleeping as well as I usually do and that usual is to close my eyes and suddenly the alarm is going off nine hours later. I’m not sure why I’m not, but for whatever reason I find it understandably annoying. The frustration I suspect is like a wind that gives the fire oxygen but it’s a lack of something that’s the kindling.

I’ve led a reasonably interesting life so far, been to a few places and met many faces. I don’t really feel proud of it like it’s some accomplishment despite the positive response I get when I tell some people. There is certainly a lack of contentment and despite how it may appear I feel a constant drive to achieve things. I often see some of my friends or really successful famous people and I’m envious of their lives. They seem to have a success I don’t. Careers, homes, families and bank balances yet I’m thirty four and my instincts have rejected all of these things until now. In fact I still see the futility of some of them and I know the things they have sacrificed to achieve them, things I’m seemingly still unwilling to as I plan my next adventure. Can we adventure forever though? We can’t eat our memories, we can’t shelter under them and eventually we just become those repetitive old travellers others avoid because all they have is their stories. I don’t often tell my stories unless they come up as a relatable anecdote, I don’t want to be that person.

So why the frustration? I hope you don’t feel me to be self indulgent with this piece but it’s simply I know expressing thoughts like this can help others with their own thoughts. I’m not saying my thoughts are anything special but more that I’m not unique and we all suffer the same things just through different eyes. The frustration stems from a lack of something in life as I said. I’m not sure if it’s a home because I have one now and it’s great and safe but it’s not going to bring me happiness on it’s own. Maybe it’s a family? A wife and kids. Again I’m unsure of that, although I don’t doubt it would be nice to have a woman in my life. Perhaps it’s just wanting it all, or more precisely wanting an idea of how I imagine it’ll be.

I was thinking that for all the knowledge I’ve learnt over the years; meeting wise people, reading wise texts, experiencing moments of understanding; I still don’t seem to put much of this into practice in my own life. It would explain why it is still knowledge within and not wisdom. The only thing I’ve learnt is that unlike twenty five year old me I try to avoid giving wise enlightened advice or talking in that empty way people do when they think they know it all. I feel an immediate inclination to end the conversation, or I’ll carry it on but sometimes it just feels stupid. I know it can impress people, and you see people taking it in but it doesn’t feel real. Unless you start living it it’s just a series of empty words.

A series of desires about something we imagine we want and a series of empty words then. I know the rhetoric about contentment and desires but I’m not content and I still desire. I know the words that give the impression of a level of enlightened but I feel as far from enlightened as I’ve even been. This is the frustration then. Why what I know doesn’t correlate in any way to how I act. This is why I feel confident I can say this aloud and it will resonate with others, another thing I know is that others don’t act on what they know either. Perhaps it’s just part of being a fallible human. Perhaps we just need more than knowledge of words. This drive to achieve life, live it to whatever fullest version we choose. Again this is just an idea of a desire. I think I need to end this here because I can see myself going in circles. The answers aren’t attached to my tail. Maybe the answers aren’t attached to anything. Maybe there are no answers. Perhaps that’s what I’m missing, but what does that even mean? Just empty fucking words again.

Discovery

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

“Your twenties are for discovering who you are” said nobody today but to paraphrase Chris Ryan on his podcast I heard today, that is exactly more or less what he said. However I’m not entirely sure I agree, or do, and think one way or another I may be wrong. If none of that makes any sense that is acceptable. I agree with him because that is what many people do in their twenties and I know that because that is exactly what I did. My twenties were great and I had all sorts of adventures as I explored the world, life and myself but during this period I was sure I had evolved into a new person I’m not entirely convinced how much that resembles me now. As I write this I am also jumping back and forward between being sure of what I think so really I can’t offer you coherence unfortunately.

On one hand after all that self discovery I can see in hindsight that much of it was an illusion, an idea of myself within the world I inhabited. Does that mean it was not me though, or is that the person I am when in that particular environment? At the same time while I now appear to be back in the UK in a situation I arguably grew up in, how different am I now to how I would be had I never left? In reality I know I wouldn’t be this person and I know I am very much an outsider in this world, but arguably I realise now I was in many of the other worlds I explored too. Where I disagree in that case with the initial statement is that perhaps your twenties are for exploring other sides of you before you settle back into your true self, but a self fully inspired and shaped by all those things you discovered in your twenties. I may have just contradicted myself in that one sentence. No matter what happens I can’t unexperience and unlearn things, and would never want to, so everything else risks requiring hypotheticals which are completely pointless and valueless for this. In that case exploring all the other sides I hadn’t realised existed before means I now take all of them as one and find myself in my mid-thirties having discovered who I am. The more I write the more I suspect there may be some truth in this. Mentally too, to understand this seems to take some weight off my mind. It’s funny how heavy an understanding of oneself and ones own worth can weigh us down. What a confusing flip flop back and forth self-discovery and understanding seem to be. And it ends in your twenties you say?