These days, I spend a lot of time home alone, even when my wife is working from home, as she doesn't have time to spend with me. I have spent a lot of my life alone and I am comfortable with it, but when I don't get out of the house often enough, it wears on my spirit - and I don't have a lot of it to spare at the moment. So today, I decided I would spend a few hours somewhere else to write, somewhere I thought might have some rarer beauty, and maybe even something inspiring - The city art gallery. However, despite me checking the opening times, when I got there, it was closed, as they are setting up for a new exhibition. I checked the opening times from the website again, and after a few additional clicks, there was an "exceptions" page. Poor design.
Instead, I came to a café on the way home.
It is beautiful in a different way.
It is in a converted factory area that now houses small businesses, and this is a standalone building. I haven't been here for a long time, but once my wife and I were here and I described what I would do to this if it were my house. It has a high, curved ceiling with plenty of room to build a floating second floor. Essentially, while leaving all of the original red brick walls completely intact, it would be possible to build bedrooms, bathrooms and other practical areas in a free-standing house within the building. The floor is probably 400m2, so if the "house" was 200m2 spread across 2 floors, there would still be 300m2 of open space. The challenge in doing it this way, would be there would be little natural light in the bedrooms. However the living space would be surrounded by large windows on all sides.
Of course, this was just in my head and never a real possibility, but imagining interior design used to be a skill of mine. I could walk into a space, deconstruct it to a blank canvas in my mind and then reconstruct and reiterate in seconds. It was possible for me to "see the finished product" months or years before it was possible to accomplish. When I walked through what would become our house at the start of 2020, it was old and falling apart, with an eclectic mix of design disaster after disaster in every room. But this isn't what I saw. I saw more.
It used to be so easy.
But it is gone. And with it, a large percentage of my creative side went with it. In some way, it is like a piano player losing their fingers. Yes, life goes on, but the effect of the loss is profound. Especially when it was playing those keys that brought a sense of peace and enjoyment. For me, my guided imagination was my artform and I could use it to shape the physical world. It wasn't just in the design of a room, but a design of my work, my relationships, my life. It was the ability to take the reality that I had available, and create the path forward and develop the steps needed to get there. It was the creation of a blueprint of the future.
I've lost my mind.
Not in the sense that I have gone insane, but in the sense that the mind that was mine, is no longer there and in its stead, is the mind of someone unfamiliar, someone who is missing the fingers to play the piano, the brush to paint a portrait, and the feet to dance into the night. The mind of someone who has a physical self, but is missing the mental self that animates the world. A dull mind.
Or the mind of someone dull.
I needn't write about this here, nor do I really want to. However, I have always used my own experiences and observations to develop my content, rather than repeat the words and ideas of others. And, I think that part of life is loss, and we are all going to lose many things along the journey. Some of them we will be glad to lose in hindsight, others we will come to terms with their loss, and too many, we will have taken away and be left with a void that might be unfillable. That is part of life experience also.
The effects I feel and face are likely not unique to me, but are likely quite rare. But my experience of them is unique, and perhaps through open self-observation and reflection, a word, a line or a paragraph of what I write will help someone else who is struggling with something in their life, something they feel they are experiencing alone, even if they are surrounded by people trying to help. Maybe writing about these things will only help me.
It's hard to imagine.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
