Every first step is taken amidst the smallest of things

Here I am.

I’ve finally gathered up the courage to start my own blog; so far it hasn’t been too difficult: I must admit that I am quite used to publishing what I write… Or at least a part of the esoteric ensemble of texts and poems that have settled upon the surface of my mystical grotto like autumn leaves in a barren bombsite.
I am afraid that my posts will be sporadic, but maybe it’s just a question of acquiring a new habit. Ah-ha! So everything IS indeed connected – today I wrote a small piece on stepping away from daily customs and practices to embark on micro-adventures. It reads as such:

“I am one of those people who adhere to habit in an obscenely rigorous manner and are wont to stretch to the extremes of human patience and ability just to stick to petty habitudes; I am writing this whilst eating a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich, which I eat for lunch every Monday as if for some esoteric religious ritual that some weird tea-time Gods prescribed.
Although I proved just how morbid a compulsion can be, today I decided to abandon my usual routine: I bought my cucumbers at a different supermarket, took a different route home, gave some spare change to a poor elderly woman, whom I would have otherwise ignored quite some time ago.
I feel good; and that means that change isn’t always deleterious. Every first step is taken amidst the smallest of things…”

I did feel good. Verily I did – until I was overcome by some existential doubt. A doubt that is very much like a serpent’s shed skin: we see it, we know more or less where it comes from, but taken merely as it is, it’s quite empty and therefore incomprehensible; quite like the fragments people leave behind of themselves. Our personal worlds are adorned with these “pieces of shed soul” that people leave right in front us, encrypted and frail messages that we are left to decipher. We could literally give an infinite number of interpretations to any given act; we could construe a smile as a gesture of sympathy, love, scorn, animosity, as a sign of any possible emotion. People are extremely good at dissimulating at times. After all, we are all actors on the stage of reality. A ray of hope enlightens us and convinces to believe whatever we want to believe.

 

Back to the notion of “Lia Porridge’s Blog“: I’ve realised a myriad of (maybe even fatuous) things lately and one of them is that life’s far too short to relinquish passions and to be slave to petty, transient matters. So there, I’ve finally created a blog!

Quite ironically, I just opened up my WHSmith’s diary to fish out a nice quote that could conclude my first post on a positive note and on the other end of the rod I found a sentence in which Lewis Carroll covers the notion of time with a rather droll sentence:

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.”