Who are you?
Are you what you possess? Are you the product of your genes? Are you the sum of what you created? Do you know who you are? And I got one more question for you: Do you really want to know who you are?
I am really satisfied with my life so far. I have always been healthy, my parents love me and I love them. I got good grades at school. I have the best friends I am able to imagine and met some of the most fascinating persons on this planet. I do not really have to worry about money and have always found a way out of unpleasing situations that my own stupidity got me in. Things are going in the direction I pushed them.
You are living a life that everyone would desire, you may say. What is your problem? There are people freezing and starving to death everyday and you have such self-indulging worries about who you are.
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a man called Dave, but then he died.
What is death to you? Is it the ending of your life? Or is it the beginning of another life, over and over again? Quite frankly, I am really glad I do not have to live forever. If I had an unlimited amout of time to do anything, I would most likely become incredibly lazy, because I could simply do it tomorrow. Or the day after tommorrow. To me, life is that short period in time between birth and death. It’s so simple. And if you think about it like that, death is the only thing that urges you to move on, to run as fast as you can.
The question is: where are we running? Where am I running? Tied to that is the question why I am running to where I am running? The only answer to that is: because I want to run there and nowhere else. To figure out where I want to go for what reason is one of the most striking and most influential possibilities in everyone’s life.
In fact, nobody can be forced to achieve this. It might never happen to you. But it never happens instantaneously. It is a long, lonely road.
I am on a beach. I have no idea how I managed to get here, apart from why I am here. A few days ago, I packed up a few clothes, a few groceries, a tent and a sleeping bag, got into my car and drove west on the A4 towards Belgium. A few kilometers before Liege, the route I printed out from Google Maps leads me off the Autobahn. It takes only a few minutes until I am completely lost. The road I am on is not indicated on my map. It takes me an hour to get back on track. And another three hours to Paris. Once I am on the circle around the city, I miss my exit to Bordeaux. I take the next one and end up in a terrible banlieu, a run-down suburb. I go back and forth, trying to find the direction to Versailles to go down south on a countryside road. I have to stop at a gas station and buy another map of the Île de France. It takes me another hour through the horrifying Parisian traffic to see the first roadsign to Versailles. After I passed by hundreds of busses, spitting out thousands of tourists next to Louis XIV’s palace, I drive for a while through beautiful landscapes and finally find my way back on the highway.
It is already dark when I arrive at the bridge to l’Île de Ré. My right heel hurts from being stuck on the gas pedal for 14 hours in a row. As I arrive on the Island, everything is closed, everyone’s sleeping. It starts to rain. I follow signs towards a small campground which consists of a small patch of grass and restrooms. The flashlight saves my life as I set up my tent in the cold, dark rain.
The next morning I get up, pack up my stuff and leave without paying, assuming that nobody noticed my late arrival and presence. The sun shines as I drive down the coast. The air-conditioning is switched off to save gas and money. Instead I pull down all the windows. I can barely see what is happening right of me because I put my 6’7’’ surfboard into my 12’ car, flipping down the back seats, pulling it inbetween the driver’s and the passenger’s seat, reaching from the right exterior mirror to the far left of the trunk. I am looking for a place where I heard there was a beachbreak, eventhough I cannot remember its name. I make a right eastwards towards the shore and after another 45 minutes I end up on a sandy parking lot shaded by pine trees.
So I sit here and listen to the waves. There is nothing to watch. Nobody is there. I haven’t got a cell phone. I barely know where I am. Everything that I know, that I am used to right now is myself. And it is these moments in time when your vision becomes so clear. You focus on nothing but yourself because you know that everything around you is replacable. And it is these moments in which you look back and question everything you did so far. Why did you do this and what purpose served that? Did I do all this because I really wanted it? Or was it because I assumed it might have been what I wanted?
When people break up with the ones they love, when someone they loved just died, when things like that happen, people need to be alone. Is there only such mournful occasions to be with yourself?
If you feel the desire to dive down the depths of your self, it’s time to get away. Get away from what you know. Get away from everything that holds you on a leash.
It is moments like that on beach which change you. Actually they do not change you, but they can tell you which way to go. Life is not a dead end – it is an intersection. However, it is a one way. You can never go back. I never wanted to go back. Aldous Huxley once wrote: “Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.” Behind this quotation is the thought, that whatever happens to you, it will not have no effect on you. How you deal with what happens to you is to constitute how it will affect you in the future.
I believe the one way character of life is a precious notion. Above all because it neglects that I am. It rather enunciates the term of becoming, of never standing still, of never stopping to evolve, to alter, to change.
I have come across quite a few people who felt likewise me – in many different matters but in particular about becoming. Among them are lots of musicians, many are writers, but all of them are artitsts in one way or another. The least of them I have met in person. The only connection between them and me are shared thoughts. It is bizarre how sometimes I feel this connection is so much stronger than the one to the people around me.
One work that made me feel like this was Thus spoke Zarathustra. I stumbled upon it not a long time ago. When I read those lines it felt like someone has been watching my life, my emotions, my thoughts since I was born – someone who knew more about me than I do. It was like someone found words for what I was struggeling to express. It made clear what I have always been thinking and seemed to verbalize even what I was going to think in the future. This book became the articulation of my mind and it unveiled things in me that I never saw before. I felt like I was told things for which it takes an entire lifetime to figure them out.
Do you know what this feels like? Let me try to envelope it in words. You are being hit in the face. You taste the blood in your mouth. You get that weird feeling of numbness in your nose. You can feel splinters of what used to be your teeth on your tongue – and they are damn sharp. At the same time you are unable to move. Your jaw rests in a position that makes you look like a primate. Your eyes stare at something that you cannot discern. Your body is completely paralized. You forget about the presence of your body. You forget about where you are. Even your thoughts freeze. You are sitting there and you are unable to think of anything. You think of absolutely nothing. In this moment you could die. You could die and it would not matter to you at all. You have just found a truth which kicks the ass of everything that happened before – a truth that is undefeatable and has instantaneously become a turning point in your life.
Whatsoever, you never know whether you were right in what you did. The day might come on which you discover you were running down the wrong road with blinders on, no matter how right it felt. At that point you may know your valleys, but you have never seen your highest summits. The one single opportuniy’s name to rewind your tape of experiences is oblivion. It is not going to change who you have become so far but it offers you new roads of building up on what you have been through – if you choose to treat your past like that.
On the other hand, the fascinating thing about forgetting is that it works automatically. You leave things behind which you do not need anymore. Get your head clear for what you are about to become.
Why am I telling you all this? All these words might sound bizarre, absurd and even moronic in your ears. These exploring words are probably less about me than much more about you. However, if you feel like I wasted your time, I am sincerely disconsolate because you certainly could have spent it more wisely on watching TV.
If not so, here is a very few final words of my congenial brothers that I could not have pronounced better in any way:
“Who we are depends on three factors: what we inherited, what our surroundings gave to us and what we made in free choice out of our genes and environment.” (Aldous Huxley)
„Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee? Canst thou be judge for thyself, and avenger of thy law?” (F.W. Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra)
