Reduction, expansion, fragility, and protection

This thing we call life is just a live-performance. It is not one reality, for we go through only one version of it — the individual one.

An instruction booklet to life can not be printed, not ahead of birth, not during the performance, not while getting off the stage.

The first couple of years we are absorbing smiles, caress, flavour, rain, the cold, warmth, sounds of words, whistles, vibration, lights. Then we begin replicating sounds, want, dislike. We begin to understand endurance.

For years it is like looking at a small table covered with a fair amount of things which become increasingly tangible, day by day.

For some, the process of identifying things on the table is a quick one, and it may be somewhat easy to recognize the objects displayed, and the space between them. For some, the focusing and zooming in may take longer.

Perhaps this whole performance is merely the process of reduction, expansion, and acquiring a taste for fragility, all in such a way that we end up clinging to protection, or daring every single shape of it.

Reflecting on life as such, I know that from the very beginning, my learning process was supported by an intense but passive absorption of things on the table. Perhaps, rather than things, an ocean — a magnificent one which provoked no fear in me. And that ocean attracted me every second. It still does.

Viewing life retrospectively, that is how it feels today. And it is now, and during the last couple of decades when I have been able to dissect what this performance is about. Not what it has been but what it is. It is now that I have been able to reduce, expand, and notice the fragile. It is now when I have recognize the irrelevance of protection.