bang bang

the year 2011 is inevitably drawing to its end. no matter how nonchalantly one tries to approach the matter i reckon it is more or less compulsory to look back a bit and try to make some kind of summary of the past 12 months. what has changed since the last time rockets were fired to the sky, what has remained the same -- what has disappointed and what has been rewarding. what was good, what was bad, and most importantly -- how to improve that balance during the next year.

but as convenient a focus point the start of a new calendar year is, it might be more useful to have those kinds of reflection points more often. it doesn't take a new year's resolution to get rid of a nasty habit or otherwise make changes in your life -- as obvious as it may seem, it is sometimes easy to forget that every day can be the start of something new, or end of something old. all it takes is a little bit of courage, and a little bit of blunt honesty as well.

you do, after all, choose the way you live your life.

unknown territory

below are some pictures that haven't been taken at 6 am or in helsinki, but considerably later and in copenhagen where i just spent one of my best and un-christmassy christmases ever. maybe the two are one and the same?

objects in the dark

i sometimes have a bit difficulties in understanding people saying they don't have time to exercise. this is not true for there is always time -- it's just a question of prioritizing it. say, over sleep. or social life. eating. i wouldn't recommend over personal hygiene or taking your medication but pretty much everything else can be re-thought or organized.

i am obviously exaggerating, but only to an extent. 

it's just a question of scheduling.

wonder why

i am a relatively lazy person with a somewhat short attention span.


i know this contradicts quite strongly with the fact that i get up early and go running in addition to doing ashtanga and going regularly to spinning (and thoroughly enjoy all of these), but it is true. 


i have thought about this equation more than once, and i'm not the only one who has found it a paradox. people have suggested that i am not, indeed, lazy at all, but this is not true -- for example, i got my old bike stolen partly because i didn't have the energy to take it a bit further behind a locked gate but instead left it on a street. granted, it was a street i never would have thought a bike would get stolen, but still.  


and then there's the attention thing --  it's more often than not hard for me to sit through a film (i either turn it off or if i can't, i.e. not watching alone, fall asleep) and i get bored quite easily which results in anxiousness and annoyance-- and yet i have no problem running two hours on a treadmill, probably the most boring thing after watching paint dry.


selective laziness? split personality? obsessive mind? i haven't got a clue.

not quite

he would spend long periods of time just staring at himself in the mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of himself; a flicker of the person he had became but who he didn't know. there were times when he came close to seeing  -- a minimal movement of an eye he had not instigated or an involuntary twitch of the upper lip that was not his -- but he never seemed to quite succeed, never was able to tell if it was him or someone else he was looking at.

one of those

sometimes you have just plain shit mornings. 


it can start from something relatively small that you drag with you from the previous day, something that may or may not keep you up during the night -- but in any case something did, so when you wake up to the absolute darkness this country has to offer at quarter past five in the morning you really don't feel like you've slept all that much. or at least not even close to the amount you would need to in order to get through the 10 hr working day ahead of you.


with those preconditions it doesn't turn the what started out as an unpleasant morning into a good one that there is both rain and a bastardly wind outside, or that you have to stuff your iphone into your glove in order to protect it from the said rain, which is both very uncomfortable and extremely inconvenient. it also doesn't help that you can't really see anything because of the raindrops in your glasses or that the nice tune playing in your headphones is basically useless because that wind is blowing so loud that it drowns out pretty much everything else.


when your ankle or whatever joint it is this time that is bothering you starts to give some signs of its existence it can only add to your annoyance, as can the fact that you run into a puddle with a temperature and area of the arctic sea, only because you can't see a bloody thing because the street lights happen to be off. as you trot along with your soaking wet feet and almost get run over by a bus which doesn't seem to pay attention to the fact that the light for the pedestrians is green, it sort of becomes too much and you fall into a state of whatever-ness; the shit morning has taken over and there is not much to be done about it anymore.


i try to be really zen about it all and i'm doing a decent job; at least i haven't hurt anyone physically (yet). i think this is the difference between a normal person and a person who beats their wife, or kids, or becomes a serial killer who wears their victims as a hat -- they don't slouch into the resigned state of numbness brought about the shit mornings. 


life unfortunately is not a yacht in the mediterranean you can sit on drinking cocktails. i wish it were but it's not.  it's more like the fittest analogy of finnish winter i have yet seen -- a crow poking a pile of frozen vomit on a grey saturday morning.


rant over. surprisingly enough there was absolutely nothing of beauty or interest this morning for me to take a picture of (or maybe it was just me) so i'm posting an old photo, taken maybe in october or so.


it can only get better from here, i guess.

maybe, maybe not

it's amazing how our perceptions of things change. something that meant the world to you can now be completely mundane, just like something you don't give a second thought to now can sometime in the future be the reason for a life-altering decision. why is this so? why can't we ever really say that this is something that will never change, no matter what -- i will, indeed, always be passionate about collecting stamps and that will always be so.


until it's not. isn't it annoying that you can't be sure even of your own needs and desires?


you change so your view of the world and what you want it to encompass change as well; i suppose this is only natural. where that change in you comes from, well, that's completely another matter. but this flux of interests and focus points also creates a continuous state of uncertainty; you can never be sure. of course there are things that remain static, things we carry with us throughout our lives; it's not even that rare. but the truth is that even in the case of those we cannot know, never; we can just go with the assumption.


sometimes you hit, sometimes you miss. you don't know until you get there.

awesomeness

do you know the feeling when you're running and it's kind of dark and miserable and cold and windy -- and you just don't want to stop?  the feeling which makes you really remember how absolutely magnificent it is that you can do what you're doing and how very grateful it makes you to have that ability? the feeling when you realize that the even rhythm of your feet hitting the gravel is probably one of the best sounds in the world?


i do.

i suppose

there's so many things in this world that you are supposed to (and not supposed to) do. the rules and standards set by not only the society we live in but also by the people and conditions we are surrounded with all place their own assumptions and starting points. trying to live up to these, and especially the bar you set for yourself according to them, i think, is one of the crafters of the so-called reality that sometimes smacks you in the face. you know, that moment when you feel like you have gone wrong somewhere and you start to question what the hell are you actually doing in the situation you have got yourself into to, and why did you get there.

of course one could say not to care about these external, societal or otherwise learnt codes of conduct; but that's not really how it works; you can't exist outside your own framework. things we do define what we are -- but why do we do the things we do?

why does anybody do anything? what's the incentive? i don't believe in pure altruism; therefore i think we always do things because we think we have to or because we think we want to. one way or another, there is always something in it for you -- even a charity worker is driven by the pleasure he or she gets out from helping someone else. but there are times when the expectation of what you are supposed to do or how you are supposed to be blurs your vision so that it  misleads you into thinking that you are doing what you need to or what you want to, when in the actual fact you are doing neither.

and that is a problematic spot to be in. for in order for you to get out from it you first have to realize you're in it; and for you to realize you're in it, you have to understand that you were never supposed to be anything at all. 

keep the streets empty for me

one of the best things about running very early is that you get the city all to yourself. minus the few random people you come across every now and then, the streets are pretty much empty, which gives the opportunity to experience the normally crowded public spaces in a whole new way -- alone.


running across the empty charles bridge in prague in a summer morning has to be one of the most beautiful experiences i have had through morning runs; close may come sunrise in kensington gardens in london or the empty banks of danube in budapest. running in places where you during the day  couldn't -- city centers, popular routes, tourist attractions, that kind of things -- gives a very particular feeling; it is almost as if that place, so well-known to people and used by so many, exists then only for you. it also gives you a possibility to create a much more deeper relationship with that location; and when you for some reason or another visit it during the day, when it's dressed in its normal layer of people and action, you know that it is not all there is and you almost feel a sense of mutual secret.

and just like that

6.20 am, rain, wind 12 m/s, +5°C


soundtrack


talking about the beauty of misery.