Mart-deBlog

There is the saying of 'uitvliegen', in the sense of flying away from home. When I was sitting in the train to Berlin with my fat suitcase and stuffed backpack, I really felt as close to flying as one can get. It is an experience in which the senses get clear, sounds become piercing and sight becomes full. There is a new sensitivity, well-known from the childhood when everything still hurts. Although it is sad to have a melting mind, it is rejuvenating at the same time. In a way my summer prepared me for it, like a circle coming around I softened my mind back to when I entered college. I went back to computer games and careless indifference, uprooting my ways of the past three years. It is an essential experience to feel the existential control over your life, the sense of power over who one is. During my teenage years, I consciously did this every year, I recreated myself during summer sitting in the sun and looking back without contemplation, but somehow I could not do it anymore when I got into my twenties. But I think I now know how it happens: by the bounding of a period, an absolute ending of a self and its time, after which an absolute a new beginning will always follow. In this case it was the moment between the leaving behind of a home and the entering of a new environment, a moment of being disconnected. My period in Holland was clearly bounded, it ended with the last high-five with my brother; just as my life in Berlin had a clear boundary: the moment I had set foot in Ostbahnhof surrounded by the mass of Berliners in which I just fit. Two clear boundaries and nothing in between. Discontinuity is the secret.