Something weird happened after my last trip to Copenhagen. I got sad and self-conscious. Back to everyday life which somehow never turns out to be quite satisfactory and doubting my ability to care for my own life. Then doubt radiates out to details about my self-image and I end up questioning the miracle that I somehow manage to even breathe correctly. That's a common occurence. But this time was different. I felt alone because I have recently been honest with my best friend, who is the woman I love. I had to tell her: "You are my friend, but I cannot bare being separated from you. I do not enjoy our moments anymore." I check my phone for messages and feel the lack of someone to tell about my travels and thoughts but I where I would have expected regret, I don't regret anything. So I am brooding for one day and a half, waiting for the symptoms of my cold to subside, then go to my favorite coffee shop. Smalltalk, smiles, familiarity. I thank them for their company and start having more positive thoughts. In that brooding moment, I was reading Kierkegaard: "If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility". As the aphorisms of Either/Or succeed each other in the defiantly proud procession of a thinker scared of living, that is now so familiar to me, about life being like a spider throwing herself into unknown consequences or the world being miserable because people's thoughts and passions are thin like shoelaces, I am now a living testament of the same mindset, opposite conclusion: whatever you do, you regret. Whatever you do is fine. Decisions are actually not the culprit of my moods. It's the fear of not-living. And as a recent conversation with Claude revealed, I am not at all uncertain about what I want, it's my judgement of my wishes that makes everything complicated. I suffered in that friendship because I wasn't able to admit to myself, that I am not actually a friend. I was a lover. That's the reason why I insisted on an impossible amount of time on the part of someone who has other priorities in life. That's not wrong or neurotic or overly complicated. The moment I admitted and was able to formulate what I want, the uncertainty which made it impossible for me to enjoy a simple friendship went away. I am prone to say that I have lost a friend, a wonderful influence in my life. But I have lost nothing but dishonesty. I have gained clarity. Another day I had a fight with my gf because I asked Claude about what a good relationship is. It turns out, mine is pretty much all solid, including clear signs of love. But she correctly called me out on the fact that I am unclear, what I say oscillates and I generally lack enthusiasm or direction. I thought: "maybe that's just me, being avoidant, hesitant". But then I remember what I say during these fights. It's actually so clear and analytic that my gf scorns me: "you always know what to say. You always have an answer for everything". I would like for someone to actually poke holes in my reasoning. But yes in fact I do. I want to do a couple of things which are not aligned with the idea of the life of a couple. I want to spend some years in other countries. I want to have other sexual experiences. I want this, because I have the nagging feeling that I have not tried enough things in the past and I have a fear of missing out. The only thing holding me back is love, actually. I also want to build something with her, I want to see what an uninterrupted, decades long relationship with one woman could lead to. The problem is, our ideas about that are divergent too. And so I cannot help but see the comfort at home as complacency which will lead to a calm and simple life until it inevitably falls apart. Whereas the possibility of a chaotic and exciting life is immediately enticing and if everything is going to disintegrate anyway, why not make a series of radically different experiences? Because we really cannot reach a conclusion with so radically different points of view, we avoid each other. We always reconcile after 3-4 days of quarreling, we always learn again to enjoy our many beautiful small moments together until she starts to get insecure because of my lack of commitment and I drift off to the things that I am genuinely interested in at the moment. This is another manifestation of vagueness and lack of direction. It's two people avoiding each other, not admitting the real issue at hand: that they both want something different from life. What to do? Make a list of pros and cons, of reason vs. passion, ask youself what you would regret as a 80 year old. I claim this wouldn't lead anywhere. The pros outweigh the cons or vice versa depending on where you are in your mood cycle, on your experience over the last week or two. Reason vs. passion is an unfair question. Passion always wins, if you optimize for excitement and enjoyment, reason always wins if you optimize for continuity and decency. Regret at 80? You'll regret everything anyway. The other day, I had to clean up boxes of books that I have been carrying around my life for 20 years now at my in-laws. My gf and they have asked me to do that periodically, I avoided it somehow and only separated myself from books that I didn't feel strongly attached to. It was already devastating, though, because many of those were books I inherited from my parents and grand-parents, and then had to throw away. German or Czech language in France, books of literature of philosophy in the present world, almost utterly worthless objects. It took me a week to overcome that slap of absurdity. This time, I don't feel much attachments even to most books I grew up with. I even have positive thoughts. Like those books on China, Japan, the italian books I bought with my mom in Milan - I can now read them, have friends in these regions. Some authors pop up because my friends recently told me about them, in different languages, age groups. Back then, those books were my only connection to the world. All I knew and cared about had learned from them. But I had always remained a reader. Almost an archivist. That is I would know about the Trojan War or the latin authors of the european middle ages or introductory notions to real analysis without any need or intuition. I would just know, until my memory grew patchy and I didn't exactly know anymore. That's when I stopped being a reader. For a while I didn't know what to do with myself, felt almost dead. Then, I started to meet real people, gain confidence, talk, teach, laugh. I know much less today than I used to but what I do know today is much more impactful. What makes a friend happy, how to have a good time at the bakery, how to enjoy and remember an ever changing landscape. How to change the perceive length of time. How to love, how to develop friendship and so on. Yet the moment my gf and I packed the books to sell or give away, I had to lean on her shoulder to cry like I hadn't in a long time. What I see in that inconvenient pile of heavy paper that everybody around me just rolls their eyes about, are all the potential possibilities I saw for myself at a certain point, none of which materialized. And for the nth time I have to take my past which piled up as some rusty artefacts in a one way street, and essentially throw it away. A 40EUR book that fueled your passion for X will now be re-sold for 0.50. Your possible future as Y goes to charity. Z, the moment where your life finally takes off, might even be refused by them because they already have 100 versions of it. Current life in general gives us too often the signal that something we cared about is meaningless. We not only buy to throw away, we also own and grow to throw away. After 15 dehydrating minutes, my gf tells me this. "You don't need this books. They are you." "But I don't remember anything..." "Everytime you talk, you say something on the level of all these philosophers and authors. In all the languages. People like you, feel good around you. You don't need objects to remind you of who you are. They were a step of your becoming." Dixit the woman I want to leave to have some sexual adventures and bath in the passion of the new and unexplored. We're sitting at a seasonal coffee shop at the foot of the cathedral hill. A woman trips over one of the many dislodged cobble stones, falls gracefuly, gets help and moves on after putting the stone to the side. Other people flow in, some trip on other stones. A dog runs along, sniffs out the stone at the sidewalk and pees over it - "It doesn't fit in, let me fix that". I talk with my gf about this and that over coffee and ice tea. In the morning and after noon I'll browse through Kierkegaard, Montagne, Rilke, some of my old favorites. They just say the same things I do. Cioran! "Once you do not want and desire you are at home here or anywhere" or something like that. A conclusion we had about our impending move where we'll leave friends behind only to possibly make new ones. At almost 40, daily thoughts are like the post travel blues. You settle into yourself who is so calm and familiar that it's frightening. There is nothing holding me back from not settling except the fear of death and making mistakes. There is nothing holding me back from settling, except the fear of death and making mistakes. Either way it doesn't matter. That's the conclusion I reach on 80% of my days (I do keep count). That's good enough. But there is one thing that I have found undeniably true. Happiness comes from having done what you want. That awkward time is on purpose. You gain clarity about something you want, you follow it through and irrespective of whether you succeed or not, you'll be happy for having tried. Vagueness, brain fog, reluctance, inhibition, resignation, awkwardness: those take a hold of you when you don't. This is the measure by which you have to assess your moments as you live them. Do you want clarity or do you want safety? In French they have a saying: "Le risque n'evite pas le danger".