You’ll know

There is a sensation that overwhelms you the first time you lock eyes and you share a conversation. You know. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds – minutes top – but the feeling arrives. Or it doesn’t. You know.

With every person you meet, you can tell from the start if the continuation will be good, or at least worth pursuing. Be it out of simple curiosity, you might give it a chance. But the intuition is real and often it is much more aware of the situation you’re in than you yourself. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.

Be it with friends you’ve grown out of sync with, or with potential flirts that have nothing more to offer than a few interesting initial conversations, your psychosomatic signs will make you understand when it’s time to move on and find others who might be more of an intellectual stimulation as well as a pleasant company.

As we mature, as we make our way through life, we acknowledge that there’s always much more to living than simply scraping the surface. You quickly tire of people who cannot hold an intriguing or interesting conversation with depth that has nothing to do with gossip or daily routines, but rather something genuinely attention-grabbing: things you read, or simply thoughts you catch as they fleet instantaneously from your mind and may be interesting to share. From the slightest silliness to the most bizarre thing you heard, anything out of the ordinary can actually be a measure of how much there is to discuss with anyone after all has been said and done.

We tend to seek more out of the people around us. Because if we ourselves are active and in constant search of a higher level in everything we do, we want to surround ourselves with like-minded, goal-oriented, perceptive people. We help each other grow, evolve, be better. That’s how (healthy) relationships work.

We encounter so many people in our lives. Some for a while, others come and go, and few remain. But each time, if you think back to that first happenstance, you feel it. You sort of know how important or not they’ll be.

There are people whom you keep forever and hope to hold on to. Because that feeling is mutual.

But there is an even stronger emotional bond to those who entered your life, disappeared for a while, but searched their way back in. It’s as if there is an invisible thread uniting your lives and drawing you back together wherever you’ve been. It’s those people you feel most comfortable with. It’s people like that we need but rarely find. Who ignite that special feeling. And you just know.

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The slightest in a day

Research has at various times shown that messy people are in fact smarter. That is not an excuse for being disorganised though. It just goes to show that a creative mind has ideas lying around everywhere. And that is represented in real life too.

In addition, the more ideas you have swerving around in your head waiting to be implemented, the more energetic you are and the more chances you have that your adrenaline levels strike a high.

In fact, this is the reason you often can’t sleep at night, tossing and turning in bed, waiting impatiently to fall asleep. But at the same time, the minute you sit on a couch to watch some TV or something of the like, in order to de-pressure yourself, that is exactly when – all so suddenly – you fall asleep. It is almost instantaneous.

You most often feel like this. You wake up already tired, wishing you could stay in bed for a few more hours of sleep. But the urge and the stress of having so many things to do, don’t let you. You’re too diligent for that. You start to work, simultaneously sticking to-do notes everywhere and abruptly it happens: as if you’re injected with an insulin-dopamine dose, you become so adrenaline-high, multitasking seems too little to describe what you can do. Even as night falls, you’re still high.

It is a law of nature, however, that everything that goes up must come down (so it can have the energy to go up again). Just like that, you feel your mood fall. And so does your energy. And that is when you try to understand that you’ve done all that you could for the day. 24 hours are very often not enough. But being even in the slightest productive, is much more than most people do in their entire week, to say the least.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re worth more than you give yourself credit for. And for that, you can achieve so much more than you believe.

 

Also part of Daily Prompt: Slight

No news is not a fact

You know that feeling when you go to bed at night at a decent hour, tired but satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, and then wake up the next morning refreshed and ready to actively engage in a full day ahead? Could you describe what that feels like please? Because in our hectic lives, this all sounds like a luxury. Being able to go to sleep early and wake up having adequately rested.

These current times are interesting in many ways – in the fact that revolutionary movements spur to life, that innovations succeed one another faster than you realise, that societies strive to become more open-minded, that politics reveals just how dirty a game it can be, and terrorism overshadows the entire globe. Everything seems to evolve so rapidly that you sleep-in for a few hours more, and wake up feeling you lost an entire year due to all the things that have happened: violent massacres, gruesome juvenile crimes, train accidents, lost airplanes, mass shootings, explosions, financial crises, political elections, the emergence of radical movements, and so much more than you could ever imagine.

We have reached such a point that when we read fewer than five items of news per day, we begin to worry that we missed something. It’s that feeling when all of a sudden your heart begins to pump faster and anxiety overwhelms you, because you are almost certain there is something you didn’t see or you haven’t heard of. It’s like the restless calm before the storm; when you know that the next day will definitely contain a shower of news headlines to compensate the fewer ones the day before.

But all of this is exhausting. Not only for people who have to cover the news. But for everyone who reads and listens to it. It is physically and mentally stressful to hear all this negativity span our lives. To constantly add to the stress of contemporary living and to know that things will hardly get any better.

So how do you manage this situation? Probably in the only way you can: with a nap whenever possible. Because you may feel strong and able, but after a while, your organism itself will begin to call on you – through headaches that turn into migraines, upset stomach, and drowsiness – sounding an internal alarm that you need to slow down, rest and maybe even hit pause. The news will happen whether you chase it or not. And unless you have some kind of superpower, there is little you can do to change that.

 

Also part of Daily Prompt: Struggle

Turn to page 82

The thing with bookworms (people who love books, not worms who live in them) is that they are deeply attracted by the writing on them, particularly that on the cover. And especially the back cover. So, when you grab a book with a huge “82” drawn on the front on a blueish background and with all sorts of creatures and objects flying, crawling or even drilling their way out of the number itself, it does catch your attention. So, you turn it over to read the summary on the back. All it says is “This book has a significant focus on the number 82. It tells a story like no other, which will remain with you long after you read it. Now, you want to find out what the number 82 has anything to do with it, don’t you? Well, you’ll just have to read the book then…” You think it is silly. But it already has you gripped. And the next thing you know, you’re comfortable in your relaxing armchair, with your soft, fleece blanket at your knees, and a steaming hot cup of tea at the table beside you, and you turn the first page of this new book.

It had a fascinating start. It was a story about a young man who had learned to read from a shepherd who took refuge in his barn one night. And he inadvertently found his first book one morning when he went to offer the shepherd-guest some food but discovered he was gone. All he left behind was a book. Intrigued, the young man began to read it, as he believed it would solve the mystery of the shepherd’s presence.

That is when it first appeared.

“Turn to page 82”.

Was this a Fighting Fantasy book? It couldn’t be. But the man tried to find page 82 to turn to anyway. (So did you). Page 82 was nowhere to be found. (It was nowhere in this book either). It was not between pages 81 or 83, nor misplaced in any other part of the book. Nor were there any signs whatsoever that it had been ripped out. Page 82 had simply never been a part of that book. (Nor in this one – clever, huh?).

But drowning in curiosity, the man continued to read on from where he left off. A few pages later, it appeared again.

“Turn to page 82”.

The same process was wearingly repeated. The man continued to read on. It was a story that seemed incoherent. With weird animals, imaginary creatures and ghosts appearing out of nowhere, with the story taking place on earth, in the ocean, on different planets, in different universes, at different times even. It was utterly confusing, but for some reason it kept you wanting more. That’s the other thing with bookworms – they must finish the books they start reading; it’s a matter of principle.

So whenever the prompt to turn to page 82 appeared – and it appeared quite often – the man simply ignored it and continued to read on. (So did you). He had still not understood the storyline or purpose of the book, but was profoundly drawn into it by now. (And coincidentally, so were you).

Alas, he reached the final page. He thought that finally he might understand what all this “turn to page 82” was about. It turns out, however, that the book would eventually end in a cliché: this was all a dream. The young man had apparently imagined it all – the strange paradoxes, the hen fighting with an elephant, the appearance of a yoku (a beast which was half eagle, half something that resembled a lion-snake) and its defeat using rat’s poison that was taken from a far away planet that could only be reached by planting a specific type of bean that grew from tomato plants watered with coke. It was so confusing that you were surprised you had managed to last until the end. So, although you were deeply disappointed that all this time you were reading something that was in essence never there, a smile did form on your face when you read the last sentence explaining that the man had fallen asleep in his quest to find page 82 in a book that simply did not have it because a publisher had been distracted when numbering the pages.

And that is when you closed the cover and put the book down. “Well, that was ingenious”, you thought.

 

Inspired by Daily Prompt: Connect the Dots