Window Reflections

There is this enormous window around fifty meters across the street. A man is walking back and forth between the pulsating flickers of a disco light, holding something that resembles the curves of a baseball bat. I don't really know what is happening behind the reflections of this awfully large pane of glass but it is hauntingly interesting to me. Maybe because it puts my mind onto a straight and easily digestible track of thoughts, some coherent baseline of stimulation that doesn't ferociously scream at me in the shape of short-form-content and bass-boosted alterations of TikTok charts.

Another guy just wheeled out a cart covered in a tangled black mess of cables which reminds me way too intensely of the extra large Venom movie posters decorating the thirty feet tall gallery of my local cinema. The figures who were so eagerly watching him up until five minutes ago have vanished behind the balding branches of a Ginkgo tree, covering a large portion of the glass front, thus diffusing this establishment's happenings into a shroud of mystery. The disco ball is going off in endless circles of primary colours, projecting an elliptical cloud of light onto the paved plaza beneath. This is the first time in a while I have felt truly peaceful. Between the mental toll of working two jobs and freelancing, I have been unintentionally depriving myself of the joy of self-expression. It's been quite a long time since I sat down like this to write, read, or paint.

I spent a large portion of my life believing that happiness is the opposition to depression. I have since come to learn that the true counterpart to this is self-expression. It is basic human need as much as is hydration or movement. She who does not have the space nor the ability to express herself will wither like daffodils in their inability to stretch petals toward missing rays of sunlight on a cloudy day.

The primary coloured illumination has run its course. The silver mosaic of the disco ball is no longer dancing in an array of rainbow hues, it is now merely glistening in the dim and yellow light cast by three A23 bulbs. Or so I assume. The guy, dressed in fully white except for a black polo peeking out the edges of his cardigan, has just carried a dog-like figurine across the room. Watching the unfolding of this preparation feels like a warm blanket tucking in the slimy, cranial mess that is my mind.

Maybe the world would be a better place if more people sat down across window panes.

We live in a society powered by the incoherent identification with achievement, which leaves little room for focusing inward to bring the intrinsic outward, it instead teaches to take what is outward and let it root inward. It robs us of genuine expression and seeks to depress the internal with external stimuli. There is this German saying 'Hast du was, bist du was!' which roughly translates to "If you have something, you are something!"

We constantly strive to possess - job titles, certificates, perceptions of others, the need to be meaningful, to have 'meaningful', to do meaningful. A cultural epidemic that even I have become patient of. Don't get me wrong - it's not a bad thing to wish for a life with meaning, purpose and remembrance. But when has this meaning turned into the need to be grand and known?

Why can helping a snail across the road not be as meaningful?

When did we let others decide what has meaning and what does not?

Shouldn't I be the one dictating grandness in the scale that is my own life?

I haven't seen the guy in at least 10 minutes. It might be time to go home.