There are two pieces of advice gathered in the past 17 years I would like to share here.
“Learn Mandarin.”
This was the advice I was given as I looked over the edge of Viktor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning, on the Blue Line ride from Randolph Street copywriting job back to my studio apartment on the borderlands of Wicker Park, Bucktown, and Logan Square -Chicago neighbourhoods undergoing their facade lifts and rent spikes. He spoke to me more, and with increasingly detailed explantations about his economic and stock market research. From the smell and looks of things on his side of the train, a bath or sewn closed shoes hadn’t exerted his mind. The intensity at which he conveyed his messaged showed his focus wasn’t on hygiene as much as it were on sorting impending disaster, however real or imagined. I folded my book about finding meaning in my lap to listen, as I had been leaning through a snippets of Nietzsche. I was briefly alleviated from understanding trauma by tuning into his presentation. The man assured me before departing a stops before mine, to learn Mandarin if I wanted to survive the future. 17 years later I would recount this story to friends in a cafe in Norway, pondering life’s choices-filled by the understanding meaning as fully constructed form of social exchange and language a means of navigation through the maritime age of land living.
“Exercise the demons.”
Every night no matter where I have lived, I walk, at night. Everyone I meet, save for a few, tell me how dangerous this is, and how I must be inviting myself to harm. I’ve always found the evening stroll healthy for my mind, and better for my body. Aside from the immediate benefits, I am permitted to witness sage stray animals take off with their bounty, learn the limits and expand the range of my audible sensation, and attune the hair on the back of my hand impulse of whether the dark is safe or not. Looking both ways before crossing is important day or night, and one night I had looked left then right, and began to cross I heard the bell out of the dark, from the left-and a wavy haired man on a bike exclaiming, “You’ve got to exercise those demons.” Indeed, night or day, movement sets our bodies and minds from from all the memories and ideas that trap us in our homes.
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12 Februar 2018. Oslo, Norway
R Wolfe