carpe fucking diem

There is something horrible about being at a cross-road. Facing too many avenues at once is confusing and it is impossible to go on without deciding on that route in a logical, sensible way. But then, choosing to listen to your heart or your head is another cross-road. I should be thankful that there are no dead-ends in sight. With all the graduating, leaving and goodbye that has recently been and gone, I think more and more about myself in a year, myself in two years, myself in ten years and struggle with the choices available to me now. They are all blessings and burdens.

Seize the day. Seize the opportunity. Just do it, just make the choice to say "Yes". Simple advice to give, seemingly simple advice to take. Unless of course opportunities arise that contradict each other, and in the process of being thankful for the options and showing gratitude all round, a decision is left unmade because the conflicting options are just too good to say no to. To write my feelings and send them off into the Internet labyrinth, or keep them to myself; to say yes to a great job I don't have time for, or devote my time to what I already have. Accept, or decline/ send, or discard/ heart, or head? These may seem like very simple conundrums, but the minute I come to what I see as the perfect marriage between rationality and gut feeling, something makes me change my mind, and the chase for the answer begins all over again. To email or not to email? My gut quotes Virginia Woolf, who wrote "It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels". It also seems to know Sir Francis Bacon, who said "Silence is the virtue of fools" and speaks the words "When the heart is on fire, sparks always fly out of the mouth". My heart screams my favourite Shakespeare quote, "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again." I click "Send". I think this is logical. My heart and head are both suitably satisfied. But before long, I am thinking "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt". Mark Twain said that. Shit.

I am a Gemini. As a rule, we are all talk and no walk. Thinking and conveying our thoughts is our forte, but when it comes to the doing part, we usually require somebody else to do for us. Not that we are lazy. Believe me, my mind races faster than a Kenyan on miaow-miaow. It is death by indecision that is the end of us. My Libran friend and I regularly talk circles around each other and whatever topic we have managed to flit to. After three hours, however, our initial question, the reason for our meeting, is still completely unanswered. She is the air to my air. We drift together. And when I'm done drifting, my Capricorn sister is always on hand. "Get over it" is a much-used phrase. Or my Sagittarian flatmate. I can't actually count the number of times she has told me to man up. Like I said, I should be thankful that I am not at a dead-end. And I am, but the only thing that is certain is this; it won't be long before I drift again.

Quotations4U, or I Think Therefore I Am

"Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary" Mark Twain

"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost." Jean-Paul Sartre

"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the utterances of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorble law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which in everyway obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come." A.S. Byatt

“Oh be quiet, you medieval gnome, and let them dance.” Tony Kushner, Angels in America

"Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show, a fitter love for me." John Donne, Song

"Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men." John Donne, Divine Meditations 10

"It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels." Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

"We've got to live no matter how many skies have fallen." D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover

"Don't be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horison your goal; it will always lie ahead of you." William Thackeray

"Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again." William Shakespeare, King Lear