I’ve been living with a ghost since I was a child. She doesn’t speak, but sometimes I hear her in the rain tapping on the windows or in the whisper of leaves rustling in the wind. When I gaze at the stars at night, she leans in and murmurs, You are alone. You are meant to be alone.
Loneliness — that is her name. And she is the only one who has stayed with me all this time. I suspect she doesn’t like it when I make friends or feel happy. That’s when I stop listening to her and try to cast her out, like an evil spirit haunting me. But she seems to like my cats, Toro and Camille. Perhaps it’s because cats, too, are solitary and spiritual creatures.
Come to think of it, some people don’t like cats — as if there’s virtue in disliking them. But many writers have lived with feline companions. Edgar Allan Poe once said his cat, Catterina, was his muse. Lucy Maud Montgomery was also a devoted cat lover.
Loneliness doesn’t have to be your enemy. If you get to know her, she can help you notice the quiet details of life that others overlook or take for granted. In those everyday little things, you may find beauty — and a quiet joy in simply being alive to witness them.
To write with an eager spirit summoned
On all the consciousness there conjured
And put a pen to paper in ponderations
On all the various visions and views.
Hello to a new year. I started this first day of 2016 with a morning mass at St. Mary’s Church to celebrate the feast day of Mary, Mother of God, to whom the faithful have recourse. So I did not squander today with inactivities, albeit I skipped going to a gym. On the pretext of having a recovery day of my regular 5-day-workout regime at the gym, I opted for reading a book in peace and quiet. The first day of a new year has always been an occasion on which new gym-comers occupy all the treadmills and elliptical machines in eager expectations of shedding dozens of pound, trying to keep their new year’s resolutions. From my empirical observation, all those new faces sweating at the gym will slowly fade away in a couple of months. It’s a new year phenomenon; working out is indeed akin to a Herculean task.
I have been feeling exhausted and lethargic since this afternoon – or the beginning of the winter. Hence the negation of my lame excuse of not doing exercises at the gym as aforesaid… I presume the cause of these unfavorable feelings is the change of time and season that has started and developed since the end of the summer time. The weather and season do affect your mind and body, or play a vital of inducing psychosomatic symptoms. Which consequently leads us to see such psychological influence on our somatic existence in the relevant philosophical spectrum.
Like this canine friend, we hesitate our attempts to leap forward.
Schopenhauer has been known to complain that human life dangles between trouble and boredom. In fact, both cumbersome existential dilemmas have their profound meanings and purposes. Boredom is a continual reminder that it results from Inactivity. But activity does not exist for the purpose of our escaping boredom; to be precise, boredom exists in order that we will escape inactivity and ultimately actualize our own unique, singular ends. The struggle of life, microscopic or macroscopic, between these feelings of trouble and boredom keeps us in “suspense” because it will let us fulfill the demands placed upon our daily tasks however banal or simple they may seem.
With respect to the meaning of Trouble, it is also a good reminder that it stimulates positive sparks on our otherwise apathetic, lukewarm mental state, which is a psychic rigor mortis. So long as we suffer, we remain psychically alive and mentally alert. Therefore, it’s not a platitude that suffering makes us mature and wise in experience, richer and stronger in spirituality.
Further, Higher, and Wider.
In light of the above, lethargy or just plain laziness will be a both somatic/psychic indicator that tells you that it has a high time you bolstered up yourself with clear set of principles that guide you to self-actualization in a discovery of what life expects you to do in your time on earth. And it begins not with a grandiose ritual but with a simple but dutiful performance of daily tasks. So as the first day is reaching the dying of the night, I wish my Readers a happy new year with a full portion of health and success in whatever you Readers hope to achieve in this brand new year with God’s blessings.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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