New Year's resolutions...

I don't do new year's resolutions. I find people who seriously do them, well, I find them resistant to insight and reality, in other words: stupid.

Gym's in January are full of these people. There is a certain "charme of the heroic failure" to these people, I bet their patron saint is Sysyphos, or at least Albert Camus.

Be that as it may - new year's resolutions are illusionary, even more so than life itself.

What I decided to symbolically do this year (the beginning and end of a calendar year, as random as it might be, is at least a nice symbol and good to measure one's progress from one year to another) - is to set myself goals. Or call it "projects".

A project is a dream with a plan. I'm too lazy to google for the author of this quote right now, but I think he was dead right (I'm sure chances are that it was good old Churchill. The politician, not the dog).

A quote I know for sure who made it is from Jacques Brel. In one of his rare interviews, given to a French television chain towards the end of his life, Brel spoke about life and dreams and ambitions. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that basically, we dream all our dreams during our childhood and early adolescence (basically, before sexual hormons destroy the prince and princesses in us).

It was Brel's conviction that the rest of our life's meaning lies in our personal quest, and that quest is a quest for the realization of what we dreamt to accomplish during our "pure" or "innocent" childhood phase.

If that was true, I'm as far away from the realization of my true and inner "dreams" than I was back at grammar school - my most vivid and lively dream was that of becoming a wizard and flying through phantastic worlds of my very own and mighty dragon.

The truth lies, of course, in the interpretation, and some might agree that I am not too far away from the realization of my innermost dream.

Part of the answer - the one I am willing to reveal - lies in writing. I have been an avid reader of fantasy novels since an early age (more concretely, since that fateful day where I was sick and unable to partake in my father's weekly run to the town library, and my mother got me a "first-person RPG-book" from Steve Jackson, "Citadel of Chaos").
The days and weeks following that event were marked by me getting paler and paler despite it being summer, and in the end I knew every tunnel, monster and trap in that citadel by heart. I was able to recite whole passages of the book by heart, I even remembered the numbers of important sections of the book.

Since then, I have become an avid RPG-player (the German pen&paper system "Das Schwarze Auge") and fantasy novel reader. Amongst the heaviest influencers was the German fantasy author Wolfgang Hohlbein, who's books I devoured and worshiped at the time. Looking back now, I have clearly "grown out" of his novels (and grown into darker stuff like Joe Abercrombie and G.R.R. Martin). Tolkien also was a heavy influence on my reading, dreaming and perceiving the world since my 13th year on this planet or so. This was followed by H.P. Lovecraft and ultimately Stephen King I'm afraid, but that's another story, and these authors never influenced my writing.

Yes, my writing - that's where I wanted to take the monologue since the very beginning. At one point in time, and it was that precious time between being bold enough to dare to write up stories myself and the coming of the internet with its many distractions, where I truly developed a first idea about a novel I wanted to write... it was clearly influenced by Hohlbein, at least at the beginning, but had also some Lovecraft and, yes, Clive Barker elements in it. It was also reflective of (I had reached the age of 17 by then) a new chapter in my life: my leaving church and western religiosity behind and embracing the treasure-house that is eastern spirituality and occultism. I started at that age to become an avid reader of everything related to eastern religions and occultism that I could lay my hands on. Living in Germany and visiting Paris on a regular basis, I was also heavily influenced by the "fin de siècle" - like new age à la Francaise, including the French version of Thelema (I then didn't know that it is just that; the French authors rather claimed to be descendants of Lévi and Papus than of Crowley and the Golden Dawn), and some very discreet groups like the Martinist order (which makes common Freemasonry look like a chess or gentlemen's club, no offence).

These influences stirred my young soul and I then was convinced that "being a wizard and flying a dragon" would mean exactly that: dabbling into the Occult and discovering new planes of consciousness, and, well, becoming a fantasy author.

I'm not sure when and how exactly, but it was shortly after, when I joined University, that I kind of lost my way. I was studying and partying hard, focussing on discovering the subject of my studies (Japan) first-hand, and waved all occult reading etc... good-bye. I also lay down my author's pencil in order to learn calligraphy so to speak - and haven't really picked it up until today, 20 years later. Quite a shame.

So, my "project", to close this babble, is to pick-up the pen where I left it (not easy with such a demanding job) and to make my best effort - despite the daily battlefields of work and domestic un-rest - and get the hell writing again.

My novel, started 20 years ago, waits patiently in my G-drive in digital form, I'm not sure yet if I can and should write on my laptop or take to pen and paper, I will have to try both.

I won't establish on the other points, as they don't fall into the "childhood dreams" category, but my project- / bucket-list for 2015 goes as follows:

- Start writing again (and ideally make substantial progress with my novel)
- Make the Open Water Diver in Fuerteventura (it's already booked!)
- Get a promotion at work
- Decide in which city I want to live next, as seven and a half years in Ireland are quite enough

Oh, and if I manage to lose the one or other pound, go for a swim or to the gym from time to time, I'll take that along, but I bloody won't protest.