Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey?
Dear readers, For the past 7 or 8 months, as a way of getting to learn myself a little more, I’ve been answering introspective questions, using the book Question Yourself: 365 Questions to Explore Your Inner Self & Reveal Your Inner Nature by Dave Edelstein and I.C. Robledo. The book was chosen pretty much at random. You can find quite a few on any online bookstore or platform. I would answer two or three a day in a personal journal, then sometimes go a week or even a month without a word. The questions have ignited my unknown quest to understand where I stood on a whole number of emotional and spiritual subjects, which before I was just ambivalent or somewhat apathetic about. As you can imagine, asking such questions is a wonderful cathartic and enriching experience, almost a cleansing or purging toxins with a firm scrubbing of the soul and shedding light on old habits and ways of thinking that no longer serve me. To put it another way, a search for my own truths and values, without contamination of thought or opinion of another maje*…I mean, person, in a peaceful solitude and armed with a nice fruity cup of tea. In some ways, it has been part of a healing process, for reasons you can find in my post The Game of Grief. Saying that, sometimes I enjoyed the contamination of thought from others and asking majes…I mean, friends, aleros**, questions, particularly when they were drunk, dazed and confused, just to see what nonsense they’d come up with. Then, I would horrendously bully and ridicule them and their deepest, precious thoughts and make them believe their ideas were dogshit, but then still steal their genius pearls of amazement and redesign it as my own wisdom, intelligence and emotional maturity. Plagiarism, theft of thought and toxic manipulation at its very best [cue sarcastic bow]. I am of course joking. My friends barely have a brain cell between them. Yes, now I really am joking. It was good fun winding them up while they bumbled through their answers in intoxicated states. But more so, it was fascinating to hear reflections and the life stories that helped them come to such conclusions. I will share some of the questions and answers now and then. Feel free to write your own answers in the comments below. I invite them. Or, write them in your personal journal; I hope you receive the same mental benefits as myself. Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey? A nice facile question to begin with, then: the soul, or more so, “the soul’s journey”. I found it easy to answer when I did so in my journal. Now I think of it on a deeper level, the question raises so many more questions in my beliefs, and our belief systems as a society, loaded with concepts of faith and/or philosophy, that it makes it a little difficult knowing where to start. I am not particularly religious, nor do I pretend to be a philosopher, but I guess this question crosses all our minds at some stage (or station) of our lives (or soul’s journey), and while we all want to believe or come to a conclusion of what happens after we die, the truth is we never really know. Therefore, if this were a school essay, I would probably receive an F, “for sitting on a metaphysical fence”. Nonetheless, let me try. There are a couple of ways to interpret this question. The way we answer it hinges on what is meant by the “soul’s journey”, and whether it transcends to different lifetimes as many faiths believe, or does the journey end when the heart stops beating and we become a lush banquet for worms. A slightly morbid thing to say, I know, but I am a fan of The Walking Dead, so please accustom yourself with my ghast. It’s almost appropriate to mention The Walking Dead actually, as one of my favourite characters, Negan, a villainous yet humorous psychopath, walks around with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire which he named after his dead wife who he believes (or just says) is reincarnated into the bat. This very bat he uses for ending the lives of the dead and the living by hitting them rather hard over the head. Sorry for the spoiler. I will answer the question by first exploring whether the “soul journey” extends other to lifetimes, with “station” referring to this current lifetime. I also look at the alternative that the soul ends when this lifetime finishes and “station” refers to the here and now, and whether there are any benefits to this way of thinking. The Soul Journey So how can we define the Soul’s Journey? Something of a spiritual progression or evolution that a soul undergoes throughout its existence, which includes experiences, growth, learning, and ultimately, transcendence or reunification with a higher power or cosmic consciousness. When one thinks of “higher powers”, we can’t help but connect it to religion, faith and spirits. As mentioned above, there are many religious beliefs on the soul and what happens to the spirit once our physical body dies. In the Christian faith, there concept of the afterlife in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. It all hinges on the judgement of an omnipresent being named God who analyses the sins we’ve committed during this lifetime. For more information, read the Bible. Otherwise, I recommend The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; a nice bedtime read. As part of Mexican and Latin American culture Mexico is Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, when families craft ofrendas, marigolds, photographs, and beloved foods and beverages of their loved ones who have crossed over to the other side. The ofrendas are thought to beckon the souls back, as they listen to prayers, and savour the scents of their favourite dishes. For more information, go to Mexico. Otherwise, watch Coco. Islam is similar the Christian
Shower Thoughts: Love and Hate
Dear readers, There are moments when we love to love and moments when we love to hate. Other moments when we hate to hate and then hate to love. Humans are complex beings. Emotions are complex to comprehend. A merry-go-round of confusion. Love and hate are two extremes that bring different colours to our eyes and chaos to our thoughts and hearts, triggering an assortment of behaviours that we sometimes struggle to understand, let alone others. The most mature and experienced minds can fall trap to it at any given moment, triggering a surge of energy and/or entangled thoughts. The triggered behaviours can bring great gifts or cause great harm to ourselves and others, sometimes intentionally, other times not. The heart. The soul. That intangible thing. Whatever you want to call it. It can be provoked and manipulated, again, by ourselves and others. Influenced by the words of others and/or impulsed by inflatuation, sexual throes and attraction that blindside us. There’s also the punch of our ego and vices and habits that auto-pilot us into tumultuous predicaments, a strange flow state where we don’t know where we’ve been and how we’ve ended up there. We just slept walked into something. There’s a moment we need to stop. Breathe. Untangle the knots. Let go. People. Humans. They affect our love and hate. They build you up and let you down, let you in and let you out, and you do the same to others. Again, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It’s an inevitable part of life. People can be intrinsically great or instrincically awful, and carry out acts that demonstrate that inner goodness or badness, or sometimes unconsciously do bad things when they are good people, or good things when they are bad. People are just that way. Entrances and exits of beings in our lives. Sometimes with consent, sometimes with reluctance. Sometimes a connection evolves into something else, sometimes it is saying goodbye, having closure. Sometimes it doesn’t close the way we want or expect. Sometimes the goodbye comes without uttering or hearing the words, because you didn’t think it was the end at the time, or you didn’t get a chance to say adieu, for one reason or other. It’s about accepting. Again, it’s a time to let go. Letting go of love and hate, and finding the balance within, a flow state to an equilibrium within your emotions: it seems to be a path to happiness. I’m no expert; I’m just exploring my thoughts. But I feel our minds are wired that way. Obviously, self-love is the objective, rather than self-hate. But trying to find a love or hate in others to satisfy a love or a hole: that seems to be a toxic route we all follow at one stage or another in our lives. Some of us never learn. Managing such emotions is difficult for the most experienced of minds. Realize your triggers and treat yourselves and others with respect and harmony, and from there you can ride the waves of lives storms a little easier, with peace of mind. Where all this comes from is anyone’s guess: a test or calling from the spirits or a chemical reaction that swills somewhere within. You form your own opinion. You, the reader, and I, keep learning. The learning never ends. We absorb the lessons and tread carefully forward. Or at least, that’s what I do, and pass on what I learn to others. Now we have come to the end, we may never know what this post is really about. Maybe I’m untangling my own understanding of love and hate and emotion. Above all, these thoughts came to me while in the shower. Therefore, they are merely shower thoughts. An aqua-inspired flow state.
The Game of Grief
Dear readers, As you can guess from the title, this post is an alternative type of a jolly festive read. I’m sprinkling it all with a bit of jest and dark humour, which is the language I love best. That’s my first disclaimer. The second is that I’m not a qualified counsellor or psychologist, but God help my poor patients if I would ever decide to become one: their spiral might forever descend if their lives were put into my hands. The third disclaimer is that this post has no objective to obtain sympathy or empathy of any sort. I don’t need it. I write through personal experience, logging the journey and memories of mourning in order to support others who have also suffered a loss of some sort, whether it be a death or separation from a loved it, or anything that gives a sense of mourning or disappointment. It is also in dedication to my father, Stephen Arthur Rogers, who passed away on 9th October 2022. As romantic as it sounds, and I know he’s rolling his cynical eyes at me right now while I write these very words, but I feel he’s pushed me to write this. Or in any case, he’s certainly inspired it. Over a year has passed. I haven’t written much publicly about my father other than expressions of grief on social media. I guess it might be that I’ve had too much to say or on my mind, and I didn’t have a blog or the correct medium to express it. I’m not in the business of drama dumping the world with my thoughts. Fuck no, I save that for my nearest and dearest. If we talk about the different stages of grief; by Jaysus, there are anywhere between 5 to 7 to a zillion steps to pass through depending on what and where you read it. On some level, I guess this post is my own way of coming to terms with it: the Acceptance stage. But what I write in the below paragraphs may contradict the last sentence. Because the process of grief is more complex than a step-by-step process. I knew a little something about the grieving process. Just before my father’s death, I was going through separation from my former partner. From that experience alone, I was going through tremendous loss, and as a way to find relief and emotionally and mentally prepare for the pending divorce, I read up on the grieving process to gain insight on what to expect and when. It’s not as though I was walking into it blindly; I’d heard of the 5 or 7 or however many stages there are of grief beforehand, but it all seemed simplistic and unrealistic. We all know, emotions are wretched to grasp, comprehend and control at the best of times. When a big life event comes along, it’s an emotional boxing match: blows all over the body, especially the head. The majority of the websites and self-help guides on grief have their disclaimers before launching into the “5 steps of horrendous mental suffering”, by stating that grieving is never linear, which is very good of them, but also wholly accurate. Grief isn’t linear whatsoever. But still, I felt it was lacking that je ne sais pas quoi. As mentioned above, my father passed away on 9th October. He battled a short but intense fight against lung cancer. I remember in the weeks after the initial diagnosis in early August, I was learning all these terms and what they meant, like CT scans and the use of different dyes and colouring. I learned this-or-that scan may impact if Dad could receive chemotherapy, or that the effects of this-or-that treatment may make dad more poorly for a day or two. There were different types of diagnosis which I never knew existed, and then there was the dreaded term nobody wants to hear about themselves or a loved one: palliative care – end of life. There were different types of nurses and hospital units and treatments flowing through the conversations, and consequences and ifs-and-buts if this-or-that happens: it confused me more, as well as being the worst dictionary exercise ever. My brother and sister were grand, talking me through everything in layman’s terms. They are professional doctors and have witnessed some of this in their day-to-day jobs. It couldn’t have been easy for them having to regurgitate the spiralling bad news and information from the doctors’ technical jargon into words that the rest of the family could comprehend. That comes with its own traumas. Something I will always be grateful to them for. This was all happening during a British autumn. I was not used to the wind and drizzle and greyness, being that these days I am very much a tropical animal, thriving on vitamin D and rays del sol. Still today, in Honduras, on the rare day when temperatures drop and there’s a little drizzle, it evokes something of a melancholic trauma of those final weeks. The dampness and rain and clouds and sitting in cafes at the Royal Worcestershire Hospital drinking shitty coffee waiting for shitty news; I fucking hate those memories with a passion. It still sits in my system rather uncomfortably. I remember the first pangs of grief hit me some weeks before my dad even passed. I sat down for a pint with my best mate Stuart Harbourne in a bar in Birmingham, and he kind of confirmed what I already knew, “Lung cancer: it’s one of the bad ones”. It causes a little sense of guilt in my low moments, that I somehow premeditated or manifested the worst-case scenario. What might have happened if I’d used the power of positive thinking? Would things have turned out differently? Silly, really, I know. Very irrational and absurd. The devil’s work, procrastinating such things. I’m able to rationalise it; don’t worry. After all, I’m not sure how positive-thinking medically prevents the spread of aggressive cancerous