For a brief moment I saw you sitting there,
Looking at my soul,
Touching the source of my pain,
Exiling its existence,
Making room,
For peace and unity.
Decisions
Expect the unexpected… so they say… I guess it means be ready for change. Be ready for things to happen and not necessarily for the good. Do we really have to? Is life so easily disrupted if you do not expect the unexpected? Even when you have that mindset of expecting the unexpected, unexpected things do happen and will happen. You never really can plan it, right?
There are moments that those unexpected things have a huge impact on what comes next in your life. You seek for something different, seek answers to questions you have and without realising you stepped into a roller coaster going high speed along a track to end where you never thought you would be. Nothing is the same. Everything is different… or so it seems…
We all make mistakes. We all do things planned or unplanned that seem right at the time, but end up being wrong. We atone for our mistakes. We say sorry if those mistakes affect people you care. No matter what you do, no matter how much you think about it, you will have to make decisions and those decisions affect people not just in a good way. Decisions can hurt people. They can hurt people you care about, you love. They can hurt people you hold dear, you like no matter how long you actually know them.
The road is never straight. Even when the design is straight, traveling on the road is never on a straight line. It swirls, it bends, it cries, it climbs, it descends… Each step forward makes you leave behind something and at the same time it gathers more experience to take with you. Sometimes it is hard to leave something behind. Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes you loose something on the way and wish you didn’t. Sometimes you gain something or pick something up. That something is sometimes good and sometimes a burden.
Everything that happens when traveling the road has a purpose. We know that if we want to know it. We accept it more easily when it is good things happening to us. We have it more difficult to accept when things happen that are hard. Everything is an experience we learn from, or better said should learn from. We have the power to make the decisions in our lives if we want to. Every decision you take is yours to take and yours to carry with you. They are part of making you who you are as a person.
I am making decisions right now. Some of them scare me. Some of them give me a feeling of relieve, that finally I made them. Some decisions make me sad. Every decision though, is my responsibility and only I am accountable for them. No matter the impact on others, I carry the responsibility with me down on the road of the next chapter of my life. The next 1 to 2 years will be hard but with the love I receive I trust that all will be good. I trust in us. Thank you for your trust.
Light
I was witness of a conversation about light between Lene Hau and Olafur Eliasson (Art of Light) on Friday, August 25 – 2017 in DR Concerthuset (Copenhagen). The conversation was organised by the Carlsberg Fund and the New Carlsberg Fund and brought science and art together in a very interesting way. Hearing two persons speak with passion about light is an experience I will never forget. Light is fascinating, no matter from what angle you look at it.
My first conscious experience with Olafur Eliassons work was an exhibition of Din Blinde Passager back in 2010 in Arken, Museum for Modern Art (Ishøj). The exhibition let you embark on a journey through fog that was illuminated. Your senses reacted in strange and peculiar ways when interacting with the light and fog while walking inside the tunnel.
You walk through the fog. You are blind yet you see. You sense, yet you get confused on what you sense. You get disoriented with coinciding excitement that flows through your body. You get confused and loose sense of direction and time. Even today, after all these years the experience still is very vivid and clear in my mind. Once out of the tunnel, it took minutes to grasp what exactly I had experienced and how the light inside the tunnel had enormous effect on your senses. One thing is for sure, it was an amazing experience.
It makes you think about light in a different way. We take light for granted in our lives. We just switch it on when we need it. We watch it on our screens everyday, on television, monitor, tablet or smartphone… We switch it off when not required and don’t think about the science that allows our actions to control light in such a way. We see the light from the sun as something so normal that we do not think about the uniqueness of our world we live in.
We think we understand light, but actually don’t. Lene Hau’s research made a leap into understanding light better bodying something that even Einstein deemed impossible, which is stopping light from moving. For more info on understanding how the speed of light is slowed down and ultimately stopped follow the link to the Youtube Video Prof. Lene Hau: Stopping light cold.
Try and imagining what it means having the possibility of slowing down light to a speed that you can walk faster than it, and then actually stopping it from moving. Imagine having the possibility to just park the light somewhere for a while until you decide to make it go again. Maybe my brain is too small to comprehend what this actually means, but it sounds to me that the practical possibilities are endless whit this concept. This is very exciting stuff.
Hearing a conversation about the subject and where science and art come together about talking about light was a learning experience. The conversation touched on the positive but also negative applications of scientific discoveries and inventions. Stopping light from moving might trigger ideas to be used for the good of mankind, but we all know that anything can be used to do harm. There are ethical questions that require consideration when we embark to make new discoveries. How we use the scientific breakthroughs as humans within our world and what we do with it is our choice to make. The ethical subject also is of importance in the world of art. Olafur Eliassons Little Sun project is one of those ethical positive projects where an artist designs a product with a vision. Our actions have consequences! That is so with everything we do. We have to be mindful of that.
Wherever we bring light; wherever we control light or stop light; what we do with it and how we interact and use it, it all is up to us to decide if it is used for good or for bad. Being mindful about this is a step in the right direction in making a better world to live in. When art and science meet, a small positive step is being made in that direction…
Peinsejoager 