“The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein
Ghosts. Well, October is the month for them, but sometimes things are better laid to rest in perpetual, comfortable slumber if you can find an inner peace that grants it (I haven’t achieved this yet, hence the Einstein quote).
I’m writing this on an atmospherically cold autumn evening in my attic, with decoration provided by hard-working spiders, and rain beating down against the windows. However, there’s no need to look over my shoulder, and no fear of being plunged into darkness by a timely power cut (well, let’s see what happens with those later in the year), because I’m not referring to things that go bump in the night. My ghosts are within me. It’s the emotional hauntings; the longings, regrets, and unfulfilled needs that wistfully manifest and are mourned in the mausoleum of my mind.
It can be difficult to find that quiet place within yourself when it feels the world is in turmoil. During dark nights there are stirrings of the spirit, phantom touches in cold bedsheets, heavy exhalations, icy hands gripping anxious hearts. Expired emotions thought long dead and buried are disturbed from their sleep and creep into restless minds to tease and torment or seek peaceful acceptance.
Feelings don’t go nowhere, they oscillate between present and past to reappear with a ‘boo’ when you are least expecting them. They become encased in walls – buildings house souls – and the aura absorption causes those charged changes of chemical atmosphere that can sometimes be felt at a later date.
So this month I am facing the spectres of the past that recur in the present, and trying to move beyond, for the sake of the future. Becomes sometimes for your own sanity you just have to.
