I hate to move. My flat will be under renovation for the next three weeks, so we will be moving our stuff to our neighbour's place for a while. I do not think I know anyone who likes to move. The sense of dislocation can be rather unsettling for some. And moving will require me to dig up lots of my old stuff and to throw away some of them. Decision making is actually one of the most painful things in life. It is true at least for me, at least when deciding what to keep or what to throw.

After a break-up, my friend decided to give or throw away everything that his girlfriend has given him, including all the branded ties. He said that he likes his life streamlined, without unnecessary or painful memories. Regarding the break-up, he said that, "She doesn't want it (the relationship) and neither do I, we were just waiting for the someone to broach the subject. It is my life, and I don't want anyone screwing it up." His ex-girlfriend told him that he was too business-like handling the break-up. And I kind of agree with her. Until I found out that both of them stopped putting effort into the relationship....

While I have always believed that one should be true to oneself, and I do not really believe in the value of history and the past, I am a sentimentalist. It is a curse, but hell, I am a philosopher, and therefore masochistic. It just does not seem right, should one just let go of someone you love with just a wave of hand, even if she's screwing up your life... It just does not. Do not ask me why, because I do not have the right to comment on that. I have been known to be detached or magnaminous enough to encourage my own girlfriend to leave me should she find someone better, which incidentally is what she did. Perhaps my obsession with freedom and self actualization has influenced my ideal of love. But love to me, is not about possessing a person, love at least to me, is about the other person, but simply wanting the best for the other. Just the knowledge that your friend is fine, can be truly satisfying in itself.

It is often with mixed feelings when you dig up a piece of your past, always bitter sweet. For it is either a piece of heartbreak, that is better gone. Or a remnant of a beautiful past that is no longer. But perhaps life is meant to be so, always bitter sweet, pain and pleasure interwined. Time obfuscates, and age blurs. Yet perhaps the only fact that it does not hide or confuse is that things are no longer. Their nature is in motion, our motion. We move from the Now to the To Be on a one way street. Constantly reminded, it is possible to forget anything, but the nature of time. It is built into us like a Kantian categorical imperative. Even individuals suffering from amnesia knows that they lost their past or memories, lost something that should be there but is no longer.

And as I piece together my life from the bits and pieces that I dug up from the depths of my abyssmal cupboards, I find myself wanting to smile, sob, laugh and cry all the same time. Pride and shame, joy and disappointment all descended on me in discordant pairs, like notes from a insane pianist. The fragments came in no chronological order, periodically surfacing with the recovery of a relic, and the pianist was joined by an unorchestrated symphony, throwing to its only audience deafening crescendos in a erratic and spontaneous fashion, pushing to the limits my tear glands.

I found myself laughing at the beauty of being human, smiling at the absurdity of the No Longer, living for the wonders of life and dying for my next breath.