2026.04

https://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/monthlies-202604

We keep on improving ourselves and our work, believing that someday it will lead us to happiness, but no amount of talent, skill, or discipline truly gets us there. Society may value certain traits and disciplines -- confidence, diligence, charisma, performance -- but it is only those more abstract things that can serve as nourishment for the spirit and soul. Peace, faith, compassion, and the like.

I find it harder these days to press onwards. Not that I have a problem going on with life, or the day to day, but it feels difficult to want to proceed forward. Even those things that I took for granted like putting thoughts and emotions into writing in my blog entries and letters, feel sometimes like a dream where I try to run as fast as I can yet the ground keeps slipping under me.

In the past I would always resist forward motion because my goal was to reconnect with my past. But over the years, after licking my wounds and stitching my broken-ness back together, it's no longer a guiding north star for me to reach out to, unreachable as it may have been. I'm good enough at continuing my ever-steady navigation in the same direction as I always have, but perhaps there is a sort of lack of purpose I'm feeling, a sense of "so what?"

I clasp my hands together to pray, but the derelict shrines provide no solace. What remains is nothing more than the stillness of the lake.

A wordless prayer, then.