We need to get into the background of things for any of this to make sense. Shared along with some new photography made here during my retreat.
I used to be married to a fun and compassionate artist named Aino, but we decided to get divorced in the summer of 2016. There really was no fight or argument and the breakup was very clean and mature. For me this was something new since all my previous long term relationships had always ended in war. Reason for our divorce was simply that I did not want children even though I had expressed this earlier on in our relationship, but it had changed over the time of a few years. The same years when I developed a deep negative view on life. I always had a tendency to see the worst in situations, but now this was growing into a personality trait.
I had worked in newspapers and journalism for almost 10 years when I finally quit my job at a tiny local newspaper in the Åland Islands back in 2014. The last two years I had spent in this very small community where everyone knew what everyone was doing. It was quite a conservative society, especially politically (the Åland Islands are autonomous btw) and I let that make a big impact on myself. I felt as if journalism had failed me and I didn’t want to work within that field anymore. (Any journalists or press-photographers here who quit the old media and now work in new media?)
When we moved to Helsinki in the fall of 2014 I was glad to be out of the Islands but otherwise I had very little hopes for the future. I had my wife, my dog and my friends. I was settled. However as my depression grew deeper and I became more and more cynical about life, along with a tendency to procrastinate and mild substance abuse it caused me several situations that I now see in a very different light. Back then I was just furiously angry and thought everyone suck. My attitude got me warnings at two jobs and made social situations unbearable. I would go on rants about how much I hate this and that and spread negativity wherever I went. So it was really no wonder my wife eventually wanted a divorce, even if the kids was just a permission slip.
These events were the start of a journey I have been on since the end of the summer 2016. The journey started out as a physical journey to improve myself but as always I fell into a trap. The most common of traps are relationships, work, hanging out and general procrastination. These traps hold us from exploring what is truly meaningful in life, they are distractions that are not only bad, but often they devour us completely and we forget to seek out our calling. I’ve always been a sucker for beautiful women, so the trap was of course another relationship.
Now luckily this trap didn’t last long at all. It was a quick and sweet relationship, with mostly eating awesome vegan food (I’m now vegan, yay!) and having some very good sex, but in the end she left me because I was too negative and she thought I had anger issues. This slap in the face made me get over myself and I read a book about anger management. For anyone who has had issues like these and read one of these books you know that for the first third of the book you are just embarrassed because you recognize your own behavior in the examples given in the book. The book told me I do not need to act on my emotions. As far back as I can remember I used to yell and scream and be a horrible kid and my parents would say, just let him cool off - he’s just like that. This went on for years and after my teens I started cooling off a bit, but I had the hothead within me and could explode basically at any instance when I thought something was wrong. This impulse to speak out when something is wrong is something I thought highly off and regarded as a skill. Now I’ve learned there is a huge difference in how you express yourself - especially if you want to cause an effect and have people listen to what you have to say.
The book was a tremendous help, but it still did not make the bad feelings go away. I still felt like everything was worthless and meaningless. However the universe works in mysterious ways.
The journey continues in the next post, soon we are getting to the present - which is the only actual reality since the past only remains in our memories and the future is still on its way! Feel free to write a comment. Suggestions are welcome, is it good to have text and photos combined? How about the amount of photos? Length of text? Let me know :)
Infinite wellbeing and love.
W.K.Ø.