„To act upon one’s convictions while others wait,
to create a positive force in a world where cynics abound,
to provide information to people when it wasn’t available before”

I always liked the writings of Graham Greene. He caught my eye with a single sentence which I found hauntingly beautiful. He wrote: “You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” and I always wondered what a weird way that was to say something which I felt from time to time. Then I started reading up on him. He was once described with probably the wittiest introduction ever to be used for anyone: “A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name just a few.”
In his masterpiece “The End of the Affair” he wrote: “A story has no
beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead”. It is a fairly common thought but if one chooses to go deeper down the rabbit-hole we might find that it carries more meaning than meets the eye. In life we are not allowed to make brand new starts many times. We are all carrying luggage and extra-weights such as memories, ideas, promises both broken and kept, pieces of broken hearts, shattered dreams, words better unsaid and… you get the point… and no matter where we go or what we do all these will be behind us, strapped to our backs holding us back, that is if we choose to look back. On the other hand we might choose to look ahead and realize that although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. There is a cosmic metaphor for this and it is referred to as “the morning”. Even the biblical scripture tells us that all joy cometh in the morning.

However, the light of the morning is reached only through the darkest of shadows, and the first rays of sun-light appear to be an alleviation for all human ills. Such is the transition of the mind-set from old to new, from darkness to light, from ends of old things, to new beginnings. Through this mental transition we change our entire perspective on this world and are given wings to conquer the horizons once more. That is why, for consciencous people, the moment they first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful in their twenty-four hours. No matter how weary and hard climbing out of bed may be, the morning possesses the certainity that, during the day that lies before us, anything may happen. The mere possibility is enough to keep us going. Night-time holds the same possibility but we are not perceiving it so and thus not much happens at night.

Yet we live in a civilization which starts days with the shrieking stressful sounds of the alarm clock shattering us to pieces and forcing us to wake up stressed into a new day. This is what we carry around with us all day long and whatever happens later in the day it just keeps piling on more of the same since stress has gravity and attracts always more stress and the vicious circle continues. This, it turns out, is a general metaphor for the circles we make in life, the spirals, the ups, the downs, the ends and the beginnings which follow. If you were to step stressed into a new phase, the entire phase would be a mine field filled with stress and agony, but if you
were to rename every shadow into „pre-dawn“ and every down into
„runway for take-offs“, then we actually might turn around our entire outlook on life and give the daily events a new spin.
It is entirely up to you how you will frame your life and put it into adequate context. Feel free to try out the positive spin and let others know how it worked out.