on the road

On a journey, especially a long one, you feel the difference between a guiding star and the flowers by the roadside better than anywhere else. There's so much around, everything so interesting... People, mountains, sights, cities... And it's sad that there's no time to immerse yourself in it all, to touch everything you can reach, to feel the fates of your companions.

The flowers are so beautiful, alluring, intoxicating, that it's easy to lose sight of that guiding star for which all this was originally undertaken.

There are so many flowers that you can dissolve in them completely. They intoxicate, they stupefy, they say to you: "Come with us, it's so good here..." All of this lulls you, robs you of vigilance. And in the end, it empties you.

I feel that if you give in to the temptations, after a while the flowers will stop inviting you to them. The flowers are only interested when you have the strength to pick them. But when you can only look at them through the prism of a monitor, they won't even see you. Neither the people, nor the mountains, nor the ruins of ancient cities, nor distant cities and countries. Everything will turn into a fairy tale, into make-believe, into something not real. Into yet another illusion, which you no longer have the resources to bring to life. The resource is exhausted and was never replenished. It gradually dwindled away on those days when it should have been restored.

And it hurts, to refuse the flowers, which for someone else are outright dreams, stickers on a vision board, or something like that.

It hurts to take the red pill, not the blue one, knowing full well what you're giving up. It's much easier to choose in favor of the guiding star when life flows in a measured rhythm, without surges. But when everything around you is seething, boiling, turning its attention to you unexpectedly, unbidden, then either you'll tear yourself apart in a greedy attempt to get everything from the surrounding space, or you'll choose one thing, and that one thing will without a doubt be the main thing, the fundamental thing, in which there is strength and meaning.