State: unaltered

Today I was biking towards my university, which is a long ride, and as my body was tired from yoga earlier in the morning, I biked at a leisurely pace. I’ve done this trip perhaps a dozen times, but I had never taken the time to observe the scenery (which is quite uninspiring, the biking lane is in the middle lane of a busy highway).

I looked at the billboards and nothing seemed to make sense: “Where everything begins” said an advertising for a school. Then a typical image of the church on the top of the pyramid of Cholula, with the volcano as a backdrop, “At the vertex of an oath” it said, with a logo that I hadn’t seen before. Then a logo in the inspiration of the London Underground logo saying “Look for this logo 7Km ahead”, with no explanation about why.

Useless advertising is nothing new, but on this occasion it made me feel alienated, as if I wasn’t in the joke, and I fantasized about escaping to live to a small town where this kind of bullshit doesn’t pop up, and my yearnings to head back to Spain reappeared. It’s been one year since I came back to Puebla and I feel as if it was a lost year. Nothing of relevance has been produced, no new friends or romances have appeared on the horizon, I feel like I’m kicking a can waiting for something to happen, but then I think I need to make things happen.

I use an inordinate amount of time keeping myself sane. Three hours of exercise per day, thirty minutes of meditation, thirty minutes of sun bathing. When I don’t do this, my mood deteriorates rapidly. The boredom has led me to overindulge in weed, which I ceased smoking a week ago, and the boredom has hit me like a train and made me realize I’m stagnated in my current situation.

I approach change with the outmost caution, because 9 out of 10 times one should seek acceptance, not change. Change often comes with acceptance, I still don’t understand why, but as Carl Rogers said: “I can only change when I accept myself”. Yet, on this occasion, I’ve been patient enough to know that it is time to for the ego to shuffle things around in order to induce a collapse of sorts. The collapse may be painful, but at least it will be different.