It's none of your business to know who you are

❊

The leaves are changing and it feels as though I’m seeing them change for the very first time in my life. In awe, I’ve stood looking at the trees in Rotterdam nearly every day for the past weeks. I keep pointing out the trees to the people around me and taking pictures that don’t do its subject justice. How is it possible for the twenty third autumn of my life to feel like the first?

The emerald, golden, ruby foliage dances in the wind and… flirts with me - I flirt back. Not only with this new season but with the new ideas it's brought along. In reality, the ideas are just as new as the season, which is not new at all. The ideas have likely been thought of as often as the summer has turned to fall.

As the trees, ideas and I continue our threeway flirtation, I am thinking about what I believe about myself. About identity and change. About permission to change, who grants it? And what comes first: The desire to change or the change itself?

The red leaves, among other recent arrivals in my life, urge me to reconsider what it all means: To have spent all this time figuring out and defining who I am. To arrive at a point where I like to think I know myself quite well. To have a strong sense of identity. I am finding myself in another process that will inevitably repeat it itself, like the seasons, to forget, to remember, like most things in life, a circle: I feel a strong sense of identity and a strong sense to relieve myself of it.

It seems that knowing who I am leaves little room for being that which I am not (according to myself). Does truly knowing yourself mean knowing you are not what you think you are? The way that wisdom is knowing that you know nothing? Are the trees as surprised as I am? Did they always know the change was coming or do they forget and remember, like we do?

I suppose what makes the tree so peaceful in it's ever-changing condition, is that it identifies with no specific season or state of being. The tree does not think in the summer: "Finally, I know who I am: A luscious green tree with an abundance of leaves!" only to be horrified by its changing appearance come autumn. The tree does not expect its leaves to drop by a certain deadline, only to be disappointed when the other trees shed more quickly.

No, no, no: the tree simply is, no sense of identity needed.

“I never wonder who I am, I don’t care who I am” Aurora said, and perhaps I shall leave it at that.

​

​

“There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There's your answer.”

― Gertrude Stein

​
❊ recommendation: Clairo’s new album Charm
​(i have been listening to this Album on repeat)

​
bye for now

Zena-Rae