The loneliness that connects me with the wonderful phenomena in nature that surrounds us. In a silence embracing me, I stared to the horizon, where sky and sea meet, and hit me with the forming cloud pattern above the ever-darkening sea.
The sun, behind the clouds, let the sea, just below the horizon, shine with a beautiful play of rays. The edge of light was actually a bright white stripe of light. The light of the sun, together with the formed cloud patterns, changed the view into a magical setting.
The melancholy that these phenomena aroused in me drew a trail through my thoughts. Thoughts that always haunted me when I thought of the beauty of our planet.
One of the many beauties, sea, sky and horizon, with which our planet amazes us. In all its simplicity, in all its power, I kept staring half blinded at that magical setting.
My surprise was again stranded in the melancholic thought that man is no longer fascinated by that overwhelming beauty that mother earth shows us. Man who is blinded only by status and wealth and the life of man, for the most part, dominates.
Our lives are made up of patterns that are repeated over and over again. Patterns: such as working, eating and sleeping every day. Every weekend, every month and every year the holidays, depending in which culture and/or religion we are formed in. Patterns control our lives and give us a certain social cohesion with the people who live around us.
Melancholy has no place in it, those compelling patterns do not give the space for that.
Our planet orbits the sun and the moon, which revolves around our planet, so that we are evolutionary forced to continue living in those imposed rhythms and patterns. We cannot break free from those rhythms and patterns, no matter how much we would like to. If we do not obey this, we are corrected through our body with a hard hand.
Could melancholy and our dreams be a way out?
Patterns also have a relationship with being able to survive man in that natural rhythm, which applies to all life on this earth. We as humans are great pattern recognizers, our brains are so set up for patterns that we are able to survive in a complex environment.
Is melancholy something of the last thousand years in which we have given such thoughts a place?
Recognizing patterns also has to do with being able to survive in our natural environment, which does not mean the city or the countryside, but the steppes or the jungles from which we originated.
At that time, there will probably have been no place, consciously or unconsciously, for melancholic thoughts. If those thoughts were there, they probably weren’t recognized as such.
We have still not been able to imitate the complexity of recognizing patterns with the current state of our technology. The visual systems that have been developed to date cannot yet match this.
How should melancholy be shaped, which crosses our pattern recognition capacity?
If we as humans are finally able to recognize the patterns of our happiness and thereby build a society in which the patterns of happiness and peace can be recognized and acknowledged, perhaps then and only then will the patterns of the beauty of nature and mother earth, be seen and cherished.
Perhaps our melancholy can contribute to that and embrace that happiness and peace with a loving gesture?
