Non Serviam

I draw a picture of my own life from the beginning – "30" meant settlement and stability, it meant my own home, my own family, teaching and writing for a couple of years. It meant breathing, it meant living, not surviving. However, as I get close to this age, I found myself breaking into pieces this settlement and stability that I have always been searching for, having no clue what I want to do next, what I enjoy, what is the best road to be taken. And I hate this insecurity, this point where I have broken into pieces all the things that I knew since childhood that I wanted.

I don’t know for sure if this restart is good or bad. I dreamt of teaching in my school last night. And I keep on saying “my school” although I do not want to. Like it or not, I miss the students, being in front of the classes, the atmosphere that I managed to create. I don’t miss the papers, the system, the stupid close-minded thinking of some of my colleagues – schools need new things, not old, dictarioal notions. 

I met myself at 18 in a book, and now, inside my mind and soul the echo of a “non serviam” keeps on hitting my walls. Non serviam. Easier said, written, than done and felt. Non serviam – feeling its true heaviness, its real meaning.  

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”

I shall not serve “my home, my fatherland, my church”, or the old systems that do not form human beings, but mechanic, meaningless creatures, and destroy (my) being. I feel myself in an exile from my own place, in my attempt of breathing, of finding, grasping myself. And in my minimalism, my silence, my defeat – because this is how it feels – I try to find, to connect the old and the new self.