Of erasing

It is easy to turn over a new leaf, but difficult to write something on it

Remembering is standing bewildered and still, looking at how you forget

You will never get rid of your own shadow


On a computer screen it is easy to first type a long line of symbols and then erase them, holding the backspace button down with one finger and see, how every letter disappears on by one, one by one, one by one. It is like seeing the events running backwards so that in the end you are back at the beginning. And no one could ever tell that there was something - when you have finished pressing the key the screen is so white and newly made and empty, no one could ever guess.

And I do it again and again and again, type and erase, and the vertical line runs from the right to the left as if it were in a hurry, in a hurry to hide all those embarrassing things in a closet before anyone can see. The more we people give up to the machines, the more we forget that we are not like them. It is going to make us angry and frustrated; why can we not operate the same way that our machines do? And where is the backspace key in the human mind?

I left once and thought I would get so far that I would not see back. (How could I have known? I am still so young.) And then I had to realise that the further you get, the better you see the things left behind. From further away... the picture becomes clearer.