Sometimes, thinking and rethinking about a certain idea is not necessarily the best solution. Over-thinking decisions might just take the right moment of action from before your eyes and then, all of a sudden, you are left with an over-thought decision, that you missed the opportunity to actually implement. 

So this belief makes me realize there are times when I feel that I act based only on my instinct. There are many times like this, after which I have the impression I might have just made a huge mistake, but then I calm down and start breathing through the infinite dosage of optimism that lies in all the pores of my body. And if there is anything anyone could say about me, is that, as much as I love perfection, I am a terribly messy person. Apart from my work e-mail, where I have arranged everything like an OCD patient who's refusing treatment :D, my wardrobe is messy, my desk is messy, my hair is messy most of the times, my thoughts are messy. Yet, in order to fit the definition of a true messy person, I can find whatever I need and fast, no matter how messy my search territory is. 

Take a leap. Take a deep breath and take the risk. Jump. You might not rotate in the air like a cat, but you do have a chance to land on your feet.

A few moments earlier I surprised myself while drawing on the bed with my index finger, repetitively, the sign of infinity.

We, Romanians, have an expression: doing -insert stuff here- like a goose goes through water. 

As an explanation, water goes away from the goose's feathers, so it's not affected by the wet walk.

Yes, I know, I am not even close to being old, so I don't have quite an extensive life experience. I probably, hopefully, have more years to live ahead and time and opportunities to gain more and more experience, so I am now speaking again as a mini-beginner. Or as much as the mini-adult that I managed to become.

Truth is that the recent years made me experiment situations with which I hoped I would not have to deal with, at least for a while, so I managed to change some of my perspectives and tried to look more at the big picture, rather than focusing on the small issues.
Then again, I see people around me going through life like the goose I was mentioning at the beginning. More and more I am forced to digest that "ignorance is bliss" saying, as I see it tends to become a habit; and like all habits, embraced by many, I am sick to the stomach when I think it will in the end become something more than normality itself.
I see people worried about clothes, carbs and diets, I see poor people on the street about whom no one gives a damn while walking past them, I see rich kids spending money they will never know how it was earned, I see animals killing dogs, I see lovers hurting people.

Some weeks ago I was having a tea in a tea-house and at the table next to mine there was a couple. Since the tables are very close to each other, I managed to enjoy their 3 hours conversation - even if I know that paying attention to people's discussions is not polite, but I was simply hearing more or less everything. 3 hours later I was still amazed, but happy they left. I couldn't indulge more talks about, food, Coke Zero, going to the gym and so on.
Ignorance is bliss. But at least they seemed to be happy.

One of the good things about flying so often is that I get the chance to quickly go through the magazine offered by the Airline company. 

The very good thing about these magazines is that they offer details about nice places to visit or events that are happening in the city you are heading to, from concerts to exhibitions, from modern to classical, etc. When I have business trips I don't even bother to waste my already poor sight with that, since I usually have 0% time to actually visit anything, apart from the hotel, the meeting spaces and the sightseeing taxi-tour to and from the airport.

But for Vienna it is quite useful, as here you can always find something to do, so I started a list in which I wrote down from the magazine, about things to do and see while in Vienna. Every time I get the chance, I go and cross something from the list.

A nice name that draw my attention was the so called Salon der Angst, an exhibition held al Kunsthalle Wien, where I eventually went last week. According to the booklet, "Angst" is a German word, which in English could be translated as Fear-Anxiety-Worries. I used the 3 words altogether, since the English booklet I took from the exhibition tried to sell "Angst" as the very German word that cannot be translated into English as just one of them.

Now, I am merely a freshy in this contemporary art thingy, so I will avoid making comments on the exhibition. All I can tell you is that it was worth the time and more information & pictures can be found here. But I will focus on a simple piece, that draw my attention more than others, especially after I read the text, which made me think about this Angst in a very diversified way. I couldn't say it better than the author of the Wall, so you can read below the description of what the artist wanted to express through such a simple idea as a Lichen Wall.

The proposal of a surface - Lichen Wall (Zin Taylor, 2013) 

"The spots that collect on a stone, these things know when they arrived. They're thousands of years old, remembering what came next, and next, and next. It's their job, it's what they do - they're lichen.

Foundationally, Lichen is a four-layer organism. The first and last layers are identical fungal hosts, the middle two a paired algae. Composed similar to a sandwich made of two elements, ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly, the planar units of bread (fungus) contain a dialogue (algae) within its form (lichen). The forms can be small and repetitive, oblong or circular. they can be pools of colour, like a stain referencing the action that made it so, or cauliflower patterns traversing a surface with colourful growth, blanketing the host with a field of their thoughts.

Red, pink, rose, orange, yellow, lavender, blue, green, black, grey, darker grey, white, whatever happened, whatever that organism "saw" was absorbed, producing these colours. A field of spotted colour shifts hues according to the events, actions, gestures and forms, passing before it. Sometimes these spots are turned into paint, a memory-paste rubbed onto a surface to depict a person's impression of something. These are subjects that exist only in the mind, that can't be photographed. What exists in your mind? What secret thoughts control your actions? What have you painted today?

Photographic examples of lichen, in particular the scattered patterns produced through centuries of build-up, strike a fortuitous relationship to visual representations of 1960's LSD culture. Projected light shows, presented by Liquid Light Groups, were one of many aesthetic elements employed to visually define psychedelic culture of the 1960s. Light companies, specializing in live performances utilizing liquid inks and overhead projectors, routinely lent a visual complement to the progressive/psychedelic bands playing at the time. San Francisco's Brotherhood of Light performed at San Francisco's legendary music venues Fillmore West and Winterland Ballroom. Other groups of the area, with equally enigmatic names were The Single Wing Turquoise Bird Lightshow Troupe, Little Princess 109 and Light Sound Dimension (LSD).

This cultural activity of the late 1960's marked a period in history when, both institutionally and recreationally, investigations of the unconscious were actively facilitated through the exploratory use of psychotropic drugs. During the 1969 music festival Woodstock a now infamous public announcement was made to a collected crowd of a half million people urging them to "avoid the brown acid" as the effects weren't as expected. A mixture of chemicals, designed to produce elated psychological investigations, had been mixed wrong - the brown acid was the harbinger of the nefarious bad trip. The effect enabled a seemingly negative experience for those who had ingested this particular item of hallucinogenic facilitation. Stanislov Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, has conducted extensive research into the bad trip phenomenon. This form of LSD induced psychosis, or psychedelic crisis, produces disturbing hallucinogenic experiences for the recipient. The manifestations can range from feelings of vague anxiety and alienation to profoundly disturbing states of unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, or cosmic annihilation - cerebral effects descriptive of elemental angst. Grof, as a founder of The Faculty of Transpersonal Psychology, believed an analysis of this state would lead to generative breakthroughs in the treatment of an individual 's psychosis, in particular the unresolved psychological tensions triggered during the course of the experience: bad trips generate positive material.

The bad trip philosophy predicates that the imaginative results of angst are generative towards analytical thinking. What does a bad trip look like? Let the mosaic field of lichen be a background of alternative possibility. The portrait of a slow-growing micro-biotic organism, never dying, always watching, absorbing, reflecting these thoughts as a colour palette scattered along a surface - a wall playing host to a myriad of thought."

So what does your lichen wall look like?

I should be doing 3 other things instead of writing here. But I will politely invite words like "should" and "have to" to gently go towards having a cup of lava in Hell. And I will write here. 

I started my yesterday evening with a visit to the doctor. 

I cured my follow-up bad mood with shopping for dresses and with drinking ginger-mint tea with a friend, in a hipster cafe, downtown Vienna. We talked about different things, like we always do when we meet, like the first time we met and talked for 3 hours, while the people around must have thought we are old friends.

We talked about happiness, adventures, family and friends, we joked about the future, loneliness and uncertainties and we ended up travelling with the subway, on our way to our homes, with him making fun of me for taking the tram for 2 stops instead of walking. 

As if walking alone in the night is my favourite thing in the world. 

But I did it. The tram was coming in 12 minutes, so I decided to walk, even if I somehow feel afraid of doing it, after almost 10 years since that bad memory occured downtown Bucharest.

I liked it. I walked 80% of the way 2 metres behind a tall brunette guy, who was walking a small cute white dog, which was turning every 14 steps to look at me.

This morning I decided to walk a little instead of taking the tram. I was already late for work, but since my schedule is more or less flexible and my colleagues + manager are the best ones anyone could wish for, I considered there's no need for me to be stressed on such a rainy Thursday morning.

Now, Vienna is not the greenest city you could live in, so most of my way to work is full of concrete and artificial things. 

As I was listening to my morning playlist, I found myself smiling while I realized that since autumn came and the leaves started falling, I guess no one bothered to clean the sidewalk  in my neighbourhood. This is how I found myself walking on a carpet of leaves in all colours......

........realizing I finally learned how to enjoy Autumn. :-)