I went to the lab and ate lunch with the others while everyone was talking and some were leaving. I ate my cheese-walnut sandwich and told the professor that I will be in the library this week and he said Enjoy :) I feel that he wants to help me and is happy to see I grow and progress, both as a person and as a scientist.
I came to the library and decided to sit on the first floor where the magazines are. We have the new issue of the New Scientist and I want to spend some time turning its pages. I sit, and I see that some of the trees have turned orange. They were not orange two weeks ago, I was here, they were all green.
Too many feelings and thoughts happen to me all at once. It is autumn and it contains so many memories. For some reason, autumn is the season I register the change the most.
It is autumn.
The orange tree stands magnificently in the middle of this green floor. Gentle wind shakes it sometimes and it looks like a tree that is full of life. But the color carries weight for my senses, I see it and I remember the bitcoin days, I see it and remember my favorite person whose favorite color was orange. It reminds me of the days that I was so happy for it to be fall and I go to school, I also was full of life. It was pure love back then, the affinity for learning and understanding; but then gradually it contained more, more of what I was offered by other people, pleasant and unpleasant things. I have them, all stored in this scenary of the orange tree from the library window.
I can't express this colorful feeling because it has not been regular enough for humans to name it. We tend to only invent terms for useful things for communicative purposes but sometimes we can just want more and ask for more. Germans and Japanese seem historically to have more time to document and name their experiences. I go there and still can't find a fitting noun.
I accept that there might not be a single word for how I'm feeling, but I appreciate もののあはれ (mono no aware). It has aware which looks aware (conscious) to me and mono as in single. So it's like I am conscious about one single object in my environment right now which caused this cascade of memories, the tree. But that's my interpretation and the origional meaning is more general and beautiful:
もの = thing, but also the thingness of things.
あはれ = Originally it wasn't a word at all. It was あはれ, an exclamation. A sound you make. Roughly ah + hare — the noise a person emits when something strikes them. It meant approximately: oh.
So, it just captures the moment I looked at it and all of the memories and feelings appeared after that moment. I will stop there and call it a day.
Hello, Autumn.
