Tag: Personal Reflections

  • This Virtual Corner Turns One

    This Virtual Corner Turns One

    A year ago, I decided to create a small corner for myself in the vast ocean of the internet.

    I called it between everywhere and nowhere because it seemed to capture exactly what I was trying to do: bringing together nowhere—the virtual world—and everywhere—the places my thoughts had travelled.

    At the time, I did not have a master plan. If anything, this blog began as a small act of rebellion against my own habits.

    I wanted to prove to myself that not everything needs to be optimized, categorized, justified, or turned into an achievement. Some things can exist simply because they are worth doing. Because they help us reflect. Because they help us understand ourselves a little better. Because sharing an experience can sometimes be reason enough.

    I assumed these posts would quietly occupy a few servers somewhere in the world and little more.

    What I did not anticipate was how much writing here would change my understanding of sharing.

    I have always considered thoughts to be among the most private and sacred parts of a person.

    Not because they are necessarily brilliant or unique, but because of what they are made of.

    A thought is rarely just a thought. It is an accumulation of observations, mistakes, curiosities, disappointments, discoveries, memories, conversations, and countless invisible connections made somewhere within the mental faculty. It is evidence that a person has passed through life in a particular way and attempted to make sense of it.

    For that reason, I kept many of my thoughts to myself for a long time. Publishing them felt vulnerable, unsurprisingly.

    Yet over the past year, I realized that sharing a thought does not diminish its intimacy. Sometimes, it even expands its purpose.

    What feels deeply personal to one person may feel deeply familiar to another.

    Somewhere in the world, there may be someone asking the same question, carrying the same uncertainty, navigating the same experience, or searching for words for something they have never quite been able to articulate.

    Perhaps this blog has simply been my way of saying:

    “I experienced this. I reflected on it. This is what remained after I tried to understand it. Here it is. If any part of it resonates with your own journey, you are welcome to take it with you.”

    Here, I have offered neither a lesson nor a universal truth. Only an experience and the meaning I happened to draw from it.

    What continues to fascinate me is how a thought, once released, can be received through lives, beliefs, perspectives, and stories that may have little in common with my own.

    It returns in different coats—critical or compassionate, skeptical or spiritual, certain or questioning—and yet it arrives all the same. Meeting beneath the same sky of human experience.

    Looking back, I think this blog has also been my way of letting go. For most of my life, I kept my thoughts close to myself.

    Then one day, I folded them into little virtual paper boats and released them into the vast ocean of the internet.

    I did not know where they would drift. I did not know whether they would disappear among millions of other voices.

    Instead, I watched them travel.

    Across screens. Across cities. Across countries.

    Across lives I will probably never know.

    In a very tangible sense, this blog became my farewell to a certain kind of reserve I had always carried with me.

    It also became a quiet reminder that I do not always have to resist the currents.

    Some things in life are not meant to be controlled, only released.

    Writing, I discovered, is one of them.

    Another unexpected gift of this blog was the permission it gave me to use language differently.

    For years, I had grown accustomed to using my mind and my sentences almost exclusively in service of professional purposes.

    To translate. To explain. To communicate. To solve.

    Somewhere along the way, I had placed a seal over the more aesthetic and exploratory side of my relationship with language. This blog helped me remove it.

    It reminded me that sentences can be built not only for others, but also for oneself. Not only to arrive somewhere, but also to wander.

    Beneath that old seal, I discovered colors I had almost forgotten were there.

    You have accompanied these virtual paper boats on their journey.

    You have spent a few minutes with thoughts that once existed only inside my own mind.

    You have challenged them, expanded them, questioned them, and sometimes embraced them.

    You have reminded me that once a thought enters the world, it no longer belongs entirely to the person who created it. And that is a beautiful thing.

    The internet often feels vast, noisy, and impersonal.

    Yet somehow, within that immeasurable ocean, these thoughts found their way from one screen to another. 

    From nowhere. To everywhere. For that, I am genuinely grateful.

    And who knows?

    Perhaps somewhere among all these crossings of thoughts and experiences, there is a bottle drifting through the same waters carrying a life-changing insight, an unexpected truth, or a joke so good that it alters the course of a day.

    Perhaps I will find it tomorrow.

    Or perhaps, I already have.

    Either way, thank you for spending part of your journey between everywhere and nowhere.

    Artwork: Breakfast In The Loggia, John Singer Sargent

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  • I Am in Love with Ravelverse

    I Am in Love with Ravelverse

    Have you ever listened to the French composer Maurice Ravel? Because this post is a pure, unapologetic appreciation of his art.

    I know there are hundreds of analyses, critiques, and historical readings of any work of art. But I always find myself stepping aside from all of that—away from the academy, away from “what it really means”—and instead focusing on what the piece does to me. What it awakens in my mind. What it places in front of my eyes. What it opens in my imagination.

    And for this reason, I love Ravel, and the universe he creates—what I call the Ravelverse.

    Take his most renowned work, La Valse, for example. It is often described as a “waltz on the edge of collapse,” a dance dissolving into chaos. But whenever I listen to it—or watch it performed live—the notes do something entirely different to me. They teleport me directly into Ravelverse.

    There, I am dressed in elegant clothes, standing in a place so calm it almost feels unreal. A calm so perfect that I cannot fully comprehend it. Everything is suspended in a soft, almost weightless illusion of beauty. And just when I start surrendering to that peace, to that constructed serenity, the percussion arrives.

    It doesn’t enter gently. It grabs me by the neck and throws me back into something like reality—raw, sudden, almost painfully tangible. Something soft yet disturbing at the same time. And I love that instability.

    Because in that universe, there is nothing you can hold onto. The notes, the harmony, the percussion, the contrabass—they all continuously pull you in and out of reality, illusion, and whatever lies in between. You are never allowed to stay in one place for too long.

    On the other hand, Daphnis et Chloé carries the same vibration of Ravelverse, but it moves differently.

    Again, you are teleported into a dreamlike space, dressed in your most elegant, unreal version of yourself. But this time, nothing breaks the illusion. Nothing throws you out of it.

    It stays intact.

    And something begins to chase you.

    Not violently. Not suddenly. But persistently.

    You are running, escaping, moving through landscapes that feel too beautiful to be stable. And yet that thing—whatever we choose to call it—keeps coming closer. Not loud enough to be named, not clear enough to be understood. But always there. Always approaching.

    In La Valse, the illusion collapses and forces you out of itself.
    In Daphnis et Chloé, the illusion holds and you are the one trying to escape.

    Then suddenly, you wake up.

    At least you think you do.

    Because you realize it was only a dream. But it is not over—because you have woken up inside another layer of it. This is the kind of illusion that does not end when the music stops. It leaves something behind. A weight that stays with you for hours, as if part of it refuses to let go.

    And all his works… I still cannot believe what I hear is also what I see so vividly in front of me. How sound becomes a space. How it takes me away from reality and then suddenly drops me back into the chair I am sitting on, as if nothing happened.

    I love watching how the orchestra reflects a kind of quiet dominance when they perform Ravel—an elegant control, as if they are not just playing the instruments but negotiating with them. I love the intensity Ravelverse brings to everyone and everything it touches. I love the way it feels both familiar and completely strange at the same time.

    And I don’t think there will ever be a time in the near future when I will get enough of it.

    Some places you visit once and leave behind.

    Ravelverse is definitely not one of them.

    Artwork: The March Wind, Robert Henri

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