Ian Axel - This Is the New Year

Thank you for understanding.

"Ignorance is Bliss. And yet every day I set out to learn and to experience the world in a new light. Why would I do this if it will only make me unhappy?

I do it because even when I was ignorant I could tell there was something I lacked, something others had, even if it was only in stories. I knew it the same way a woman who had never drank would be parched of thirst yet not know water. I am immersing myself now in this sea of life and learning. A mermaid of knowledge and truths.

Knowledge and understanding underpin appreciation and enjoyment of lifes' astounding and incomparable breath taking beauty.  I will never choose to return to ignorance because that would rob me of all I have become and all I have seen. Of all that I have won. 

I pine for growth and to stumble and scrape my knees on paths unknown. I yearn for new pleasures and new pain. For new faces and ideas that do not correspond exactly with my own. For conversation that instigates connection and new understanding. It is such a beautiful life if you can only open your eyes.

Or baby steps and try out a few games of Peek-a-Boo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-EMjTXvHPU

Tik-Tok

Please know there are much better things in life than being liked or being cautious. Than being bitter or scared or self-conscious. Go love someone just because. Fall in and out of love. Don't keep your heart tied up in a box, let it roam free and acquire scrapes and bruises if that is the path you have laid out before you. You will get badly bruised and perhaps will feel as though your heart is breaking. You will break. It's beautiful and it's alive.  You will always heal even if you don't want to. The heart heals with time and does not stop ticking even when smashed to bits with all of the cogs torn asunder.

There are the most fantastic, beautiful things, places, and people out there.  I promise.

It is up to you to find them. Don't be late.

I’ve decided that I no longer want to have a hierarchy of value between my friendships and my love relationships: They’re both crucial, irreplaceable in my life, and I don't need to listen to anyone who wants me to choose between any of them. Not only that, but I’ve stopped classifying things as “love” or “friendship” according to arbitrary superficial details-the feelings I share with certain friends are so intimate, so beautiful, that it’s ridiculous that I don’t call them lovers just because we don’t sleep together.  It’s absurd that sex should be the dividing line between our relationships, between which one take precedence, between who we play with, live with, sleep with, who we take care of first, who we die with at last.