The ([un]-reachable) outside world

How does one liberate oneself from the prison of their mind?

Photo by Olga Budko on Unsplash

Note: This journal entry has a companion piece, *Narcissus & the Reflections in the Water, *which delves a bit deeper into the topic of making sense of oneself, and how that might feel oddly narcissitic.

Journal, 23rd of June 2026

Nature looks so pretty when I peer out from my apartment window. Even the graffitied concrete walls of the nearby motorway’s noise barrier shine with their own kind of vibrance. The inside world — or better yet — my inside world seems devoid of that range of colour.

I’ve always been adamant to say that I don’t feel trapped within my small home. “Twenty-four and a half square metres is all that an ascetic man such as myself needs.”, I tell myself. But recently it hasn’t been feeling like that’s true. The white walls, grey laminate flooring and the equally grey floor tiles of my bathroom have started to blend together into a monochromatic prison cell.

Liberation is easily within my grasp, of course. All I need to do is open my door and take in the fresh air outside. That’s kind of what my soul usually tells me to strive for; to feel soft breezes on my skin, and to listen to the life all around me. But I don’t listen to my soul intently. Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe in a soul in a traditional sense. It’s possible that I’ve become so cynical about the wider spiritual world that I’ve neglected my own. Or at least parts of it.

That’s not to say that I don’t feel connected to anything higher. Two things in particular speak to me on a level that is hard to put to words.

The first of them is the aforementioned nature; or rather the outside world — not just the plants and the animals, but also the human environments we’ve crafted for ourselves as a species. I am often in awe of the little things; a weird rock, a chance encounter with a bird (as we saw this week), a cute sticker slapped onto a trashcan. I particularly enjoy the things that seem so mundane that they don’t feel like worth mentioning. The kinds of things I think nobody else would notice, like how a cigarette butt’s faded orange stem silently mingles with the red granite within the concrete tile it was tossed on. There’s beauty in so many little things that it is impossible to mention it all.

The second is art. I think it is possible to consider almost anything human-made as art; be that an artesanally crafted tool, a meticulously constructed dish at a restaurant, or a way of speaking with eloquence. Your mileage with this may vary of course. Admittedly, there are levels to art, and not all of it is created equal. When it comes to things traditionally considered as art, I think music is the artform that connects with me the most; closely followed by cinema.

A great deal of my journal entries have been influenced partially or entirely inspired by nature or art. They are some of the most excellent catalysts for writing. In fact, the first journal entry I ever made within the Yesterday’s Journal -project was inspired by a song. And so was the first-ever article I ever published on my earliest self-exploration project.

To put it shortly, there is power in art and nature, and not all of it is entirely explainable by reason (well well well, look at the non-spiritual me giving in). I’m blessed to have been raised in a way that made me appreciate these things because I think they’re some of the best parts about life in general.

There are also a great number of things that I could call artworks of nature, such as the aforementioned flora and fauna, including us humans. Bounds of truly spectacular creations that are arguably beyond the scope of human ingenuity. A lot of what we create only pales in comparison to the wonders of the natural world. Perhaps that is exactly why so many artists choose to try to imitate the sublimity of such things in their works.

I don’t think that even our greatest pieces have a fighting chance against nature, but it’s not a fair comparison. We fight in different weight classes. The human body and mind might be some of the only things in this world capable of willingly trying to replicate themselves in forms outside of the biological, but we have far to go before we reach the levels of our origin.

Well, that’s all for my glazing of the natural world for now. In a funky twist, it seems like I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the magnum opus of the outside world is the human form, which in turn would mean that the most beautiful thing is always within reach of me! How terrifically convenient!

But if nature is what my soul is yearning for and my human-ness is at the precipice of nature, then why do I still feel so…

What do I even feel like?

Trapped?

But nature is right here within me. Or right there, behind my front door, outside my window.

Disconnected?

But if I feel connected to nature and art and all these other little things, then how can that be?

Maybe that’s just the thing. I’m just a human, trying to understand things way too intricate, too beautiful and too close to understand them. Like an artist, trying to imitate his own natural form, but never quite being pleased with the result. Perhaps that’s the crux of my human condition; trying to complete a picture of myself in my head, always one step behind the natural processes going on within.

For all I know, it might be better this way. What the hell would I do with my time if I finally made sense of myself?