On the top of the planet - Day 4

Let's recapitulate. What I have here. I live in a high room full of light, at five-minute walk from the library. Library collection is exhaustive, for Arabic, and sufficient for many other things. I have everything to keep my competence up-to-date. Leiden is like a garden, full of trees and flowers. Its university is on the strict top of the planet. People are smiling and relaxed. My diet, based on fresh fish, vegetables and fruits, costs me less than it would cost in Kraków. A good international airport is at a distance of fifteen minutes by train. Everything is convenient, reasonable, well designed. Optimal.
Why do I still look back? Is it an addiction to the past, a persistent fear of the future, fear of success, fear of those things that are too good for me? I would really like to forget, to leave those past things behind. Return to Poland? How, where, to work with whom? For what money? And my private library? My mahogany shelves? They cannot squeeze under the low ceiling of my Cracovian apartment. Why does the idea of absurd, suicidal return stick so strong to the back of my head?

How can I accept my Paradise, start to feel one with it? Assume my intellectual destiny, the work I have to do on the top of the planet?
Still hesitating, still uncertain, still unable to accept the reality, the luminous world around me. 

​There is a hidden aspect in learned helplessness most people do not comprehend. The helpless dog does not lie passive on the floor of his cage. He does not have the presence of mind to jump the divide, because he is so busy coping with pain. All his mind is focused on it. I lived like this for so many years, all my muscles tense in resistance, swimming in ignorance, constantly opposing contempt and hostility. When all these adverse factors are no more, I feel a great confusion, as if I was out of my flux, of my proper context. It is so hard to refocus on my targets, on my new home and mahogany shelves, and my ERC project on which I propose myself to work from the day one, every day. Without constantly running away from my leading concept into collateral, accidental topics. 
It is so hard that, as I try to work these days, things flow through my brain like through a colander. I would swear that Arabs are the most boring race, and that I never really wanted to become an Orientalist. Just because that damned learned behaviour of turning my back to my dreams is so deep in me. 


***********************************************************************************************************************

Nee, nee, I don't want to be the dog from some ethically questionable experiment!!! Get me out of this parallel reality immediately!!! 


And what if everything is OK?
I mean, as much OK that Poland doesn't quit the European Union before I get my Dutch passport. As much OK that I get my project financed. And if I do, I will settle smoothly, buy one of these little housies, put my books inside. The rest, planting ivy and roses, will be so simple. And that's it. Perhaps I'm not that far from getting my life just right.

And then I will just go on, writing my books and articles, studying Sufism and Arabic calligraphy, travelling to Amsterdam from time to time for museums and concerts. Or I will buy a piano and play it on Saturday mornings, just as I listen people do. Sit barefoot in my little garden.
​