There was a world within me. I did not have to go anywhere. I could just keep wandering in the fields in my mind. This sentence has appeared in my notes as if by some magic. I do not remember writing this, but it caught my eye when I saw it earlier this morning. I often go over my notes—it is both a pleasure to see what I had written in the heat of the moment and a deep sadness that I had now long forgotten how I felt to do the words justice. I can’t know for sure when I felt there to be a world within me. My mind was but an apartment, with the general markings of a house well-lived in. There were soft spots on the walls here and there, little dirt in the corner, a few gaps of paint where the walls meet the floor, and dust in some places reachable but not usually seen and hence, not dusted.
But since I wrote the words, I know there may be a field, and I must have wandered it. There is one thing I would never write: a lie. I only wrote what I felt and saw, so I know there is a field. I must exit this apartment of mine. I must go out to where the field is, and there I will wander and remember why I wrote what I wrote. And if I said there is a world, there must be a world, too. There must be a bustling life filled with thousands of little details. And there was, all I had to do was get out of my head. The mind was a perfect mirror. It only reflected what it saw. To see an ocean was to feel the infinite within you; to see a mountain was to ground yourself; to see a field was to feel its vastness. The mind was colloquially the room we require. It could be what we want it to be, but we first have to know what we need. You could not reflect what you could not see.
And if it is an apartment I see today, then it is this apartment I must need. There is work to do, and there are books to read. When I see the fields next, I will walk amongst the grass, the reeds and the crickets long enough to come back home to write a sentence I would forget writing again. And over and over, I will do this. It was the only way I knew to live.