First off, I have come back home from Japan and thus my blog needed changes in the title and the subtitle. Which I made today. The new title is, I have to admit, the first thing that came to me, and I let it hang there until I find something better. I also changed the theme, as my not-so-numerous readers might notice. This new theme is somewhat too clunky with its big font size and a little clumsy-looking in my eyes with its right-hand alignment and the tags on the top, but at the moment I don’t really care about being neat and clean. This change is good, for a change.

Secondly, I became a father last November (the same month I came back from Japan) and my life now is a whole lot more different than it used to be. If you have a kid you might understand me without any further ado, but even if you don’t, I can’t make my feelings clearer because it is so WOW!

Finally, I have a full-time job now (at the same place I used to work before I went to Japan and when I was writing this blog) and I am quite excited about it. It’s full of interesting challenges and I can’t wait to see the first results of my work in the next several months. I won’t be talking here more about my job, though.

I like reading about football and writing about it is also interesting to me. I could even say that this is a topic that excites and inspires me. So yesterday, after the historical win over the nouveau riches from the Blue Moon, I thought – maybe I should being writing an MU blog? This blog would not be something as regular and “professional” as the abovementioned three, but I would still have a place to let out my thoughts on my club and on football in general.

The idea seems very exciting and I am even thinking to write to one of the more experienced MU bloggers asking advice. The only problem is that the blog will not come any time soon because of my hectic schedule – I am registered for a GRE exam on Nov 8 and there is all this fuss with applications, so I won’t be free enough until early next year. Until that, I will get myself ready for the blog.

This idea might seem too simplistic for some, yet when you stop and think, this is what comes to mind. Life has all the attributes of the things we own: for example, when we say ‘this is my life’ as we often do when we feel somebody being too intrusive, we mean we own our lives and can do whatever we please to do with them. But only when we ask questions about the origins of this possession do we start facing dilemmas, clashes of opinions and perceptions, tides of dogma and scepticism. In the everyday frenzy of our existence we don’t think for a minute about how we came to own this valuable possession. We usually don’t think about life – we simply live. Some see life as bestowed from above by some deity, other believe it is inherited from ancestors biologically as a result of a consecutive succession of reproductions. But both the creationists and the free minds feel life is solely theirs to have.

It is only when somebody is seen to be abusing his life that morality comes to light. The harshest critics of such abuse are naturally those who see life as a gift from God, one gift to be accepted with humility, lived with honour, and returned with grace, however burdensome and unwanted it might seem at times. And it does get tough sometimes for some of us, so tough that it is easier – less painful – to get rid of this valuable possession altogether, to return the gift to the Bestower earlier than it was expected back. Suicide for believers in the Creator is not an honourable return of the precious present to its real owner. It is a disgraceful slap in the face, a slamming of the heavenly doors, blowing away once and for all the single opportunity to rest eternally in the gardens of Eden.

Yet if it were so simple, nobody would be willing to step over the line. If life were all rainbows and butterflies, no single soul, however desperate and derelict, would want to deliberately part with it and go searching for better places. After all, it is not as easy as it might seem – one makes the horrible decision with one’s mind, but we also have our bodies, don’t we? At such a critical point, the body might not be too willing to follow the “crazy” mind – it will surely do whatever it can to overturn the mind’s foolish decision. Thus, successful suicides are nothing but outcomes of deadliest of battles, inner conflicts to which there are only two solutions. Those who succeed in taking their own lives are anything but cowards; they deserve at least some respect for finding enough courage to pull the trigger, or step over the edge. This is not something a coward can do.

Ultimately this is a test of myself, of how long I can keep it going. I am kind of stubborn and like to persevere, but at times it gets frustrating and I lose all my initial enthusiasm. Well, I am serious about running at the moment, but I cannot be sure of what I will think about my progress and performance a few months later.

There was something strange in this butterfly, some weird calmness one does not usually expect of an insect in the vicinity of a night lamp. It was sitting with its back to me, its beautiful little wings fully exposed, resplendent in the light. It was as if the butterfly sat there to draw my eyes upon itself, to make me aware of its presence in the room. I could see its tiny black eyes, no bigger than pinheads, reflecting the lamp – it appeared the butterfly was also watching me.

I have never been a superstitious man, neither have I taken mysticism too seriously. But I believe that even diehard materialists must have second thoughts in their lives, so I was not too unwelcoming to a strange idea that visited my mind out of the blue. To be precise, it was rather a recollection of a weird hypothesis I had read about somewhere long time ago. It said that the souls of late relatives, or loved ones, sometimes came to visit those still living in the disguise of nocturnal insects: moths, or butterflies. At the time I had liked the hypothesis, although never believed it; the resemblance of a specter to a light-coloured nocturnal flying insect with airy wings had seemed quite plausible – and reasonable – to me. After that, for a short period of time I had become mindful of butterflies, moths and other flying insects inside the house. But this was a long ago experience, and I had comfortably forgotten the whole thing, buried it deep cobwebs of my memory, well until the last night encounter.

A warm feeling arose deep inside me as I observed the butterfly. “Mother, is that you?” – I thought. And waited for a reply, believing, for a moment, that the butterfly would answer me. And had it answered, I would have not been surprised too, as I think about it now. Over my head, one the bookshelf, was my mother’s photo in a frame as white as that butterfly’s wings. The photo was taken on the day I saw my mother for the last time; she was seeing me off on a long journey, I was hugging her with a happy smile. I didn’t dare to look up at the picture. I simply knew that my mother was smiling back at me, and I felt content with that knowledge.

Today we had another meeting with friends, and I proposed playing twice a week. The proposal was met enthusiastically by most, so we decided to play on Wednesday morning. I am looking very much forward to this day and will report on my own performance after the match.

The boy was cute, his smile was sweet and his soft brownish hair fluttered under the breath of train ventilation. He prattled unintelligible words to himself, sang childish songs. At times he fell silent and studied with his innocent round eyes the surrounding bustle, the sleepless metropolis and its inhabitants on various errands on a warm Saturday evening. I couldn’t get my eyes off of him. Inside, I wished him a long and beautiful life – he felt my gaze and stared back with curious eyes, not knowing that the words I hastily jotted down in my notebook were about him. His father kept on reading his book with enthusiasm.

I thought about the boy for a moment, about the way he made me reach for my bag for a pen and paper. The way he inspired me. I imagined a world depraved of this kind of inspiration – the world of a desk and a chair in a quiet, gloomy room. Of pale paper and a lonely pen that runs back and forth on it, without touching the real world, detached from the things outside of it. This made me think about the importance of seeing other people. I thought about Auster, his long walks on New York streets, his fondness for observing people.

At one station the boy got off his seat and straddled hesitatingly towards a rail handle in the centre of the car. The train was motionless and the boy almost made it, his eyes glowing with adventurous joy. I watched him with a smile, encouraging him to take the challenge with my sympathetic eyes. But right at the moment he extended his white plumpy hand towards the rail the train launched abruptly towards the next station. The boy’s face changed immediately: the expression of alert took the place of adventure and he quickly climbed back into the safety of his train seat. The father had at last noticed he was not travelling alone; he picked the boy up into his lap. For the rest of the journey the boy cuddled there, his eyes moving thoughtfully from one commuter to another. He saw me off with his eyes, when I got up and off the train on Tokyo station.