We have just driven to Bulgaria and encountering the local language and letters has been an incredibly revealing experience to say the least.
If you come from a country where the Latin letters are used, such as these you are reading here, and you come to a place that has the same letters as basis but a different language built on it you may not understand the words you are reading but at least you can read the letters.
Here in Bulgaria it's totally different.
Everything is written in Cyrillic, a different system of letters altogether that are pronounced in their own manner and that cannot be guessed from the arabic letter system.
How is this at all relevant?
Well, for the first time in years I feel a soothing aura of silence and serenity in my mind while driving through a major city! Yes!
As any other city on Earth, there are shops everywhere, offers, bargains, ads, traffic signs, posters, banners, all the typical mundance noise of commercialized "modern" society... but none of it registers one bit. It all reads like Chinese letters without any significance in the rational parts of my brain.
No split-second analyses or thoughts, no weighing of options, no considering of potential necessities I am still missing. No calculating of costs, no second guessing any items I have already purchased in the past. No air of artificial needs summoned by advertisements about things I really don't need. Just silence.
To be honest, I couldn't even tell whether I was driving past a shop that selles cat food or offers thai massages. In a nutshell: Total and utter childlike innocence about commerce and the world of pervasive offers on artificial obsessions.
I find myself in the midst of a sea of noise that is somehow inaudible, indiscernible and therefore mute. I see no judgments in myself, no resistance to things I don't like, no things I want to chase. Only a sea of colors, signs, designs and letters I can't make heads or tails of. And it's liberating to feel the way a child would before learning about all these "normalities" or life in the matrix. I feel like I am 4 years old again not knowing how to decipher any of the letters surrounding me. And just like back then I feel the same aura of serenity and calmness, for the matrix and the gang can't reach me by sheer circumstance of language barrier <3
I am fairly confident I do not wish to learn to read Cyrillic, maybe ever. On this one thing I would rather remain in ignorance on purpose for good, knowing what I don't know and taking the utmost delight in keeping it that way!
If I choose to never learn it I would effectively have created a mind void for myself, a group of countries I could always come to to have utter mind vacation and calmness when I need a break from it all. And considering all the mass-media and gang-related noise of recent months, that thought seems highly attractive these days <3
A sanctuary.
unsplash.com