For the first time in a long time, life is looking good. So far, 2015 has been difficult. Most years, in the past few, have been difficult, one way or another. And all I've wanted are the same problems everyone else has, the same usual issues, and the last few years it's felt that there's been more than usual. The moments, the individual moments, the days, the weeks – most of them have been overall good, but into every life a little rain must fall : and there have been far too many of those.

The usual things. Health. My health is generally brilliant, and I am lucky that no major physical ailments have befallen me this year. But certainly, the past decade and a half has seen my mental resolve tested and tested and tested again. It is easy to surrender. Harder to pick yourself up and keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. At least when I have failed, I have failed upward. I have failed forward. I have failed better. I can see, now, the mistakes I have made, and how I have learnt from them. I still make mistakes. Everyone does. Life is not a puzzle to be solved. It's not a Rubik's cube. It's an ever shifting sea of events,a set of dozens of tiles, each of which can be overturned at any moment. Peace is seeing things going well for a week, or a month, or a year. Happiness is forgetting unhappiness exists.

Health. Love. Work. All these things. Every year recently has seen some kind of traumatic event, some kind of moment of revelation, some crisis, where I have been beset my factors outside of me and beyond my influence. In these storms the trick is to know when the storm can be influenced, and when the storm just has to be navigated. I know where and how I and others have made bad decisions over the past umpteen years, and I've tried to stop doing that. (Luckily, I am getting better at it). There's been catastrophes that I cannot reasonably understand. There's been events I can, in retrospect, see how certain events transpired, how others have wildly misinterpreted situations, and how the unpredictable actions of others, as well as a rapid desire to avoid responsibility in some, have lead to some situations that have been very unhealthy. Some very traumatic events that have jeopardised the security of my world are still.. to me... absolutely mystifying as to why they have happened. And then well, I understand that I don't understand certain people. In the way that I don't understand the cruelty of some. Or the the mystifying psychosis of others.

As a side note, on one occasion many years ago, some borderline sociopath tried to psychoanalyse my life using their way of thinking... the analysis was that I was obsessed with my dead mother and terrified of loneliness …. which is why I always had a girlfriend. The fact was far less interesting.. I liked going out with people and being in relationships, it was more enjoyable than being single, and luckily, some humans seemed to agree with me that being in a relationship with me was more enjoyable than being single.

I can't think the way some people think, and boy, I love the fact I can't think the way some people think.

But further than that, brought by a recent, and somewhat permanent, re-connection with a certain type of music – made by machines and bleeps and bloops – I've realised that, for a period in the mid to late 00's, I lost touch with part of who I was.. the part of me that stayed out all night and danced to the dawn. I lost the joy of life for a while. And it took a period of healing inside me to get back to who I used to be, to rebuild the connections in my soul, to get back to who I always was. I thought maybe you changed with time, you let go of certain things, you moved beyond certain things. It reminded me of that bullshit quote about no longer being a child and putting away childish things, as if something as important, as joyful, and as life-changing as music were a mere childish fucking fad.

I always came back to certain things. Certain things that were awesome. I rediscovered my life of love. My love of life. My world has become very very brilliant in the past couple of years, and I have, with the joy of my friends, my family, my love, seemingly escaped out of a fire. Life isn't easy : it never is easy. It's just been extremely hard at points the past decade, and I've had to let go of certain battles I could never win, even when I knew I was absolutely, indisputably right. Not my battles, not my wars. I let them go, because otherwise they'd drag me down to their sorry level. The race to the bottom is not one I want to win. Here is no race but the human one, and that is all we ever are.