Has a melody ever got stuck in your head, one you can’t quite remember?
One of them is playing now: The Windmills of Your Mind. Months later, it came back to me, almost like a miracle. The song is about thoughts going round and round in your head. The endless confusion of a mind caught in the blades of its own windmill, spinning in circles, searching for a way out.
As I wonder what this song has to do with anything, another melody slips in: “Parçalandım...” (“I fell apart...”). Candan Erçetin, who turns the broken map of our inner world into a song, seems to be asking: What are we really looking for all our lives? Someone like ourselves, or a saviour who can piece us back together and fill the bottomless void inside us with a single touch?
But perhaps the real question is this: Do we even know who we are, to know what we want that emptiness to become?
Psychology calls it the “shadow of the unconscious”. It’s everywhere these days. The other half of ourselves we refuse to accept, the part we push into dark corners. The things we passionately seek in others, or flee from in fear and hatred. Perhaps these are all reflections of ourselves, hitting a wall, sometimes crashing straight into it. Not "perhaps," actually. Experience seems to tell us that is exactly how it is. But the emptiness inside us may not be a lack at all. It may simply be the self we have yet to meet, or have kept at a distance until now.
And expecting one person to fill that emptiness, shed light on our shadow and make us whole... It may sound beautiful under the name of love, but it is a great injustice to the soul.
What about running away? Could we lose ourselves in other cities, with other people? Then Sezen Aksu’s words come back to us: “If your troubles are bigger than the world, changing your surroundings won’t help.” Because wherever you go, you take that crackling radio inside your head and the shadow in your suitcase with you. That great burden within you remains unchanged until you face yourself. Until you find a way out...
Rilke says it too:
Whoever has no home now will build one no more.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay awake, read, write long letters,
and wander restlessly back and forth
along the tree-lined avenues, as the leaves drift.
The restlessness, the feeling of being homeless, comes not from failing to find a roof outside, but from being unable to settle into oneself.
Like peeling an onion, each layer releases a fresh scent. It is a journey that seems to take us back to the same place, one in which we keep describing ourselves in the same words, yet each layer brings us a little closer to that tiny core at the centre. Even if it makes us cry...
But what happens when we get there?
Is life just a collection of discarded layers surrounding that tiny, naked core? That fresh scent that stings our eyes every time? Or is it about realising, when we finally reach that core, that there are no more layers to peel, and nowhere left to go but into ourselves?
What was it the song said? Those windmills turning inside our minds, circles connecting to circles, the endless revolutions...
Although we often say, “My life flashed before my eyes like a film,” it isn’t one continuous, seamless piece, but a series of fragments stitched together.
And sometimes we are raindrops that shatter against a barren stone; sometimes we seep into a hidden crack in the earth and merge with underground waters. Just when we think we have disappeared, we evaporate in the sun, become new clouds in the embrace of the sky, and breathe again in another form.
Perhaps the point is not to find ourselves once and for all, but to discover something we didn’t know about ourselves each time we turn like a windmill. To give way to the seeds reaching for light within us, to the flowers waiting to bloom.
Let’s end with Tanju Okan: “A wind blew from the distant past. My childhood...”
Or perhaps, let’s begin!
Stay with love.
