The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up the Heart

"So what are you thinking or feeling now?" she asked.

I sat there in the quiet boardroom, with my face in my hands. I could hear the muffled sounds of the rest of the office building going on with it's regular business things.

"I don't know," I said.

"I don't know?" she mimicked me gently.

I looked up and peeked at her, "I don't know. All I can think is the L word."

"Ooh boy," she shook her head.

"It scares me so much, how much this is affecting me. I don't know how to let go if that's what I have to do, because it is killing me right now even to consider not..." I flicked away a stray tear that found its way down my cheek.

"Do you think you should let go?" she asked.

I took a breath and considered how to phrase what I felt.

"It's like that Marie Kondo thing," I started.

"Huh? Marie Kondo?"

"You know how she has that system of purging things and keeping a minimalist, simple life..." I tried explaining. "Well it's like you consider what you have and how that thing makes you feel and if you can let it go."

She nodded at me.

"Well," I looked out the window lost in thought.

"Well that's the thing. It isn't what I may or may not have promised for tomorrow.

It's just that, when I think of him, when I am with him, when he's being whatever the hell he is even the most annoying version of himself, but when he is there with me....he sparks joy."

Expectations of Empathy

This morning at work, I was returning from a meeting and passed a colleague. As she passed, I sensed it.

She was asking someone on my team a question when I sidled up to her and waited for her to finish her query. As she turned, I simply put my arms around her. 

"Hi Nadia," I said quietly, "I think you need a hug right now."

And she just started crying. There in my arms, she held on and sobbed. 

I think it's because I know what it's like to hold in so much pain, and contain all the grief in a very tight vessel that you think you've buried deep inside that I am able to sense it so acutely and tangibly in others.

I recall recently talking to someone very important to me and we were discussing our lives, and also that thing about being empaths. I recall pondering the idea that I sometimes tell myself that I am able to absorb all the pain that is out there in the world and perhaps help mitigate the anguish and despair that is out there, if perhaps somehow, even a little bit, it makes the world we live in a better place.

I don't know. Maybe it's a way of surviving for me. I've done my share of locking out people and pushing away those who care simply from a deeply entrenched emotional claustrophobia that maybe everything that comes my way is just a way of me getting my share.

Then again, just the way I spotted Nadia throughout the day chatting with colleagues, making jokes, cackling to her own surprise, I can smile to myself to know that perhaps just by my own small gestures I can provide comfort to others and help lighten the loads they are carrying just by acknowledging that I care.

There'll always be the people who will make sure you know that they care, not by assuming you know, but by their behaviour. It's also ok to let go of the naive idea that you can ever be so important to be someone's #1. Be your own #1. 

Canopy of Change

Sometimes I forget how easily the sight of a bird in flight, in flit, in air fills me with contentment. 

In the same way that soaring along a ravine path under the canopy of the newly-adorned trees fills me with a certain type of ecstasy: wind rushing through my hair, against my ears, into my face, with the sweet soundtrack of serendipity that is nature.

Or the whimsical pleasure of having random grandmothers - throughout the day, and quite independent of one another - strike up conversations:

"We ought to get a discount for this, don't you think?" says the white-haired little woman, as we disembarked off a bus that stopped 15 feet from the actual stop, making us walk further to the intersection.

"What soup is that?" enquired a smiley lola, "... oh, I've never had lentil and kale soup in my life!" 

"yes darlin', is the weather of romance I tell ya," winked a Jamaican momma, upon catching me smiling as I walked home, swinging my bag.

Maybe it's the season: Spring has always filled me with a burgeoning sense of joy. The beckoning of warmth, the tendrils of hope, the aroma of a beautiful tomorrow tantalizing our senses from around the corner. 

Maybe it's more. I've always pondered about my relationship with change. I've written about it often enough...and sometimes I wonder whether it's a love-hate relationship. The idea of new things, new ideas, new possibilities, new opportunities fills me with a sense of being. It's hard to describe. Sometimes I just put it down to my innate sense of curiosity and irreverent urge of pushing boundaries.

Maybe its - well, that's for another post. Before the next thunderstorm drops, I've to don my running shoes and hit the ground running for another dose of ecstasy.

The Chaos of Reckless Loneliness

Lately, she's stopped being alone. And yet, she finds herself lost in a starker, darker, loneliness than she's experienced in a long while.

How did she allow this door to open again? She's kept it shut, locked tight, waterproof—almost—for a very long time.. and somehow, without realizing, the door's eased its way open again.

She's put up too many guards over the years — successfully building out an empire of aloofness and detachment that's only served exceedingly well. And in the blink of an eye, somehow she's allowed it all to vanish, evaporate, in the blink of an eye.

And yet this loneliness seems the worst sort. It's addicting, calls her name in the middle of uneasy dreams, whispering into her ear whilst she's otherwise occupied. She's constantly seeking it out. It's a strange ache: she's catapulted head over heels into a black hole of chaos. She's not sure if its killing her or she's only revived.

And yet, despite it all, she's always been one to jump into the deep end, launch herself into the air without a parachute ... so maybe this time, despite the agony, despite the reckless hope — perhaps, she'll finally fly.

Crossroads

I woke up today with a dull, but intimately familiar, sense of melancholy. I am feeling the twinge, that effervescent strumming of heartstrings that resound in a song of hope yet with an underlying whisper of torment.

I find myself once again at a crossroads, or rather, in one of my favourite spaces: a state of liminality. I've broken free of the cage that has held me from fully stretching my wings to its utmost to truly soar. And still there is something that makes me hesitate; for I have flown beyond expectations and broken ceilings...nevertheless, I still find myself as guarded as ever with this strange feeling that's so familiar and yet so different in the best of ways.

I've wished that I had been able to return here - my comfort zone where I can pen my feelings and thoughts in the comfort of my words. But in the last several years, this too has been tainted with that disconcerting sense of peering eyes; watching and prying. It's a feeling that has prevented me from truly returning to writing the way I have before.

I wish, as always, that I had been able to record those moments that were less melancholic. I've put myself more into living in the moment - and in doing so, I've detached myself from dwelling. Dwelling in the form of sitting here and writing, dwelling in nostalgia, or perhaps running away from the possibility of hope. Perhaps I've been running from myself even whilst saying that I've focused on the now, at the cost of sacrificing the one vehicle that has always been my sanctuary. It's now the stirring in the air, coupled with this strange stirring that I find within that's yet again spurring me to write.

I recognize that I am now on a threshold. I'm trying to pace myself in enjoying things at a slower pace even while experience a crazy rush of strange emotions coming at me all at once. It's driving me crazy but I think it's safe to say that underneath it all I am enjoying every moment of it.

Entropy

What will it take for us to understand that love will resist all definition. It exists beyond our attempts to mold it into form, names and time. We try to claim it and conquer it, to find answers and meanings when it exists in a void beyond questions.

Love laughs in the face of our nets and snares; it answers to noone. Love is imperturbable chaos, it is reckless calm.

What will it take for us to understand? We will lose ourselves again and again, to drown and surface in this same murky ocean, and float adrift in the vast cosmos of love, until the very end of time.

Vavavoom

This morning I stood at my garden door, in the sunlit quiet, just enjoying the peace and serenity that comes with that feeling of being alone in a world that's still slumbering. As I stood there watching, I realized in front of me, almost camouflaged, was a huge monarch butterfly. It's wings were like a fine etched stain-glassed window, all gemstone oranges and gold and black.

As it quietly fed off my geraniums, I held my breath. I realized there was a part of me that itched to grab my camera and capture that moment for perpetuity. But for some reason I resisted, and let myself let go of that feeling of wanting to keep something for the future, and instead simply watched the butterfly as it nuzzled the flowers with its wings opening and closing in rapture.

I felt my breathe slow down, as I let myself simply enjoy the moment. Let the contentment and thrill of miracles wash through me. Sometimes it's okay to know that what you have now will soon flit away, maybe just be a nugget of doubt of "did I really experience that?" in memory..

But then again, perhaps simply letting yourself open yourself to the moment in the here, now and today, without worrying about what will come next, is what life is about.

Circles

Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is to take that gift you thought was everything you every wanted and carefully wrap it back up, typing a perfect ribbon on top of where the old ribbon lay--and give it away.

and even though hurts you, still smile.

Slowing it down

Just because you have one plate doesn't mean you have to fill it up with just one dish at a time. It's okay to take just some at a time, putting a little of this and that, or a little of everything—allowing you to savour your favourite bit that much more.

Serendipity

Sometimes you find a $20 bill in the pocket of an old coat.

If you were broke or hungry, it feels like a miracle. It can feel like a miracle just simply by the mere serendipity of finding it when you didn't expect to. Maybe all this time you've missed it, or maybe all this time you didn't really know it was gone or what you'd lost.

It was always with you—until that moment you've found it again.

Whether you decide keep it forever as a memento or decide to spend it, you've already lost it.

Small Happies

Spent two hours at the Superstore, ended up picking up just two things: sundried tomatoes and imported cheese. My sandal broke while roaming - the heavier wooden bottom went rogue and disengaged from the sole, but just at the back, so instead of hobbling, sliding my foot behind me or clacking around, I just looped my hair-tie around both pieces and I was good to go, until I got off the bus and stepped into a thunderstorm at its prime and realized I couldn't even walk in my sandals because I was sliding around on that smooth wooden surface. With my bag of cheese and sundried tomatoes, I danced home singing, of all things, "kuch to hua hai."

Sea Glass: There's No Place Like

He’s sprawled on the couch, watching his latest favourite show while I am sprawled upside down, head on his lap and feet up on the back of the couch. Ostensibly reading, but really at this moment I am watching him from under my eyelashes, watching him upside down. It is a favourite place to be for me: not just there beside him or head on his lap but upside down, too. There is a infinite realism to experiencing the world this way, head over heels, or heels over head (...).

Life, I find, is sometimes too often experienced the way physics and biology, allegedly, designated us to do. But then if we didn’t let ourselves break rules, break hearts, break and fall over, trip, tumble, somersault or even get stuck when turned inside out and upside down, maybe we couldn’t really appreciate all there is to experience.

I can hear his heartbeat, the slow, steady and solid rhythm that’s often put me to sleep, has calmed me on nights when I’m wide awake and blinking in the dark. Same rhythm that has lulled me into a slow, lazy and content slumber. His face is a mask of ferocious grimace as he stares at the screen, inscrutable.

And yet, I watch and read so much. Not watchful as maybe an older, albeit younger, me would have done. There’s a peace in this place. Sometimes it is quiet, and not a word needs to pass. Sometimes, it is full of chatter, of giggles, hiccups, murmurs and sighs. A lot of times the peace of pure friendship, companionship, is cut through with a lightning bolt of electrical frisson as hairs spark on fire and emotions rage. This, to me, is the calmest place. This rocking ball of fire, topically rearranged as sensitivity, despair, uneasiness and anger, is sanctuary.

There once was a time and place when I wouldn’t have thought so. But edges of things broken have smoothed away. Sometimes it was time that did that smoothing, and sometimes I had to sequester myself in a dark closet armed with a nail file to metaphorically chisel away at those sharp broken edges to make them easier to live with. There once was a time when this left me bleeding and in puddles, ponds, oceans of tears. But a broken shard of glass lost in the sea returns to the shore as a smooth gemstone reflecting a million colours.

Now when we rage, I feel at home. Because that is the security of unconditional love. No matter how much you lambast the other, no matter how much you throw plates, books or grenades, you know that this is a safety net, an ever-expanding sanctuary that can contain all of that, can withstand all the flames and blasts. Boundaries of a certain brand of companionship that is far more elastic and accommodating than that of any other. That is home.

Even when we go quiet for days. Me in my place, he in his. Even when time just keeps going on its journey, the sanctuary of home exists.

It is this peace, this quintessence of love, that permeates the space of infinity. A place I continue to poke and prod, questioning its existence.  Sometimes it whispers back an inscrutable answer: I don’t need to understand it for it to happen.

Conditioned

There's been this weird thing happening. Whenever I go to the washroom, there is something behind the shower curtains. I find my eyes returning to a certain spot inside the bathtub.  Often, it stays with me, what I've seen. I leave half-absentmindedly, mind absorbed with what I just witnessed.

Eraser. There's a physicality in the word, a beautiful sense of closure, perhaps, in the way the word rolls around inside my head.

I find myself wondering about the word. About how little it is used today. Instead we use "delete" -- an easy tap on a button to remove something unwanted. But erase, there is something physical about it, a manual act almost, summoning memories of rolled up bits of indian rubber on old canvases. Maybe it's sepia-hued. Sometimes, it's not.

Memory sometimes makes one feel that things cannot be erased. Old hurts, broken hearts, things that seem like even if they mend, they leave cracks, shatter lines ... they seem almost un-erasable. And yet, time is supposed to be that healer. Does healing equal erasure, is what I want to ask, yet I already have my answer.

Sometimes this act of erasing is a physical, conscious act. You can erase someone out of your life. Sometimes you have to, in order to clear out what isn't needed, in order to make space for the things that are important. Sometimes erasing is forgiveness. Sometimes forgiveness is the same act as erasing a person from your life.

And then this act of erasure means erasing regrets, erasing those things you cannot change. Erasing words exchanged, erasing kisses exchanged, erasing promises exchanged. And the strangest thing about this is that for someone so immersed in memories and holding on to dreams, the act of erasure is so damn fulfilling.

It is fulfilling to just let go of weighted sentences, of words riddled with meaning. Fulfillment can also come in living in this moment, in shooting out a smile to those who matter. Even to those who don't. It's in falling in love again when you don't expect it. In extending a hand to hold another person's hand, and also in retracting it without having any expectations whatsoever.

Damage eraser. That's what I keep seeing inside the washroom, behind the shower curtains. It isn't a ghost, or a supernatural phenomenon. Just two simple words on my Garnier hair conditioner, "damage eraser."

Damage, maybe it's sepia-hued. Sometimes, it's not.


music accompaniment: ben howard - empty corridors

That Feeling

When your eyes meet across a crowded room and the second you lock eyes the smiles are already exchanged before facial muscles can even move. The feeling of a warm, snug hug that is simultaneously full of care and yet so nonchalant because it is ready to give more. Or when you're sending messages to each other on the way to meet each other and you turn the corner to see him smiling at his phone while reading your last text and already responding. When he's drunk and spends the night talking to you while you're halfway drunk on the way to fully on what he's telling you because all he can talk about is you.  When you meet again after what feels like ages though is only days or even hours and you both start talking at superspeed to share and catch up with what the other has to say. When he asks you for songs even though he can't understand a word of the language and you start to fall in love with the songs you thought you wouldn't listen to again. When

There are no more perfect moments

"I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, its quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy,  generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: it you think about it you don't do it."

— Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

You are a milestone

"Here we are back to these alexandrine discussions I had to go through before when in my heart I had the simplest, commonest desires, such as telling her I loved her, taking her in my arms."

— Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

The Echo of Eccentricity

Falling in love again wasn't something I had planned. But then again, when is it ever a planned phenomenon? I've found myself asking, pondering whether it is really something in our control or not — sometimes it seems as if we subconsciously make that decision to go ahead and pursue that sensation, and yet sometimes I wonder if we ever really have a choice. If falling out of love was viable, then why not falling in love again?

I recall an age where I had compiled a list of requirements that with every year increasingly edging further into the teen years, grew and grew. He had to be funny, he had to be artistic, he should sing, he should be sporty, he should have abs, he should be smart, he should be kind, he should have a great smile or if not a smile, one that you could feel...and on it went, with extensive requirements that got more complicated and complex.

I'm not really sure if I ever actively sought out a candidate to fill all these requirements. Whatever happened just happened. But over time as I fell, flew, hurt, and got up again, I soon realized that everything that I wanted in my true love was everything I myself had become.

And now these days my heart is doing that little double-time skip, the corners of my mouth that little uplift of a secretive smile.

The Sublimity of Reunification

One of the best ways of recovering from anything is through friendship.

Time had passed like a blink of an eye, and yet the very moment I reconnected with one of my best friends it was as if no time at all had passed. And the funny thing is that both of us voiced that very thought, as the penultimate and long-overdue reunion finally happened.

We regressed to those same younger selves that we once were, and yet I reflected on the many ways we had transformed. We returned to the same hallowed halls where we once spent hours and days, and blanketed with memories and time and experience shared everything that has passed since we had went our own ways.

It is fascinating to realize how we were just children at that time we thought we were conquering the world. Perhaps in another ten years again, this realization will happen, looking at ourselves as we are today.

All the "remember when"s of nostalgia, of recounting old escapades as if it were just yesterday, of opening up about failed relationships and worries for the future — and realizing how much we have changed. Him more gentle, me more poised. If anything, I realized we had both survived a long weary journey, and were more laidback, calmer, and steadier from the experience.

I pointed out the full moon as we walked our last moments. "It's giving us its blessing," I joked.

Maybe blessings don't need to really have a point or outcome, maybe they are just appreciating the moments when you have them.

Resilience

Perhaps it's okay to break, afterall. Maybe that is actually the true purpose of life, if ever there was one: that living isn't about finding a form or function that is impermeable, infallible, indestructible. Living is in breaking, in drowning, in falling—living is even in hurting.

Long time ago, when I was stuck deep in my med-sci studies, one of my university professors said something which, obviously after all these years, stuck to me. He said, "The Earth will become a huge snowball, we will all die. Sure. But who are we kidding? The Earth is more resilient than we give it credit for. It's going to perish, sure, but it will still be there, and it will thrive again, light years after we have wiped ourselves off the face of it."

Maybe it is OK, therefore, to let yourself trust and be broken. It is OK, to feel the fifty million thousand frequencies of loss and despair. It is OK to paint your world with shades of anger, sorrow, melancholy, and grief. It would almost be wrong not to. Like being able to paint as many colours onto a canvas and never touching all the colours of possibility.

In breaking then, despite the many ways that the cracks seem irreparable, the way they creak and hurt again and again, like a misaligned patella that you fell on when ice-skating that many years ago and whenever you stand up or try running down stairs the pain comes shooting up your leg in remembrance, all it takes is not avoiding the pain but embracing it, exercising it.

Even when you feel that you have lost out, when your trust has been brutalized again and again, maybe sometimes the pain is the best opportunity for you to look it over and realize that those moments had more worth than you ever even knew, even (especially) when you were actually living it. There are moments that make you remember exactly why that trust was so deeply ingrained in you, why that Jenga piece was so vital to your sense of self. Perhaps that person gave you a mirror to look at yourself in ways you never were able to before. Maybe they gave you a blanket, just for a while, sometimes, if you were a bit cold. Maybe they lent you an umbrella, not expecting that the relationship would develop further than that casual transaction. Maybe you spent hours and hours, learning to be yourself for once in your life, because this person gave you the space to be that, with them.

These were beautiful moments, and yet moments always have an inexorable place in the past. There are echoes of that laughter which permeate even into the very present now, telling you, reminding you, that you have never laughed as much in your life or smiled as much as you did then—and even if it is gone, it had at least existed.

Perspective is such a compelling narrative.  Even that moment you fell, where you hurt so much and thought that was it: that was the end, that was life, goodbye, time and perspective allows you to see that 5 year old little child that you were, falling on the playground and skimming your hands with gravel embedded under the skin. Adulthood is no different from that child, because we are always lost children seeking something more: a best friend, or companionship, a better snack, or a great exhilarating experience on the slide; and we are always growing in ways even we do not know—until we break.

Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. — Corrie ten Boom (quote that popped up in my inbox after I finished writing this post)

 There is a reason we can forgive, and maybe even as we cannot forget because we are still scared—maybe now more than ever—to trust again, we learn to forgive ourselves. We are all broken children, but in breaking, and breaking again and again, we have learnt to become a little more accountable to and for ourselves.

Sometimes you realize that the trust you thought was shattered is actually only a small dwarf planet compared to the huge expanse of a neverending universe of that patient, deep-abiding, resilient love within which it revolves.

Safekeeping

One of the hardest things is piecing yourself back together again after breaking into a million pieces. 

Trust.

You can trust someone with information, or trust them to get a job done. Trust someone to have your back, trust someone to be there, no matter what. Or trust someone to keep you safe. 

The worst part in misplaced trust in a person is that when you give that trust to another being, that trust is completely contingent in your very own personal trust of the self. You are trusting yourself, your sense of judgement, in being able to believe that this other person is worthy of keeping your trust.

So, when they decide they no longer want that burden, when they decide that hurting another person to relieve their own stress in life is OK, because they have already done the calculations and decided you will be OK even if your trust in them was wrong all along, they forget that the implications lie on a much grander scale. Because, even after the damage is done, and they have moved on, that huge earthquake is only the start of an avalanche of aftershocks: you are left stranded in a place where you cannot even trust yourself.

When you have moved from a space of casual acquaintance, slowly and systematically ingraining everything inside of you with this person's aura, their function in your life slowly becoming part of the very equation of who you are, so much that you would bet your life in that trust, nevermind your own sense of identity and trust, it goes without saying that once that little piece of trust is removed like a Jenga piece down there below the other million pieces which comprise you, of course everything, absolutely everything, collapses.

But it is all inside of you. And not any other person ever could imagine what it is like beyond that outer shell.  Inside, you are juggling the pieces that have not yet fallen, and yet you are trying to pick up, and catch, the other falling pieces which are sharp, fatal, piercing you with pain. Inside, you are slipping trying to escape falling completely and utterly to that bottomless pit where your sense of self can never be resuscitated, and yet you are slipping on the shards which make up the slopes you are trying to keep a grip on with the soles of your already-ripped and bleeding feet, and mutilated palms, slipping on the blood, bringing you to your knees, on which you continue to struggle up. Inside you are suffocating, as the atmosphere around you is a vacuum-sealed vessel of building pressure, toxic fumes of self-hatred, green gaseous canisters of laughter assaulting you with no remorse. Inside, you don't even know which part of you is really you, and inside, you don't even know who you are anymore, not really. 

Can you ever really—really—trust another person to keep you safe?