The flowers are tight in buds. Have I forgotten the smell of monsoon?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about where and with whom I spend my days. I have been forced to rethink the acquaintances and environments I occupy because the ways in which I show up for others, are not the ways in which they show up for me. This is not to paint my whole life with a single brush, but after experiencing disrepect, not being given the credit I wholly deserve, and waiting to see people value me for who I’ve been to them, I feel the great urge to pause and reflect on the shores at which I have anchored my ship.
I place no burden on others. This reflection is not theirs to bear.
I knock on my own heart, to ask myself — is this where I want to continue to be? The answer to this question is guiding me now, it is forming the renewed fences of my stable, and helping me re-invest my energy in what I would want me to do.
Beyond the disappointment of living in an unfair system, there is clarity, if one chooses to reach for it. This clarity shines a light on what people and systems are capable of, and sometimes, they’re not capable of more than what they’re doing. And that’s pretty much it. The question, for the self, then becomes that of association. Does one want to be associated with ideas, values, environments that one has outgrown or moored away from?
This could mean as huge as packing your bags and moving cities, or as small as deleting an application on your phone that occupies your time in an unhealthy way. It could mean spending an extra fifteen minutes each morning doing breath work instead of sleeping in, or it could mean detaching your self-worth from your day-job.
Either way, change is hard, and it takes a fair bit of reflection, and then, a spoonful of courage, every single day.
The days have been easier. The days have been uninspired.
It’s not possible to guard oneself in a way that one won’t be hurt or disappointed. But it’s possible to make realistic choices, whatever that might mean. But I am tired of spending energy in trying to prevent things from happening, from being preemptive, as it were. This could mean planning the week, foreseeing issues on projects and trying to prevent them, or ensuring that I’m personally armed with everything I might need to stay healthy, including solitude and a trip to the journal. There’s always a mental load of meeting the future prepared.
This forecasting is now exhausting me. It’s making me feel uninspired and less creative. While it helps to live like a planner instead of a pantser, I’m feeling like a brown-bounded diary with calendar dates instead of a person.
The spontaneity seems lost on me, and I’m not sure if it is a condition of my age, even though, I don’t give aging much thought because as I wrote recently, I am singularly focused on my mortality. If I am going to die someday, is this how I want to live? I am trying to embed this question into the heart of everything I am doing. It begs me to ask myself, what do I need, what do I need?
While reading Jane Eyre, I found my spirit emboldened by young Jane who rages against her cruel aunt and cousins to defend her self-worth. Despite being treated as inhuman, unworthy of love and tenderness, and being strip away of her childlike curiosity, Jane Eyre rebels against her relatives to protect her sense of who she is, and over and over, reminds herself that she matters. That she was able to do this at such a young age, without outside influence, inspired me to be like her in the every day.
Jane did that when no one else believed in her, and she had no prospects, no friends, no light at the end of the tunnel. It is an immensely courageous act. And reading it made me sad and happy at the same time.
It is the forgetting that is easy. It is the remembering that is harder now.
One day, I was sipping on lemon iced tea in a communal space while the book was sitting next to me. A woman with a wide smile asked me how I was liking it. I told her, and handed her the copy, hardbound and decorated with flowers, the name of the book and author embossed on it in sterling white font. It was a conversation starter, and the familiarity of a different age.
Such moments come rarely now, if at all. We don’t read as much. We don’t talk fondly with strangers as much.
Despite living locally this year, and not travelling, I can safely say I’ve been able to reconnect with myself more. Whether it be the slow dawn of realisation that I deserve better, the untethering of my self from places that don’t serve me, the closing of childhood loops, and turning my gaze inwards, it has been a journey of sorts.
I look forward to see what I’m going to do.
So that’s there for spontaneity, I guess.
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