What are you allowed to demand from those who have hurt you? Or is it nothing at all? When your body begs, is it calling for reparations or retribution? When the accused is laying at your feet, what's the moral gradient of demanding tithe for sins brandished onto you? The pain kisses flames onto our burning skin, heating up an inferno of hurt and rage. Do you give mercy or enforce justice? Questions left unanswered, embroiling in an inner torment of holding on and letting go — not knowing if casting off will lead to a paradise island or the sunken depths. But the anchors root you to the past, holding you prisoner to something someone else did. Marks on your soul singed from malicious indifferent. How it stings to be so affected by another person.
Concept: taking something destructive and polluting and turning it into a vessel for a bit brighter future. The newest in my broken things project is a pipe from my car taken out during repair at the mechanic. It's being repurposed to grow wildflowers, using seeds sent from Honey Nut Cheerios' campaign to bring back the dying populations of bees. By planting these wildflowers, we're trying to save the colonies that are disappearing at alarming rates. It's a small thing for me to do, and it's not enough to counter all the effects my carbon footprint has. But it's something. It's a step. It's one more broken thing that no longer harms, a villain that is trying to change.
Spring asks us to consider minimalism. Taking the time to go through all our things and declutter our lives. Separating the sentimental and useful from the trash that has snuck into the corners of cabinets and drawers. Evaluating each piece that stuck over the years, and deciding if it still holds true to who we are now, or if it is just a relic of who we used to be. There's a risk, of course, of airbrushing reminders of the bad parts of us, of throwing out our worst memories and most embarrassing moments. But is that so wrong to do? I’m not sure, as burning also offers baptism, as we cleanse to a sense of purity. Cleaning in the spring empowers us, because everything that makes the cut of staying has earned the right to be remembered or has proven its usefulness. And when all is said and done, there's space for new things, as we can now welcome more into our lives, having been freed from burdens which have been relocated to the green and blue bins sitting curbside, to be picked up in the morning by someone else.
After experiencing my first full-blown panic attack, I visited my guidance counselor, who recommended to me the ABCD method of processing my thoughts and emotions.
A: Adversity — what's the problem?
B: Belief — what is your mind telling you is going on?
C: Consequences — what are the results of letting your thoughts go in this direction?
D: Diversion — what's the reality of the situation, and how does that differ from the distortions you're perceiving?
Within her office, we worked on calming me down, and over the years, I've done my best to continue the maintenance of my thoughts and emotions through therapy. Not everything that enters our minds should be preserved or given free reign to control us. And if our thoughts are neglected, they can become distorted, exaggerated, and removed from the reality of our lives. When we take the time to groom our thoughts, cutting those that are ruinous, while nourishing those that give us strength — when we conquer our thoughts, we no longer become subjected to them, but rather agents of our own future, our own fate. Self-awareness is the first step to any lasting, positive change. Though I've expanded my toolkit to keeping sane, that first step was hard to take. But over the years of meditation and journaling, talking through that I was experiencing and being reflective of my thought process has kept me mentally healthy, and has given me the structure to make it through every anxiety or panic attack, through depression and trauma. It's only when we empty out the water of our buckets, can we reach out to those in need, pouring their flooding burdens into our own robust minds.
Broken things litter my life — reminders of all the mistakes I’ve made and the consequences of my carelessness. Guilt would quickly cloud my mind for my clumsy fingers or my coarse actions. Though justifications sprung up of accidents, good intentions, and insignificance, I still found broken things in my wake. But what I’m proud of of late is gathering those broken things and turning them into some form of art, not rushing to discard my history, but to embrace it in something sort of beautiful. Maybe it's in my nature to be destructive, but it's also in my nature to make an attempt at amends.
Our universe's sole currency is time. And everything we do and everything we are molds time in just four ways: giving, making, killing, taking. We translate time into different currencies, names like money, love, legacy, effort. But those codes distort our behaviors as we diminish the value of time, and give it away without thinking, steal it without thinking, kill it without thinking. In the hopes of acceptance and belonging, we trip over ourselves to prioritize the clocks running in other people, and take a while to notice when the hours we shower aren't cherished, but instead discarded like leaflets given out on the streets. Taken, yes, but disinterestedly so, and soon to be littered. The terrifying reality that time is all we have begun a shrill ringing in my ears, the tick tocks an incessant, thunderous waterfall. I pulled myself away, and have entered the discipline of respecting my time. Mastering the art of time makers, and learning the tells of time stealers. Judging better what hours I should offer, and fighting the waste of sand in our hourglasses.
Time: a temptress both sly and shy. Overstays her welcome when we're full, but gone beyond reach when we're begging for more.
Let us make our way to the land of lucidity. Boarding a spaceship to a neon future, where our dreams have limitless scope, and our eyes the clarity of expression. The journey from babel to paradise requires reinterpreting this world into a better one. Slowly but surely, we can get there. I'm doing my best to take daily vitamins of creativity, put in at least some cardio of patience, and floss at morning and night with goodwill. I know what my purpose is here — to build the bridge to lucidity, where we dream in a state of total consciousness. We all have a piece of color to add to our neon future, and the bridge to get there cannot be made alone. To start, we must pay attention to what makes us lucid, what brings us clarity. Eyes wide open, dreams burst out of souls, and together we make our way, turning our babel into paradise.
Montreal — this city of youth and loneliness. Best experienced at 3am walking alone during snowfall. On first arrival, we leave what we know and relinquish ourselves to the island.
It's easy to become enveloped in its charm, easy to feel washed in highlights. But Montreal also wears us down, and often we sink into crevices and the cracks within ourselves, and don't know how to ask for help to climb out. Our tender hearts bruise quickly, and eventually we spread the carelessness we've experienced to others.
A wonder in the summer, a trap set in the winter. Desperately trying to connect and figure out our lives, clawing and running, clawing and running. Leaving starts as a detox, but eventually, your soul aches to be back.
The murals on walls. Gourmet tastes. Drums in the park. Mount Royal watching over your best and your worst moments. The empty streets. Old cobblestones. And the people who made this space between home and the rest of the world.
Montreal: not where we start, nor where we end up, but a flickering companion who showed us how to live.
Looking forward ends up being a lot of looking back. Hoping to engrave your good habits without indulging in the mistakes of yesteryear. Even when I know a new year isn't a magical restart, that change requires more hard work than resolutions promise, I still feel hopeful. Despite the cynicism that latches on with age, I still appreciate the time we take to reflect, make our peace, and move forward. The novelty of novelty I cannot help but celebrate. Sure, I can imagine that life isn't good enough, but my imagination isn't good enough. Instead, I fall folly to the fancies of fools — that the future will be brighter, even if it takes more than the red ink of I will I will to make it so.
The heart is a muscle, not a filter. To survive, the organ must be exercised. A weak heart rests in comfort, while vetted ones can be both strong and soft. Armored, a person is impervious to heartbreak, but impermeability is its only defense. If disrupted, its skin is akin to an invasion of chicken pox. The later the first exposure, the sicker we become. Our blood needs to learn the fingerprints of intruders, to let our antibodies rise through the ranks. To recognize that we are vulnerable frightens us, but we are all vulnerable. Self-admittance may seem like failure of our capabilities. It is, instead, a fact of the world we are born into, one with viruses and bacteria that target our need to connect and touch. Emotional isolation is an easy answer, but a dangerous one, running the risks of self-medication that cannot truly heal us. As individuals, maybe our hearts cannot withstand much; at which point, our DNA begins to pray in mayday, a 9-1-1 call bringing in the song of our evolution — as social creatures, we run the risk of shattering, not just breaking apart, if we choose to pull away, and feed loneliness into our human hearts.
Arriving in a new place, I do my best to find a rooftop, overcoming my dislocation by overseeing the terrain. Wondering what adventures await me here, what lives are being lived under me, who else is looking at the same sky, what will shape me here, and who will I be by the time I leave. I've sought out rooftops with strangers to share a sunset, with friends to hold a secret, with family to say goodbye, with a touch of magic on sharp shingles at late night — but most often, just me and the moon. I always end up feeling a sort of sad, a sadness that feels like the most me of mes, the foundation at the core of all my layers. There's a power to it too, like a general surveying a battle to come. The world is yours, but takes lifetimes to know; people with you sharing an incredible moment, but still are light years away. Visits of vertigo mark the moments that matter most. And heading back to the ground always feels like waking up from a dream that should be the one with the tallies of reality.
We will never be satisfied. Our hunger is eternal, goalposts always shifting with any morsel of happiness we consume. There is no finale or boss level to our lives; we will never be able to sustain our victories. Even the highest highs our minds adapt to and normalize. This comforts me, that no one is ever done living. It means that we will never be bored — there will be something to complain about, something to fix. With every victory, the game starts over, and over, and over, challenges abound if we only look for excitation. The discipline to keep our brains elastic, never settling into the suburbs of neural pathways, but always pressing in new directions. Our cells now are completely different than seven years ago, our bodies just hazy boundaries of atoms loosely holding onto a stream-of-consciousness. I like that. I am not who I was yesterday, and tomorrow will be an anagram of our antecedents, with the opportunity always to change our philosophies. It's easy to think to paralysis, to complicate the meaning of life into a clean narrative. It's harder to remember to simply live, to hunger for moments that make us feel alive. To be content is to die.
See smoke, call 911. Put out the fire. Pretty self explanatory. But putting out the fire, damn that's heart breaking. Cover up a candle and actually watch the light flicker, confused, not quite understanding what went wrong; angry, hey, I was consuming flammable things, isn't that what I'm supposed to do? And finally, a bit desperate, a bit resigned, a bit accepted to it all, last wish — I hope somebody out there enjoyed the smoke.
We're at the junctures of time, aging through the spinning of atoms and the splitting of cells. But life, unlike time, is immediate, pushing recklessness through our blood. And as life escapes time, so do we — enveloping ourselves in the scriptures of providence.
I thought I knew that lady, September. I've seen her walk my way before, felt always a whisper or a thunder, but never looked at her with a trace of wonder. Now here I am, seduced by her charm — a touch of September, a hint of change, and how quickly I’ve fallen under.
The leaps of faith we take putting our trust into what's not ourselves. To let our identities be defined by what we are not, giving permission to lose control entirely. Is that selling out your soul or expanding it? Moving from place to place, I never quite felt allowed to call one country my own, the telltale signs of the immigrant experience — nomads whose homes are what they can tuck in their luggage bags and hearts. The question of who am I always rooting itself in where do you come from. A question asked many times and my answer always being a conflicted and uncertain one begging for clarification of what it is really that they wanted to know.
To not slay the dragon. To not be the hero. To change the quest from conqueror to explorer. To not save the world, just yourself. To build a better future by holding onto your dream of one. To apologize, and making sure to do it in person. To opening the doors of your home and making your family bigger every day. To look back, before you go, and make sure everyone knows your farewell isn't permanent. To tame the dragon and let the hero be the one who takes the leap of faith to jump out of the tower — so when they open their eyes, they're flying in the skies, traveling the world with you on dragon back.
Haunted houses host tenants of the past, as we hold onto What Ifs and Almosts, letting in Should Haves, Would Haves, Could Haves, and sleeping every night with the ghosts of Guilt, Shame, and Regret. The floors, so burdened by the weight of all these residents, begin to creak and heave, but thinking we're the only ones there, we wonder why walking has become so dangerous. Before falling asleep, we make sure to keep dreamcatchers strung above our beds, but never think to lock the doors or put in a security system to keep out Fear, Worry, and Blame. Our bodies get weaker, as we only consume our hurt over and over, coping with mechanisms that dig in deeper wounds. Eventually, the house collapses, as the ground has been eroded through. Now trapped in the basement where specters have made their home, we're submerged into possession. As our souls are taken over entirely and our senses stolen away, only in our last moments do we finally realize that we needed an exorcism.
Like a child at a concert, some things that we are thrown into, we just aren't ready for. The overwhelming of the senses takes away the beauty of the music and the magic of thousands sharing a moment, turning it into discordance and chaos. It's okay for us to look back and state that concerts aren't for us, a claim backed by psychological scars and burst eardrums. But maybe some time later, we can turn the fissures and cracks in ourselves to paths for soil to turn into flowers. Returning to the scene of the crime when our senses aren't overwhelmed but prepared. Being able to say truly, "there was nothing ever bad about you, I was just not ready yet. My love misdirected to fear and I never knew how to express it any other way. Until now."
There's only two serious philosophical questions: why do people commit suicide? & why haven't you yet? I'm trying to figure out what makes someone look at this world and this life and decide they're done. Like love, life is a choice, but so is the absence of life or transcendence from it. To move on and end the human experiment. I have never been suicidal, but I have been depressed, where I looked at my life and felt that I lost everything I was working on. And that mindset was piercing holes in me, turning me into a destructive cyclone that ravaged what I actually had of value. So why don't I go to bed with a gun to my head? I still feel useful and appreciated, in a raw, elemental kind of way. And the more I recognize that in myself, what I actually offer the world and my purpose, the easier it has become to turn my cyclone self into a gust of wind getting fall leaves to dance — or a very simple breath of fresh air.
