Are you happy with the way your personal life stands currently? If so why, and if not, what would you change about yourself or your personal life to shape it into the life you would like to have?
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
I think this poem is rather apposite for the topic at hand. Combined, they speak to my current state, especially as the thoughts of my transition seem to be be growing louder as the days progress. Not too much mind you. But now, as I begin to approach the midsummer of my life, there is a feeling that time is running out. Autumn will soon descend and I realize that my greatest anxiety, increasingly, is not the fear of that final sunset. Instead, my trepidation lies in the fact that maybe I may never do the things that I have been meaning to do by the time I view that last sunset.
Have I seen the things I had planned to see? Have I been to the places I have been wanting to go? Have I enjoyed these few days I have in this 3-D space called life? How much is left to do? Have I lived?
Once I started sifting through the database of my former years to find the answers to these questions, I must confess that the conclusion, particularly as it pertains to the latter, is a resounding, no. Do not get me wrong. I have by no means had a completely mundane life, for there have been times of excitement. And there have also been those occasional missteps and faux pas that I would like to toss into the dustbin of forgetfulness.
The issue lies in the fact that as the years have progressed, my ability to enjoy simple things has been greatly diminished. This was why on my trip to Nara, one of Japan’s most iconic cities. I recalled while sifting through these pictorial remnants of my halcyon days, how I had resolved to make the most of my time in that place. In Nara, I tried to be a child again even though I had long forgotten what that felt like. While there, I put on my childhood spectacles and started looking at the world through a completely different pair of lenses. This hiatus from looking at the world except through the perspective of survival and profit was for the nonce, liberating.
And so Nara became more than a place to see simply because it was on one's checklist. It was something to be experienced in the way that a child would; with joyful abandon. Hence, when these deer from Deer Park came to eat out of my hands, the sensation of feeling their gums and their tongues and their teeth rubbing against my hand cheered me up. Imagine, an encounter so simple yet so rewarding in the main that one finds contentment in merely being in the moment.
So what does all this have to do with this week’s topic and Derek Walcott? Well, Nara was a reminder of a promise I had broken. Several years ago I had sworn never again to look at the world through the lenses of survival and profit. I was adamant that I would resurrect that stranger whom I had placed in a comatose state when I entered this rat race. I had affirmed to be like a child, where even the smallest of things would once more bring magic to my life. Just as they used to.
In Nara, I was in that place. So immersed I was in the experience that I stopped to listen to the birds sing, something I had not done in a while even though songbirds are nested just outside my window. Their harmonies reminded me of how unhappy I was with merely aggrandizing things. Anent that I am not leaning towards becoming a tree-hugging hippie. I have no problems with hippies by the way, but I was discontented in the fact that I had relegated to the periphery, the stranger who was myself. That child who knows me by heart. That part of me whom I have ignored in this hustle and bustle of modern life. The child who would happily exit the toxicity of these stress-filled days and become a full-time writer and part-time organic farmer. The child who wants to remain in that Nara state of mind so as to see magic in the everyday, mundane things in life. Whether it be in the scratches on the floor, in the twinkle of a firefly, or in the gentle touch of another. The child who would be content to love again this stranger who is me, who has forgotten what solitude feels like but still yearns for it. A child who is nostalgic for a life that is far away from the bedlam of this perpetual hustling of modern life.
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