101 Essays: musings

as a romantic, here’s a snippet of one of my beloved pieces, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. cue William Wordworth.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. — Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

to revisit somewhere after an absence of five years. huh. what that feels like. you realize how much your surroundings have changed — nothing is stagnant. people who you’ve met before, or even collided with, change. internally, you’re prompted to also acknowledge that you are not the same person that stood at this exact same spot, five years ago. and how precious your memories are, stowed away just for you. they were sensations sweet, unremembered pleasures that guided you into who you are today. the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love that you give to the world tirelessly everyday now, are actions downstream of those memories.

one reason or another, i can’t seem to sleep right now, so time for another book review. this time, my beloved 101 essays. this is a long overdue review because it’s been approx a year since i’ve read it all the way through and i did that cover to cover, again recently. it’s interesting to read things at different time points in my life, when the same principles end up holding vastly different meanings while the essence of their guidance stays the same. i read segments of this one in vancouver, reykjavík, oxford, coventry, and victoria. memories come back with moments of life.

essentially, i loved this book so much because it allowed me to genuinely reconsider perspective. i gave this book to one of my best friends on her birthday and we share paragraphs from time to time. book’s not perfect. there are parts that are incongruent/contradictory sometimes between essays (after all, life is a balancing act). but i think my perspective changed in a sense that i take some things in life less seriously. i don’t pain myself to save up for some goalpost that is beyond of the periphery of my vision. i learn to make the process meaningful, and recognize everything meaningful is gradual, and there is no endpoint anywhere. i try to be more present and take things literally moment by moment, and not just preach it as a platitude. feelings are moment by moment, interpreted. at the end of the day, when you scan your body for sensations, they’re just literal feelings of tightness and openness. a lot of overthinking and overcomplicating in life comes from how we interpret our surroundings and create trains of thoughts. however, a thought is just that, a passing train. it doesn’t always mean something. and to live a fulfilling life, we take risks. we take it soon. we remind ourselves of our mortality and know that we don’t last forever. we don’t just stare at the stars from the gutters, we do things that make us vulnerable and reach for what we think we deserve. nothing ever comes from a place of lacking, but a place of possibility.

i’ve also learned to label less. why do things warrant labels? nothing is inherently good or bad. in fact, it’s difficult to compare moments of your life against other moments of your own life. people like to say they were “at the lowest of lows” or the “highest of highs” (and i say that too) but really, moments aren’t binary like that. moments are unique in of themselves. we don’t have to live them three times — once in anxious anticipation, once during the moment, and once in retrospect. no! they’re just the moment.

to actually live, you cannot live by holding the yardstick of your past. the future is unknown. you cannot possibly know the ecstatic feeling you have yet to experience, because you have not experienced it yet. you cannot create expectations for relationships that have yet to happen, arbitrarily defined by a previous few. inherently, moments cannot be compared. you have to be open. what you choose to recall in your past is your own narrative of how you wish to see the story, but you could easily pick out different moments of your past, and highlight/weave a different font story. my life doesn’t need to flow like a smooth story, and i don’t need to have clear discrete boxes of emotions at any give time. experiences are always multi-dimensional, and i simply choose to recall what i choose to recall. your identity does not have to be cohesive. and your story does not have to flow or even make sense to other people. experiences, they do not need narratives. i do not experience something for the purposes of recalling it when i’m old. or to tell it to other people. moments are enough.

here. now. all we have.

and other people may not recall the same things as i do, and that’s okay. nothing really matters at the end, right? isn’t that so liberating. freedom is a state of mind. and whatever you focus on, it expands. the purpose of being here is just to grow, and there’s no finish line anywhere. joy is in the process. joy is in the small things. when sunlight shines through the trees, and there’s interplay between light and leaves. the feeling of your skin on someone else’s. how not everyone will love you in a way you are able to grasp. the very simple happiness of getting up in the morning, and having an open day ahead. the list of things that turned out to be very right for you, that a year ago, how my jaw would drop to the floor if someone told me what was coming. to think that you’re not thriving— but then to remember that you were able to pay rent, buy yourself coffee, that you even have a job! and a roof over your head. then some silly daydreams and what i imagine is too good to be true. and then the sudden realization that i already have so much. the ability to just be present and let go slightly of resistance. that’s happiness for me.

anyways — this is getting long. always a work in progress ❤ and i remind myself of how the things that make me happy are challenging, beautiful, meaningful, and worthwhile.