I came here to see people who struggled
who knew nothing but the burnt ends of a cigarette and the beat of rhythm. 
I can hear for the fragrance of earth, the smell of the sky on a rainy day, 
the errant whisper of a newly blossomed leaf and the beckoning of a light a hundred meters too far gone. 

I came here to feel the intensity, 
the power of weight, oppression, release, the erotic touch,
a crescendo on a violin and then the fall of nothing more than a beating whisper. 

I came here to lie on the wet grass and to stare at a sky overcast, the rhythmic pulsating of a heart too strong to care and to weak to know the future. 

I came here for now, an unknown, a beginning, and end, and everything, everything that lies to the left. 

I came here to live lifetimes.

// // written while lying on wet grass at 11:29pm, frankfurter allee, berlin

The last piece I wrote here was three years ago to the day, on my 27th birthday, as I stood on the cusp of a new transition and tried to grapple with what, at that time, felt like a cacophonous symphony of losses, excitements, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

I got more than I bargained for.

There is a funny thing about hindsight, viewed through the smudge-free lenses of wisdom—lenses milled through realized experience and polished by sheer overcoming. Lenses that unblur lessons that feel both profound and obvious.

To judge the past with the knowledge of the present would be impossible without the past first creating the very circumstances that forged that knowledge.

And yet, we judge. Perhaps from hope, as if, somehow, the wisdom of the present could reach back and reframe what has already been written. As if the past itself were not the necessary path to the present.

I’ve questioned my decisions often, my past—what was in my control, and what I thought was in my control.

I don’t think it’s been helpful.

I’ve learned instead to see my choices, the world I shaped, and the person I’ve become as always having been the right ones.

Not because they were objectively right, but because they were right answers for the worldview I held at the time. The story I chose to live, where my actions declared my reality.

To me, the integrity of my self-trust is paramount, and so if I believe in the integrity of my internal tools, then the only thing requiring refinement is my worldview—not by default, my ability to navigate it.

It’s easier written than done, but I’ve come to realize that life, at its core, is an exercise in learning to play again.

Since I last wrote here, I’ve been through more ups and downs—really, helical loops—circling through patterns and lessons. I’ve experienced the highs of some of life’s greatest joys and the inevitable descent of sorrow that follows.

Each new chapter of life blossoming with new opportunities, relationships, and experiences, colliding with my refining sense of self, my inner demons, and the unpredictable impact of others’ choices on me.

And each chapter, cyclically, frustratingly, often abruptly, ended. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes by circumstance. And then, as that desolate page turned, the next chapter began.

I’ve cycled through new highs, abrupt endings, and the quiet dissolving of past selves. And yet, the more I observe these shifting patterns, the more I return to a Sanskrit word I grew up with: Maya.

A quick search will tell you it means “illusion”—specifically, the illusion of the phenomenal world.

I’ve learned to take its spiritual inklings in stride. The mythology and eastern philosophy I was raised with shape a more fluid meaning, a semantic cloud that resists the isolating choice of a single translation. Language often fails when it tries to distill an idea from one cultural consciousness into another, falling instead into a lexical gap as the translation strips away the nuance of its lived experience and cultural grounding.

So instead, I think of Maya as a play—a grand stage upon which we perform daily, shifting masks and personas to fit the stories we choose to live. We engage with the people who orbit our immediate world either personally or virtually, unaware of the countless others whose stories unfold beyond our line of sight.

It’s like the plays that we love to watch—in films, in books, or in the quiet schadenfreude of watching someone else navigate the rollercoaster of life. We immerse ourselves, emotionally invested in narratives we know are fiction, just as we invest in our own life. We believe, with temporary delusional confidence, that the robot truly fell in love, that the protagonist really did reconcile their grief, that tragedy had to unfold just so, dictated by fate rather than chaos. We know it’s not real. And yet, we play along, manipulating that world in our imagination.

It’s like the way a child leaps off a swing just to feel the split second of flight before hitting the dirt. The way a game of pretend becomes life-or-death for an afternoon, only to be forgotten by dinner. Play feels serious in the moment but weightless in the long run. The ability to hold both dialectics in hand at once allows neither seriousness nor weightlessness to take hold of us.

Maya is the play that fades when we close the curtains of our eyes each night, surrendering to a night of dreams—no different from our waking life, just less bound by coherence. We laugh at the absurdity of falling out of the sky on our seventeenth attempt to fly, yet wake to live another act. An act filled with sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, beginning again, in our next beat—a new story or an old classic, with a repeat cast or an ensemble of new faces.

It’s a word used to describe the ludicrousness of it all, of the stories we choose to believe and thus live, the people we cling to as anchors, and the selves we construct, knowing they are always in flux, dissolving and reforming.

It is the default script of reactivity, where life unfolds on autopilot, dictated by our silo of habit, obsession, and neurosis, leaving us unaware that the game is playable.

There is no fixed script. The stability we crave is just an illusion—a desire to escape responsibility, to live without the burden of freedom, the burden of weightlessness, without the suffering that choice entails. It is the comfort formed from decades spent reacting—watching reruns of the same episode, lulling us into stagnation, stripping away the very poignancy that gives life its thrill.

And yet there exists a boldness to life, where life isn’t a state, but a forceful determined engagement. To become a confluence of life and existence, two rivers meeting in endless motion, swirling, shifting, shaping the self anew, liberated from the responsibility of a contrived and predetermined role.

We admire those who radiate this energy – who are undeniably alive.

We may have even been them once.

In a state of being, full of vitality.

If Maya is the grand illusion, then childhood is the default time we engage with it fully, unburdened by the need to make sense of it.

Play, from our childhood, is a full-bodied experience—intense and immediate, yet fleeting.

It’s the way a child runs, then falls, then laughs at the fall before getting up to try again, unbothered by the failure, finding exhilaration in the motion itself.

It’s how a game invented in the span of a few seconds—an empire built of sticks, shadows, and whimsically shifting rules—becomes the most important thing in the world, only to be abandoned without regard when something else becomes important.

It’s the unfiltered testing of reality. What happens if I jump from here? What if I pretend to be a lion? How far can I run? How do you react to my ridiculous idea?

Every action is a question, a hypothesis, an experiment. Every failure is folded into the next attempt. The stakes feel high, but the consequences are light.

In play, emotions run hot—laughter, frustration, triumph, heartbreak—but nothing lingers. Tears dry fast, and bruises are forgotten and healed. A feud over an imaginary meal is mended in seconds when a new adventure calls. There is no burden of permanence, no need to make sense of it all.

It is life in motion, unencumbered by self-judgment or the fear of looking foolish.

To play is to live lightly, but completely.

Life then is not the opposite of death, it’s the continual engagement despite the lure of comfort.

To live is to destroy one’s identity repeatedly—letting go of past traumas, realizations, regrets, and victories alike—in favor of what is necessary to be present.

To live is to learn, to dismantle faulty constructs, and rebuild them to hold the new.

To live is to play—with ourselves, with our relationships, with our conception of existence. To test the boundaries of the material and immaterial, of people, of ourselves, to cultivate the ability to see things as they are.

To continually play is to tell the greatest story our life can offer.

A story that, in its telling, becomes the meaning of life.

I sit here now, three years later, on the cusp of a new decade of life, one that everyone seems to have an opinion on. Your 30s, as I’ve been told, is when you leave the chaos of your 20s behind, find a renewed sense of self and identity, solidify the people that matter to your core, stabilize your relationships, start experiencing the highs of your career, beckon the start of a new family, and build solidarity with community.

It’s often a loss of people, watching former friends and lovers move on, watching the slow decay of family and older loved ones, and confronting in the mirror our own frailness and temporality.

It’s all a stark declaration, one that I imagine comes from a milkshake of hope, expectations, reassignment, progress, self knowledge, and a honest confrontation with reality.

For me, these things are neither something to chase, nor understand, nor something I even expect to grasp.

I have an inkling that life doesn’t set, clarity doesn’t emerge, and that I don’t get to be subsumed by the stability of my own comforting realizations.

I hope instead, to develop more awareness of my world and the immaterial in my mind, to continue to exercise my agency in the world, to curate and tend to the beauty I find daily. I hope to have more time with the people I cherish, and to cherish the world I get to occupy for this season of my life.

And in all of that, to continue playing—building, testing, learning, failing, and trying—on that edge between life and death.

To be caught up in living so fully that the need for answers dissolves into the simple act of play.

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the misty veil reveals a wry dwindling
of whenever, whoever, and then
a memoriam, not dark, instead
a lightness of being untarnished
not provoked nor still

an uncertain uncertainty
of mixed allure
revealing neither for you nor me
the risk that lies ahead

behind what could have been
what is, and what could be
a story untold

in that permanent mist
unyielding and serenely damp
is where a new comfort lies

one where there isn’t a you
or me, or even us
but an unchartered beginning
through a bridge of dreams

an adventure waiting to be lived
for the courage to be wielded
and the fog to be lifted
by the simple perilous act
of running through it
wildly and freely

// written on my sofa at 2:48am, nyc

Life exists.

Not as a grand gesture to the universe, or an ineffable and necessary part of all.

Instead it beckons, for the realization of being itself.

Not to them, to us, to anyone.

But a call nonetheless to experience, not a direction, nor a place, nor a person

But a time.

A stopgap between the was and the will be.

A small buffer, sure, but a buffer that contains a totality —

of you, of me, of our place and our being.

It isn’t grand. It’s not meant to be – anything, really.

Instead it’s an allowance for our time, our infinitesimal yet nonzero grace —

to experience all the states of being that play.

It isn’t wholly pleasant either, or terrible.

It isn’t meant to be, well, anything really.

Anything more than a being.

An existence.

forever is not a place,
nor a date, nor a time
forever then could be
as they say, a state of mind
a feeling, disjoint from space
even away from time.
and maybe in that forever
where you and I collide
a center removed from itself
no sun, no moon
no day, no night
where a moment
can be forever.
in those places we linger
eternally enveloped
wearing in that blanket
a haven of presence
where forever is found.

I’m sitting again.

This time surrounded by the small mounds of things that make up my collective possessions.

I notice myself in a transitory state, one where my home has started to no longer feel like home, and the next place, not yet home.

The new home still ripe with the exciting unknown that leaves me grasping for hopeful thoughts of recreating a familiar state, but not quite sure of the steps it’ll take to get there.

I’m about to move again, maybe for the 12th (or 15th or 17th) time. It’s a familiar experience for me, one that, comically at this point, feels more natural than staying in one place. But this move feels different – it’s not just the symbolic act of moving myself and my belongings from one location to another.

No. This one – this one coincides with a decided willingness to walk into this next season of my life, not really even sure what to expect at all.

It’s daunting, exciting, and sorrowful all at once.

The first time I chose to move, it was a radical choice – for me – to leave all of the familiar, the world I lived in and loved, and venture to a new city, with some rolling suitcases and the excitement of so many unknowns.

It was, entirely, also, a naive move. One where the consequences of my choices, the loss of people, of familiar routines, of foods I loved, and memories I wanted to have, felt insignificant when compared with the wonder of the future.

I didn’t know then that those losses stay with you.

The loss of the paths you could have gone, but now never can, replaced instead with where you are now, for better or for worse, though likely both.

And these positives and negatives don't outweigh each other. Instead they both exist together, emblemized by your present.

No one told me about the listless drunk nights passively wondering what things might of looked like, if one seemingly arbitrary decision had been replaced with another.

The other major time I moved, it was a choice to run away from the world that scared me. A world battered by a newfound disease, that made everything, even my own body, feel unknown. It wasn’t a deliberate choice to run towards something I knew I wanted, but rather a yearning to run away from a storm towards a perceived calm. A calm in which, hopefully, I could find the stillness to heal.

I’ve even gone back to the previous homes. Homes that are always a garland of deja vus. A revel in the past, that are, just like the oddly familiar, odd.

Something still feels hopeful, like the ebbs and flows of life aren’t meant to take everything from you. My memories, my ability to revisit the amorphous structures of my past, the adopted families I never really left behind, all there.

Familiar.

So maybe then, familiarity is the atonement for loss.

I want to hold onto to each item, listening the stories of each memory, and sometimes even, the lack-there-of that each one initiates.

It isn’t even the thing itself that I care about. Nor the memories even.

Each thing, to me, represents an anchor to a consistency. To a stability I can’t automatically have when I arrive at my next destination. Each item I take with me provides me with the ability to reach out and grab something in my next unknown, and know that I’ll be grasping something familiar.

A phantom negotiation with the world for some semblance of stability.

So then what should I take?

I want to be judicious about what I choose to bring into this next season of my life. The default sentimental panic (and expensive) urge to pack it all and mule it over to my new life is there. But I am, also, acutely familiar with the cost of taking this easy way out.

Each item serves as an anchor to my previous life, and those points keep me connected, yes, but with that also, give me a way to keep me from truly experiencing the new found life that I seek. The distraction that extra weight brings to my life, inhibits me from experiencing the weightless and open potential of the newly encountered unknown.

The real reason I move.

“Should I take my bear can?” I question myself. I hold it, recounting the memories of it serving me a half dozen times in the various forests of the PNW. “Maybe I’ll find a use for it in the concrete jungle of New York”, I humor myself, already knowing I won’t.

What about the studio lights I acquired, hoping to kickstart a new pathway into portrait photography? Or the books I was once so eager to read. How about the chair that I sat on through countless video calls, or the art that I stared out for hours, looking for something to wonder about?

It’s funny how we encounter the best and worst parts of ourselves in the things we choose to inhabit our environment.

How some things evoke a hope for life, a dedication to a value, or enable the performance of a joy that few other things can compare to. And how other things represent failed starts, forgotten dreams – the cruft of a life left from an unanticipated wake of change.

I came across the idea of liminality a few years ago, almost casually, while cooking lunch and listening to a podcast in the new home I had just moved to.

Liminality as a quality can be expressed both in the physical, as a place, and in the immaterial, as a time.

We are surrounded by liminal events, and often we choose to celebrate them – funerals, weddings, graduations, New Years, new jobs, new moves. They are times that mark a transition from one state of being to another. In our society, so many of our ceremonies and rituals result from these events, characterized in all the proclamations that go hand in hand with those transformations.

And then liminal spaces – the places that feel most like home to me. Airports, hotels, bridges, bars. All providing temporary refuge from one major place to another. Places were the rules of society feel different, where you will have dinner for breakfast or a drink at 4pm with international strangers in some new city, or where you will meander across a divide in an activity that is, in itself a pleasure.

I ponder attachment. Why it hurts to leave and change, even though, as the flippant phrase declares, "change is the only constant".

I find myself walking the razors edge, with a rope of my left pulling me towards attachment, towards all that I’m leaving behind, and rope to my right pulling me towards detachment, an existential need to let it all go.

And so I walk, slipping, falling, as each tug from the ropes sways my balance.

The goal really isn’t to not fall, but rather to continue to walk the edge without fearing the slip.

So I’ll spend the week, tending to my routines with the pendulous baggage of finality. I’ll see the friends that I won’t be living in the same place with again. I’ll visit the places I’ve loved, the mini sanctuaries of familiar foods, views, and comforts. I’ll pack my bags, and repack them, a little lighter. I’ll wonder what delights and sorrows I will encounter ahead. I’ll think about all the places I’ll want to see when I come back.

And then the swarm of movement, and all the busyness that comes with it, will take over.

And I’ll find myself in some other home soon, taking in again whatever I am, whatever I have, and whatever I’ll soon become.

Life, at a fundamental basis, is a choice of feelings.

Not that we get to necessarily choose how we feel, but that we choose based upon what we hope we can.

We find new partners for the excitement of acceptance, the casual vulnerability, and the blanket delight of pure physical sensations.  

We chase the overwhelming enchantment found in the exploration of a new place, and the following discovery of the unknown, both within and without.

We relish in the terrifying controlled adrenaline thrill of an adventure – one that allows us to see death, but not touch it.

We listen to that song that acts as an invocation of something deeper, a collective mourning of a past that once was, or one that could have been.

All the various, wondrous, calamitous feelings of life, encapsulated in something profound and deeply human.

It's the baseline currency of life really.

I've been marinating in what it's like to lose – to find myself alone again.

To find myself feeling all of those emotions – anxiety, distress, grief, sadness, nostalgia, confusion, hope – in all their totalities, and to still feel – in whatever meaning it can now take on – whole.

I've been there before. I've never actively wanted to be there.

Life has an almost tragic way of offering these sensations, that you least want to feel, when you least want to feel them.

I'm there now.

It's even been a while.

And so, I've been reflecting a lot on loss.

The loss is not so much me grieving what was, but rather, what could have been.

What has happened, however splendid, beautiful, heartbreaking, maddening, and everything in between, is just that – a memory. I never lose that, even if my perceptions of those memories is distorted in the present.

But what I do lose is the world that I crafted. The one that was created from those memories, and the one that I thought I was living in.

But it wasn't reality, and that realization is the very definition of suffering.

I feel a grief germinating from the dissolution of the world and the dreams that I created while having that thing, that person, that place, in my life, that now, rudely, must be rewritten to accommodate the new reality.

It is, existentially, the greatest pain to reckon with.  

Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

– Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Often these moments of loss recalculate the route of life we take.

Disruptions that force me to question my choices, constraints, beliefs, and values.

I want a life that doesn't feel like merely surviving. But sometimes, that is enough.

Because surviving means to also accept the gamut of life's experiences, and to not deny the pain, the sadness, and the feelings I can so easily run away from, because they too are essential to living.

Because surviving means to delicately curate the attachments I have in my life. To intentionally allow for each suffering, and to have the courage to let go when the cost is too high.

I sit here, writing, feeling, breathing. It's hard. It's painful, and perversely it's also beautiful.

To be alive is to take the risk to be.

I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

― Dawna Markova, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I've been thinking about what it means to exist past a loss.

To lose, and to live with that loss.

To release the stress, the elasticity, and to put my energy elsewhere.

Not in an exercise of self delusion – to forget what once was – but instead to live in what is.

It feels like an obvious travesty, to abandon all that you can relish now, in favor of hankering for what is no longer there. But we do it – I do it, anyways.

The tide of loss takes, smooths over, ripples, and somehow leaves both less and more behind.

But then maybe a flexion of freedom is to let go. To remember that all that is, ourselves included, is a suggestion on the universe.

Our etch, however short, however long, deep or shallow, is impermanent – and that itself liberates us to leave our old barren world and run into the next one that we can belong to.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

― Joseph Campbell

I've learned recently that loss isn’t just about the rush of sadness or the mourning.

It’s also, sometimes unfairly, a beacon. Something unforgettable in my mind and spirit.

A beacon to remember how lucky I am to even have had something I cared so much about losing.

A reminder that I’ll always lose, and I can’t know when I’ll lose.

It's an everlasting signal: a cue to live bigger, love harder, and cherish every beautiful fleeting moment that presence offers.

Everything else is a distraction.

i wonder. no. i wait, for the
melody of clarity to play
an effulgent warmth of white, blues, colors.
shifting, moving, carrying, bearing
a vessel of their own dissolution
a mountain range of them, in fact
waiting for their earthly significance
overseeing, peering through.
the gaps – if any
waiting just a little longer,
for the descent that follows

// written on alaska airlines 2157, from sfo to pdx

the ocean sings her boisterous song
first a murmur — a trial of sound
then the squelching symphony
of overlapping water
leading into the sonorous crescendo
of a terrestrial collision
before once again, perpetually chorusing
to that gentle hum, to begin anew

// written on the shore of sunset beach, oregon coast

I love the idea of the road.

The rough terrain and the never before seen vistas. The cultures, the art, the foods, the music, and the people.

The world unexplored, in all of its anticipatory delights and sensations.

There is an excitement of leaving the familiar behind – just for a short time – exchanging the warm comfort of the known with the provocative embrace of the new.

I've been fortunate enough to have seen so much in my life. Different times, different places, different wonders. The gamut of poverty and wealth, nature and the created, the exciting and the terrifying.

It's been a generational privilege, to feel the new, from my grandfather traveling the world in the 1950's for political missions, to my parents migrating across the world to America decades later, to myself finding new homes and communities as I progress through my life.

I've wondered, a lot, why we take so much interest in visiting new places. Why we choose to leave.

Sometimes it's forced upon us, sometimes it's pilgrimage to reflect and expound ourselves. Sometimes it's just an excuse to escape the core dissatisfaction of our unexplored selves.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

― Lord Byron

There is an inherent sacrifice to exploration. It's a curiosity with a cost. To see new things, to experience the other and the outside, requires an adaption of self.

To truly experience another culture, some part of your view of the world must be retired to make new for an alternate perspective. It's not an easy choice, to relinquish the comforts of the known, the patterns and routines, the people in our lives, and the lives we define in the context of what we currently are, all in the hopeful exchange of some potential reality.

But there is also an inherent satisfaction with that exploration. It's a curiosity with life, to embrace possibility, and more importantly to find out one's own nature when removed from one's expected environmental context and stimuli.  

It exposes a side of ourselves. The discomfort of the unfamiliar tests our underlying principles.

What do I care about right now?

We learn how we adapt, how we grow in circumstances foreign to our core self. That excitement is an allure. The questions of self discovery, beseeching us under the guise of a novel delight.

In many ways, it's an exercise in what it means to be free.

If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself.

― Joseph Campbell

I'm fascinated by the reasons to migrate. To purposely find oneself amongst the unknown.

Maybe it's a person, an opportunity, the exciting bustle of a complex city, the calm of nature, a yearning to find a community, or even just a change from the expected and now boring norm of our current lives.

I find myself in my fifth city. I've moved many times in my life, taking a sometimes obscene delight in relinquishing my past self for the anticipatory novelty of the next. I've lived in 15 different homes in that process – each move, posing an opportunity to reexamine my values, my things, my choices, and my world.

Every new life has been a reconciliation of self. The chaos and disruption, the loneliness, the curiosity and excitement, all centered around me and my mind, sometimes pervasive, and sometimes unacknowledged.

I wonder how much of this is all in pursuit of a deeper reckoning with world, or perhaps even, myself?

I've pondered how much I've used the novelty, the busyness of the logistical move, to escape my unexamined mind.

How I've run from permanence, not because it actually exists, but because some of my choices are harder than others to undo, or even to learn from. How the decision to stay, terrifies my yearning to replace what I am, with what I can be.

Maybe it's an escapism. To run from my deeper self in pursuit of shallower changes.

How easy it is to replace my own true inner work with the newly created work of the different.

And yet I find myself in my current home.

It's not a definite stability that I seek, it's the ability to be surrounded by the people, things, and ideas that I love.

It's the ability to pack what I already have, myself and all the accoutrements of the familiar, and to feel complete, not because of the world I've learned to know, but instead, of the self I've grown to love.

in that mirror lies the reflection
that keeps track of me
a singularity now, the past, a future
nestled into this reality
this moment – a capture of me
away from all that I've been
as i am now, my fluidity
the honesty is stark
my transitory self
no matter the benchmark
i think – I see myself?

// written in my bathroom, alberta arts, portland, oregon

444 days ago I died.

April 1st, 2020

It wasn't the finality of life kind of death – instead it's the kind of death that you remember. A permanent etch in your memories that has an indelible before and after.

It may sound like a lurching transition from one life into a completely different one. But in the moment, it isn't obviously or memorably different. It's instead one, that only in retrospect, changed everything.

At that point 9181 days of my life had passed. 96% of my life to date.

Since then 444 days have passed. The other 4% of my life.

I look in the mirror daily. Sometimes I cringe. Sometimes I exalt.

Why do I want my body to look a certain way? Why do I find what I am, materially, to sometimes be remarkable, and other times, downright embarrassing?

There is a lot of talk about body image, body positivity, body acceptance, like talking about it will really change how we internally feel. Maybe.

Honestly it really hasn't for me.

Maybe you're on Instagram or TikTok, watching people flaunt their chiseled bodies, their flattering new style, their beastly workout routine, their healthy diet. All of the perfectly timed, tailored, and filtered performances.

Is it all a cry for attention? Maybe. But we listen to it. We watch it. We relish in other people's images of their life.

We know it's all a sort of farce. We desperately wish it wasn't. We know something must be missing – there always is – but what if this time, they were actually perfect? Wouldn't that be something?

It's a blind hope really, disguised as attention.

What else do we have to compare ourselves against? In the absence of self driven ideals, culture fills in those gaps.

We watch the people with the money, the time, the knowledge, and sometimes the favorable genetics, with a sweltering envy. It's not that they aren't admirable people, or that they aren't driven by the same cultural objectives that we've all implicitly agreed upon. It's just that they are them - they have the attention and admiration for now– and we are us, on the sidelines, craving.

If I am not them, how will I be noticed, respected, valued?

How will I be loved?

It's all a reinforced cultural norm– regardless of gender or ethnicity – a culture that while predominantly Victorian in origin, is now the lingua franca culture of the Internet we all live in.

We struggle to share ourselves as we are. We filter, we restrict, we construct carefully crafted images of self.

We loathe negativity. We read other's negativity in our voice. We reinforce external perceptions, without giving ourselves the chance to truly perceive ourselves.

We give a passing grace for other's flaws, but to ourselves, the internal incessant haranguing seems like a necessary part of existence.  

I grew up in an environment that did not favor movement. It favored the results, but never the performance. I thought I should look a certain way, but how I got there wasn't important.

One of the most popular greetings in most Indian households is, "Wow beta (son) you've lost so much weight". It's a strange greeting, perhaps a nod to the predominance of high blood pressure in the community.

I grew up never really understanding the relationship between my body and my self. But I knew others seem to care, for some unknown reason.

It wasn't that I was unathletic. But I wasn't fit either. I partook in various forms of movement from martial arts to hiking to biking and swimming. I found the occasional joy in them, but I never really cared much for them.

But still I judged myself constantly. I found myself judging others. I felt good if I was the fittest person in the room, I felt self conscious if I was not. I created a self deprecating hierarchy in my head.

I equated the discipline, the self-knowledge, the socioeconomic advantages of being fit, with self respect.

I feared that if I didn't, I wouldn't be respected. I wouldn't be loved. That I would always be playing catchup to that elusive ideal, that others, not me, possessed.

As an adult I tried so many different things. I played tennis. I practiced yoga. I swam. I biked. I hiked. I lifted. I learned how to move.

I tried extreme sports, I tried personal challenges.

Sometimes I liked it. Often I was pretty good at it. But none of it was really sustainable. Change one thing, and it was a reset. Nothing ever stuck.

I valued the movement, sure, but I lied to myself about how much I did. I perpetually found other things that felt more worth my time and energy.

I gained weight, I lost weight. It was all a rollercoaster of confusion.

Why did I care so much to begin with?

Really what I craved was permanence.

I craved a state, that once achieved would remain steady. I would be fit, I would have a body that myself and others respected, and for the rest of time, it would be one less thing to concern myself with. I would be loved for how I always looked, and I could relish in that. I could live a life approved by others.

You probably see why this wouldn't work.

We don't live in a stasis. Stasis is the opposite of vitality.

Stasis is death.

I spent most of the week of March 9th, 2020 in a state of active fatigue.

I was riding the high of a post promotion, post travel life from the weeks before. The world seemed uncertain then, with some new virus going around, but it didn't feel like something I couldn't handle. I'd been through some shit before, this couldn't be all that different.

I woke up March 13th, feeling like death would be better than waking up.

It was a physical terror. It was an existential terror. To be a pioneering victim of the century's first pandemic.

I lay in bed for weeks, without the energy to stand, to eat, to shit, to put my attention to anything else but sleep.

My muscles hurt, my chest hurt, breathing hurt. I was so totally exhausted.

I felt, for the first time in my life, my body falling apart in front of my own eyes. I knew that however things turned out, I wouldn't be the same.

In the moments that I couldn't sleep, I pondered.

I questioned my life up to that point. I remembered the days, just weeks before, of boundless energy.

I remembered going for a run, in my home in New York, as a homage to the first beautiful day we had that winter.

I reflected on the walks, the runs, the sweaty work outs, the physically exciting moments where myself and my body got to experience being. The totality of immersion into action.

I remembered fearing, reading articles about people recovering, permanently debilitated. The multiple doctors I talked to offered me the choice assurances of "well we all really hope you don't die, just make sure you can breathe alright".

In my privilege of being able bodied, with no major health conditions, with access to a seemingly endless amount of calories, I'd never contemplated an alternate reality. One were I couldn't just do the things I wanted to do.

I reflected on the mentality that I had developed towards moving. It was a chore. It was work. It was something that given a choice, would rank after everything else on my list. I thought of it really as a means to satisfy my insecurities – not as something always pleasurable in of itself. I would strive to be healthy, not because I wanted to, but it was what culture told me was the right thing to do.

It realized it all was temporary. My life. My people. My abilities. Maybe I'd have them for as long as I lived. Maybe I'd lose them now. The coin was still in the air.

I resolved, that if I could get through this crisis, still able, I would yearn for, I would relish and cherish every day I got to move. I would move, not because I had to, or because it would get me to where I wanted to be:

I would move because I could.

On April 1st, 2020 I started moving again. It started with walk. Then a hike. A pose. A run. A swim. My body in all is potential, sometimes struggling, sometimes transcendent, but oh so capable of moving.

It's been 444 days of movement.

People often talk about how love is the meaning of life.

It only ever registered in the romantic sense for me, even though as a bold statement it seemed that it would have potential layers in its meaning.

I think the meanings are lost because English falls short. We use a single word to channel a plethora of feelings.

We can experience love in so many ways. Our friends make us feel love. A beautiful song makes us feel love. A kind complement can make us feel love. We can feel love in the things that we do. The places we see. The people we become.

I've wondered how much I've reached for expectations in moments of love. Where I've substituted presence with desire. Where I've left the love wayside as a means to preserve the sensation itself, abandoning the moment – the pleasure itself – for an empty yearning of permanence.

Love in a way, is the abandoning of those expectations, not because they are horrid or malicious, but because they are a distraction.

I fell in love with moving.

The play. The beautiful world I got to see. The sheer enjoyment of watching my body flounder. The exhilaration of the self push. The hormonal reward for being alive in all of its senses.

I wish I knew in my previous live what I know now:

Move.

Because you are alive. Because it's magical. Because you can.

dropping into the vastness
a dive, a glide, a beginning
an intimate breathe, chasing immersion
a contortion, a follow, another breath
the dance, to the melody of the splattering divine
back beading, the percussion of rain
a love that isn't a trickle, instead –
the enveloping embrace of totality

// written on the shore of the columbia, janzten beach, portland, oregon

Words color our world. They guide our thoughts, make us feel, connect, and understand. They are our joined reality, allowing us to reshape the past, understand our present, and yearn for the future. Words transmit beyond ourself, our places, and our time.

I came across a beautiful word recently:

Parvaaz / परवाज़ / پروااز

It's an Urdu word that, as every language does, has a literal meaning – to rise.

I looked up another meaning (according to this quora response, but I'm a descriptive linguist so I'll go with it), its deeper poetic one:

the rising of a bird during its first flight.

That flutter in your heart before the kiss. The audible thudding before a performance. The rush before an adventure commences.

Parvaaz.

The sensation that lies in that space between the unknown turning into the known.

The flattening of all potential realities into the one you will now live in. Your life, in all of its thrilling moments.

It's scary. Existentially terrifying. You risk death, or worse, the death of your world, of the ideas and beliefs that have led up to this splitting point in time.

In a good life I think, you feel it a lot.

I've struggled in those moments. To stay present, to acknowledge the terror, the excitement, the possibility, and to still persevere with the moment.

In my best memories I've come through. In my regrets, I didn't.

"It's confidence that got you through those moments", I think to myself now with all the graces of hindsight.

I know what confidence feels like, but it hasn't always been accessible. I've felt the paralyzing anxiety rush through my body before, seizing my very breath, my thoughts, my moment, me.

"Anxiety", I decide, "is then the opposite of what I want".

Every motivator worth their likes will tell you "confidence is a fake it till you make it" kind of ordeal.

That hasn't really worked for me. What does "faking it" even mean?

A few months ago, a close friend of mine invited to go skiing with him. It was a pastime I never really had the socioeconomic ability to really partake in it before, but this time I did.

As I spent the humbling first days, bumbling my ways through beginner slopes, crashing, falling, and learning, I relished in the mechanical improvement. Like most physical action, you can feel yourself getting better. It is a visible progress. It's inordinately satisfying to recall being utter shit at something that comes effortlessly to you in the present.

The improvements happen gradually across multiple dimensions of growth.

You go faster, take more calculated risks, try a more challenging terrain, fall less, shit your pants less. You get better.

In learning theory, they call this the zone of proximal development.

It's that area just outside the familiar, where you nudge against what you know into the area of what you don't know, one prod at a time.

We all do this intuitively, we talk to children at their vocabulary level but introduce a few words we know are likely unfamiliar to them to help them improve. We explain things to a friend, dropping words that they likely don't know, but in context of the explanation, now understand. We take risks, pushing right outside our comfort level.

It's a delicate balance. Venture too far out this zone, and you risk everything negative: confusion, shame, injury, or death.

But in this zone you experience the fundamental human satisfaction of growth.

I felt myself getting better. I found the beginner slopes easy. I felt confident. The terrain was familiar – effortless even.

I relished in telling that to my friend. He congratulated me on the progress, and I felt good. I was confidently in my comfort zone. It wasn't scary, it wasn't unknown.

He told me to try harder, "this isn't the confidence that you want, you don't want confidence in the terrain, you want confidence in yourself".

"Try this one", he pointed to intense looking pathway on the ski resort's map, with a concerningly innocuous name.

My heart pounded. I felt that fear. The anticipatory worry that I wasn't yet ready for what life was offering me.

I was confident in where I was, wasn't that enough?

Without processing the feeling, I took the lift to that run.

As I stood at the top of that terrifyingly inviting slope, I reflected on those words in sheer panic.

I wasn't confident in myself, my abilities. I liked where I was before, it was familiar, known, comforting. I had mapped out my terrain, but change the terrain on me, and I was back to existential anxiety.

To get better, to be confident, is a regular charting to your ideals, through the winds of your fears, insecurities, and discomforts. It's not a one time affair, it's an intentional practice of orienteering from where you are at and making progress towards where you want to be. Stay blissfully where you are at, and you risk the conditions changing on you while you are not prepared.

Confidence isn't a state to relish ones existence in, it's a comfort appreciated through the consistent provocation of the self.

I dropped down the slope.

It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. I loved it. I felt alive. I wanted more.

Growth often seem like it's linear. Like its improvement should charted on a line, each assessment an upgrade upon the previous state, point by point.  

But growth doesn't always look like improvement or optimisation.

It's not always getting better.

In 2020, I felt myself struggle to make progress towards my goals. Everyday's effort was spent in just keeping myself from drowning.

A forgotten growth in the world we live in that chases ultimate efficiency is resilience.

Weathering the complex storms of life. The calamities, the suffering, the inevitable loss. To survive, to metamorphise, to adapt in place.

This progress is invisible. It's also essential.

You grow downwards, like a tree, to maintain your strength, not to seek the light.

It's a wonder then why I run, why I cower away from this. It feels good doesn't it?

The intoxication of growth.

But the risk is there.

I risk myself, my world, my reality. I risk suffering.

I risk trying, failing, and facing my own imperfection. I risk making mistakes. I risk going backwards. I risk perpetually not reaching the idealized state that I will always be short of being.

When am I ready? I won't know. I can't. There is no signal, no sign from above, there is no optimal level of preparedness that I can strive to reach for.

There is only the moment and my confidence in myself to get through it.

But I can relish in that feeling. The silliness of failure. The pleasure of success. The rising that occurs only after risking falling.

Parvaaz.

look at the tree outside
how its mass of leaves glisten in the sunlight
how it withstands, blooms, grows
how it sheds, loses, and heals
bearing through the trivialities of days
with patience, focus, and commitment

look how the tree reaches to the sky,
a hope – a yearning for light
look how it reaches, deep below,
grounding itself for strength
searching the elixir of life itself

look at the tree outside
growing through its damages, its scars
becoming its vulnerabilities
as the world continues around it

watch the tree as it sways in the wind
a rustling dance to its strength and flexibility
look how it grows and grows
never sure if the next gust will topple it
or whether it’ll withstand a century with calm majesty

notice the tree outside
how it sheds its skin, its bark
revealing a raw facade
before again turning that fragility
into a resilient armor

look how the leaves come and go
forever changing, forever turning
the flowers bloom at their time
the sun shines at its –
the will of the seasons
a time, a place, a person, a reason
just look at the tree outside

// written on the back table in donnie vegas, portland, oregon

Autumn is a season of transition.

The transitory colors of leaves strewn about the glistening streets.

Reds, oranges, yellows.

An elaborate season. My favorite.

It’s a season of transformation, not towards vitality, but towards a long silence.

A rest.

The word that reverberates in my mind is metamorphosis. It’s a loaded word. With memories of early childhood, learning about caterpillars unwitting metamorphosing into butterflies.

Wrapping itself up in a vessel of its own dissolvement.

No expectations – an act of instinct. To let go. To surrender. To transform.

To the childlike mind it is hilarious to imagine the contrast. A slow, missable creature becoming an erratic and bold butterfly. Something to chase.

On this cool autumn day, I hear the migrating birds, the falling leaves – the overcast skies and the petrichor perfuming the air.

I too, must let go.

Surrender what I am, to allow for the potential of what I can be.

Surrender is the precursor to renew, to life, to vitality.

The end of before. The beginning of the rest.

(clang)
the machine runs
ceaseless, incessant–
like a stream beyond winter.
always carrying, moving, going.
to where? unknown, but there.

(clang)
i can’t take a break,
there is no time.
time, my concept, absent from me.
rest? i’ll sleep when i’m dead.

(clang)
the pointless meetings
perfectly attended.
the deadlines
dreadfully met.

(clang)
the intoxicating grind.
i can miss today–
for my beloved
tomorrow awaits

(clang)
the conveyor belt must run.
the machine cannot stop.
productivity. production. product.
who am I selling to again?

(clang)
stress is progress.
i must build loudly.
my presence never forgotten.
forever a rebel against–
the quiet doing of nature.

(clang

)

You have a life. I have one too.

You live it, you accept that things happen.

You disallow other things. You choose one thing over another. Sometimes it's a choice, a gut feeling. Sometimes an excruciating discovery of priorities.

Why is something coveted, and something else, an entitlement?

Internal turbulence

"Values."

A word so casually tossed around, like it means something. Like it isn't something we pipe dreamed into existence.

"Find your values, let them guide you, don't let others get in the way of them."

I read it, I feel better. It's the answer to existentialism. Mental masturbation.

But do I trust myself to do that? To know? To value?

I'm frustrated, I recall. I don't even know what I want anymore.

I hear a voice, my conscience. What does it say? Are those my values?

"Go. Don't go there, don't do that. You shouldn't have said that. You should have said that. You should have stood up for yourself. Do the thing. Stop wasting your time. You're wasting your life. Say something. Reach out to them. What do you really have to lose? Just say no. Do that instead. Stop."

Despondent reorientation, ridden with guilt, bereft of satisfaction.

"I should–"

That's not what I want.

Actions betray my ideals

My family, my friends, my health, my internal calm, my flow, love, music, freedom, curiosity – all my supposed values.

And yet:

I want to be free. But I cower from my dreams.

I want to feel alive. I run away from discomfort.

I want love. I ignore it.

The phone rings. I let it.

I try to learn it. I'm not enough this time.

I sit still. I can't.

My active values, opaque to me, executing my life. Me, a marionette of my own existence.

I find the shortcuts. The lies. The dopamine chimera.

Sugar over movement. Action over intention. Scrolling over play. Desire over love.

My deeper, hidden self, is manifested at night, in the darkness of solace.

I can't sleep.

Lies to myself

Actions are the manifestations of the inner self.

The discord of trauma, false beliefs, coping mechanisms, cultural pressures, all murk the internal world. They cause us to construct ideas of who we are, who others are, and what the world is, that is not in agreement with reality.

The Buddhists say that "life itself is suffering". Not a visceral suffering, like a stab or a wound. Instead it's a suffering garnered from the reconciliation of the version of the world we have in our minds with the version that exists in reality.

I thought I was addressing the important aspects of my life, my values. I was lying to myself. My actions betrayed my false ideals.

I thought emotional disconnection was resilience, to withdraw rather than to resolve. This was a lie. My body kept the score.

I thought the life I was living – by my own accounts a comfortable and privileged life that I had worked hard to attain – was gratifying to me. It wasn't. That too was a lie.

I found ways to distract myself from this horror of responsibility. Of the agency that in my life, my decisions are all ones that I must not only orienteer but fully accept the resulting tradeoffs.

Emotional state changes offer alluring distractions from these choices. Obsession with work. Alcohol, weed, caffeine, sugar, sex, relentless action. Anything to distract from the internal hollow despair.

But those distractions prolong the emptiness, they mask it for the briefest of moments. Reality, eventually, always must be contended with. Life itself is suffering.

"What's your addiction? Is it money? Is it girls? Is it weed?
I've been afflicted by not one, not two, but all three."

– Kanye West, (Addiction, Late Registration)

Values demarcate the boundaries of choice. But having them doesn't change the choice of action. Action is a constant personal decision. A honest persistent analysis of one's true intentions.

I can change my values, or change my actions. I don't get another option.

What I ignore persists. The demons get stronger, the consequences of a decision more unbearable. Empty wallowing is alluring, but it's the trap of despair, a desperate attempt to give up the only faculty I really have, agency.

I have to face myself.

Distance from ∞

We judge. A lot. On anything, on anyone.

It's a mirror really. A reflection of our own ideals, our choices, our lies, our insecurities, reflected on the shiny canvas of another's actions.

We don't really truly understand most people's intentions. Their values.

They probably don't either. We mirror. They hurt.

We continually harangue them. We berate, we rip apart relationships. We impose our view of the world. Does it work? No. We do it anyways.

We judge ourselves. Everyday.

We compare our abyss with theirs. They've seen more, been more, done more, felt more. They are closer to the ideal, farther from the abyss, a disguised despair and fear that we ourselves aren't capable of filling the void.

Every ideal. Our judge.

What we want to be, but are always short of becoming.

The distance from infinity is always infinity. Unobtainable.

Waking up

I obsess with the distance. How far I am from where I want to be. How long I have to go.

Months seem like an eternity. I should have been there by now.

Any progress is unbearably slow. Will I ever finish? Will I ever get there?

I constantly worry about where I need to be, rather than where I am – the next step I can actually take. It's the ultimate distraction, a retreat into my own head.

I don't want to notice where I am. I don't want gratitude for my work so far, for the gifts others have given me. That presence requires me to accept that I am where I am, and I am who I am, forever imperfect, forever striving, forever degrees removed from the ideals I haven't even properly set for myself.

It's the waking up from a dream.

The weary despondency that even an imperfect life, with its flaws, mistakes, and learnings, is still a beautiful one, and the only one I can live.

"Beauty is the harvest of presence."

– David Whyte (Beauty, Consolations)

Baby steps

I watch. I notice. I reorient. I wince. The unknown.

The abyss beckons.

"Hello."

I can't wait anymore. No more lies. No more distractions.

I want to be alive. I chose to be alive.

I take the first step. I'm not "there". "There" is a mirage anyways, a siren hoping to distract my presence. It's worked before. Maybe not this time.

Every weighted step, a reorientation of myself. A self that is always changing, but maybe now, I can choose to bear witness to the change.

"But it's just a step", I think.

"It's the only one that matters."

swipe up. tap. swipe up. tap.
searching. searching. searching.
hungry, horny, hankering.

a feed. fodder. forever.
content, but never con·tent.
surely my meaning will be found in this.
my infinity.

enough? never enough.
insta·nt. i want it now. now.
there is only now. why wait?

hearts replaced by hearts, a currency.
do you know how I really feel?
i want to feel. i want to feel. i want to feel.
swipe up. tap. swipe up. tap.

// written on the verdant lawns of alberta park, portland, oregon