Everyone’s gone for the holidays. Last year I had a two week road trip, so this year I was wondering if I should be doing anything. I contemplated visiting San Diego, I haven’t been there, and traveling always brings me unexpected gifts.
But I’ve always had this fantasy of having all the time in the world to do all the things I never had time to do – read, learn, cook, code, write, whatever. The truth is I have a fear of missing out, but not the regular FOMO that people have, but rather, I fear missing out on some potential self that would exist if I don’t keep on searching. That is why I travel so much, it is a search for all the potential selves that exist.
I am exhausted from all the traveling I did this year, not just physically, but also mentally. The travels were catalysts to major life changes that resulted in several shifts in my life, both externally and internally. More about that in my upcoming end-of-year review posts.
So this year, I am going to take an internal vacation. I’m rediscovering the delight of consuming people’s work, and through that I get a peek into their hopes and imagination. That spurs my desire to create, because I want to participate in this beautiful collective consciousness we tend to take so much for granted. Yes, the world is ugly too, but we often don’t remember all the progress we’ve made, how far we’ve come along, how much work our ancestors have put in. I don’t have the answers to deal with the ugliness, for now I am choosing to consciously focus on the good – how can I be part of the good, how can I appreciate others for being good, how to make the world understand that being good is not “being nice”, it is the only sustainable way we can survive.
To have the time and space to freely consume and create, is a huge privilege I don’t want to ever take for granted. It is a theme that comes up a lot in my writing, because the seemingly mundane act of reading a book or trying to create anything requires us not to be in the constant threat of danger. We forget, how good clean water tastes, how great are hot showers, how magical it is to be reading a sequence of letters that conveys complex meaning.
I have spent too much of my life always trying to go somewhere, trying to do something, to find that elusive joy and meaning, only to realize the magic of life lies in having the capacity to notice the extraordinary in ordinary.
In other news, I’ve started a tinyletter. You would think I would have no words left in me after writing so frequently. I am not really sure what I am going to do with it yet, except there’s this desire to connect in a more personal manner with the people who have been with my writing and me for a while. I want to know who my people are, and I want to be your person too. It’ll probably be more of a dialogue, you could directly reply to me in my inbox, and perhaps we can wax lyrical about provocative socio-political theories.