A step towards

Or maybe just a step

A few months ago, after the tailwinds of an emotionally turbulent summer and the entrance of an Autumn that was thick with grief (external and internal, with and without reason), I was hit hard by an urgency of aloneness. I hadn’t felt lonely for a while - around a year even - and the ache of a life unchanged was spreading through my body. Love and romance were my usual ‘vices’ (the term used loosely and more like the rolling of a coin on the backs of my fingers), but the sweet tang of that had lost its flavour and lost its fantasy with the end of a something that stopped everything (in me). Hulme, in Moeraki Conversations (1982), said ‘I search for my name in the living, look for my name in other people’s eyes, listen for my name on the wind, in each casual breaking wave...’ - a perfect piece of writing for someone ill-pulsed, romantically-notioned and desperately(…) 25. Another person, union - or, more authentically, the musings of one - were no longer the appropriate salve for my listlessness. In a way that feels remarkably Chodron (gulp) but is at its core, a basic basic truth, I needed more of me and it was time to turn inward.

Funnily enough, and a bit pathetically, I didn’t. For a few weeks I let the fervour of a meta-devotion, a love for finding what I should be devoted to guide and drive my action. I was reading a lot more, writing a lot more, and feeling the wrinkle between my brows grow a lot deeper since all I was doing was frowning . Passion projects lifted themselves up in front of me, emphasised now by the curiosity I was actually letting myself follow. In one of Lispector’s seminal works ‘Family Ties’ a book of short stories that jump into the absolute neutralising of woman as individual, she marks the cutting off of pleasure, of urgency, of dream, of thought, of curiosity as fingers in a grasp that are strangling to personhood. In the satiation of a life that I knew well and deeply, I had become still and therefore nauseated. Idle hands had become my devil’s tools, characterised less by the usual boredom that eviscerates genuine interest, but by curiosity that cooled under inaction. Curiosity, like love, is action-based, and in the nagging to complete and do I kept in my head, a new self-assuredness grew with the expansion of my internal world and actioned interest in the external.

The fire of my meta-devotion was made coal when a problem demanded that I not have a room that felt right for weeks on end. While this problem is now mostly sorted (my fingers are crossed into an infinity symbol), I have only now just begun really making room for newness. In this spatial separation, I was forced to start making decisions - the space for what I had and could have was now so small, or more realistically, clutter crowded my life and my mind. There was only room for what I liked, needed, used and wanted , four prongs of ‘having’ that I found rarely mutually inclusive. Reihana Robinson in ‘Be the Rising Human’ - a 2024 collection of poetry that I found spirited and saltlicked - eloquented that ‘you hold onto a few details, like what you can hold.’ And as it turns out, a boyfriend is not one of those things (lol). Neither are two yellow zip-up vests (horrific purchase x 2) or two pairs of platform boots that were some of the last bastions of my pre-covid Goth period. The bee and the babadook are gone(for now). In their previous places is space.

The call to solitude has been growing fainter since. Concern nags that it is because of my inconstant practice and still-there struggles with procrastination. But there is an ease in doing things now that did not exist before, a more casual slotting of time and behaviour that no longer feels frantic in its urgency, or as if priority is as resoundingly poignant of a decision. I consider these wins as small mercies that came with the consolidation of effort. I had a conversation with someone at the start of the year about the cost of experience - related to Bourdain, who was *also* a cancer. At that time, they said maybe experience isn’t something to look at with cost and benefit or ascetism in mind. I didn’t really get it then, but maybe I’m starting to now.

Hulme (1982) said :

‘I walk home on bare numb feet
knowing a warm fire awaits.’

I think a lot of people are already at this place.

I am glad for the road I am taking.

________

I don’t particularly like preaching and haven’t lived enough of a life to constitute giving advice, but I do like to talk. So these will be more of that than ~that~.

Ngā mihi nui

x

AKO