This business of living, what is it?
I look back in my memories and it’s all hazy, a blur of sorts. I can no longer swiftly recall names. I have never had what you would call a photographic memory so I do not recall faces as well, only traces, features, minor distinguishing characteristics. I do not remember events in detail either. Sometimes I question whether things really happened the way I remember them or whether my perception at the time was warped like a star's light as it is affected by a planet’s gravitational pull. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t all an invention of my subconscious. Did it happen in a dream? Was it all a dream?
And so I ask myself, what is this business of living after all?
I come from long ago. There is a date I shall remember because it is recorded on a birth certificate. I have travelled in time. The body has grown older, the mind more mature, and the spirit…the spirit, timeless.
I have memories of my parents’ tenderness: four eyes looking down at my minute stature, the feeling of safety in their nearness, the life lessons that my young mind easily disregarded. I remember a rebellious youth: didn’t grandmother say to question everything and find for myself what the world was to me? After all, I was just following that advice, I tell myself.
Yet, mother always managed to light a fire and start boiling water as she saw me approach every time I came back home. She knew my favorite meal was steamed rice with beans, queso fresco and jalapenos.
And then there were departures. Each time it seemed a chip of heart was left behind on the side of the road. I left them there hoping that I would one day go back, collect them all and have a whole heart again. Instead, paradoxically, I created a void, an emptiness that’s full of emotion and longing.
And on this winter solstice, in which the light returns, I don’t find myself returning to all that other than in feeling, in thought.
Animals migrate, they travel distances following their natural instincts. They look for food, a place to reproduce, better climate; in a word, survival of the species. Part of that migration is a return and so their journeys have been recorded in popular documentaries and books. One of the longest annual migrations being that of Sooty Shearwaters, which nest in New Zealand and Chile and spend the northern summer feeding in the North Pacific off Japan, Alaska and California, an annual round trip of 64,000 km (39,800 mi).
We humans, being part of the animal world, migrate too. We leave our homes, our families, our towns, and sometimes our countries but not all of us return. A lot of us who don’t return recreate the life we had, our setting and community elsewhere. We surround ourselves with our customs, our culture, and the social life we can’t leave behind. We do that perhaps because we understand that we can never go home; not the home we left anyway. We do that perhaps because it’s our identity. It is how we chose to identify ourselves.
Have I migrated?
Am I a seeker?
Am I after survival?
I have not migrated. I have been shedding my past, my life, my family, my home, my country, my religion little by little the way a vibrant flower loses its petals one by one in the sun, the way a joyful bird leaves multiple feathers on its flight path, the way a tree drops its leaves in the fall allowing them to be carried by the wind. Best of all, I have no desire to return.
No, mine has not been a migration.
Am I a seeker?
Those who call themselves seekers are not seekers if they don’t know what they are searching. If they know what they are looking for, they must have found it at some point in time, at some stage in life. How did they lose it, how did they get away from it, how did they depart?
I don’t know where I am going not because I am lost, but because I do not believe in destiny or destination. I don’t even believe in going anywhere. So I am not a seeker either.
Am I after survival?
S-u-r-v-i-v-a-l, I don’t like the ring it has to it.
I learned long ago that there are two ways to do dishes. You can do dishes to get them clean or you can do dishes to do dishes. In the former you focus on the result, in the latter you focus on the present, the task at hand, the doing. Being after survival to me has this connotation of focusing on the end result instead of the actual living. Therefore no, I am not a survivor.
I am more an explorer. An explorer knows that there is a pursuit, an experience at hand, a reality to be coded. I know the reality I choose to explore and because that reality is this continuous experience of living, this exultant worshiping of the Absolute, what I have been doing is not a migration, it’s a pilgrimage.
That is the business of my living: a timely recognition of the way it all is.
I look back in my memories and it’s all hazy, a blur of sorts. I can no longer swiftly recall names. I have never had what you would call a photographic memory so I do not recall faces as well, only traces, features, minor distinguishing characteristics. I do not remember events in detail either. Sometimes I question whether things really happened the way I remember them or whether my perception at the time was warped like a star's light as it is affected by a planet’s gravitational pull. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t all an invention of my subconscious. Did it happen in a dream? Was it all a dream?
And so I ask myself, what is this business of living after all?
I come from long ago. There is a date I shall remember because it is recorded on a birth certificate. I have travelled in time. The body has grown older, the mind more mature, and the spirit…the spirit, timeless.
I have memories of my parents’ tenderness: four eyes looking down at my minute stature, the feeling of safety in their nearness, the life lessons that my young mind easily disregarded. I remember a rebellious youth: didn’t grandmother say to question everything and find for myself what the world was to me? After all, I was just following that advice, I tell myself.
Yet, mother always managed to light a fire and start boiling water as she saw me approach every time I came back home. She knew my favorite meal was steamed rice with beans, queso fresco and jalapenos.
And then there were departures. Each time it seemed a chip of heart was left behind on the side of the road. I left them there hoping that I would one day go back, collect them all and have a whole heart again. Instead, paradoxically, I created a void, an emptiness that’s full of emotion and longing.
And on this winter solstice, in which the light returns, I don’t find myself returning to all that other than in feeling, in thought.
Animals migrate, they travel distances following their natural instincts. They look for food, a place to reproduce, better climate; in a word, survival of the species. Part of that migration is a return and so their journeys have been recorded in popular documentaries and books. One of the longest annual migrations being that of Sooty Shearwaters, which nest in New Zealand and Chile and spend the northern summer feeding in the North Pacific off Japan, Alaska and California, an annual round trip of 64,000 km (39,800 mi).
We humans, being part of the animal world, migrate too. We leave our homes, our families, our towns, and sometimes our countries but not all of us return. A lot of us who don’t return recreate the life we had, our setting and community elsewhere. We surround ourselves with our customs, our culture, and the social life we can’t leave behind. We do that perhaps because we understand that we can never go home; not the home we left anyway. We do that perhaps because it’s our identity. It is how we chose to identify ourselves.
Have I migrated?
Am I a seeker?
Am I after survival?
I have not migrated. I have been shedding my past, my life, my family, my home, my country, my religion little by little the way a vibrant flower loses its petals one by one in the sun, the way a joyful bird leaves multiple feathers on its flight path, the way a tree drops its leaves in the fall allowing them to be carried by the wind. Best of all, I have no desire to return.
No, mine has not been a migration.
Am I a seeker?
Those who call themselves seekers are not seekers if they don’t know what they are searching. If they know what they are looking for, they must have found it at some point in time, at some stage in life. How did they lose it, how did they get away from it, how did they depart?
I don’t know where I am going not because I am lost, but because I do not believe in destiny or destination. I don’t even believe in going anywhere. So I am not a seeker either.
Am I after survival?
S-u-r-v-i-v-a-l, I don’t like the ring it has to it.
I learned long ago that there are two ways to do dishes. You can do dishes to get them clean or you can do dishes to do dishes. In the former you focus on the result, in the latter you focus on the present, the task at hand, the doing. Being after survival to me has this connotation of focusing on the end result instead of the actual living. Therefore no, I am not a survivor.
I am more an explorer. An explorer knows that there is a pursuit, an experience at hand, a reality to be coded. I know the reality I choose to explore and because that reality is this continuous experience of living, this exultant worshiping of the Absolute, what I have been doing is not a migration, it’s a pilgrimage.
That is the business of my living: a timely recognition of the way it all is.
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