(i.)
Nobody escapes loss. It doesn’t matter how rich, beautiful, powerful or successful you are, when it comes to life, there is an eternal truth that you can not deny— everything will end. You and everyone you love will die one day. Your beauty will eventually fade. You can not carry your wealth into your next life. Once these truths have been accepted, your living truly begins. The kind of living that you do without fear, because you already understand, and because you understand, you can embrace whatever is meant for you.
I tend to forget about the quality of impermanence, and sometimes I lose myself in my temporary indulgences or in my yearning for more. These are innocent indulges, and yet, I am so very harsh on myself for them. I let my mind wander, I let my fingers slip on my wallet, I sleep a little more than I need to, I sweeten my tea a little more than my doctor prescribes, I let myself smoke every now and then, even though I promised myself that I would stop it two years ago.
There’s nothing wrong with these indulgences in the moment, but they add up. I am beginning to feel their impact. My body is growing older and weaker with every passing day, my hair is slowly whitening, my bones hurt more than they used to when I fall (I’m still as clumsy as the littler version of me was), and I can not help but notice that time is not on my side. I still look young, but I feel weary. The same cycles that I experienced and broke out of years ago are revisiting me, and this older version of me knows now that I must go through them over and over again, but choose differently, in order to move forward.
Life slows down and it picks up pace, when you least expect it. There will be a moment when you want a thing to go a certain way and you wait religiously for it to happen for you, but it doesn’t. You wait and you wait and you wait. Then suddenly, one day, when you stop caring so much about the thing, it happens— quickly and suddenly. It is followed by many other things, and you are simply not ready. Some of us embrace these blessings and others sabotage ourselves, because we have “waited” for so long, that we do not believe ourselves to be worthy of them.
(ii.)
Then there is the matter of love. The kind that we yearn for but are terrified of. We want to be known, and we are so very afraid of being seen. We want to be accepted, and yet, we reject our own selves. We allow our limiting beliefs to blind us from being able to fully understand, accept and embrace the love that we so deeply long for. We forget that, to be loved, we must be willing to love. We can not expect ourselves to be loved in a way that we ourselves do not love. Reality is a mirror. I know those who attract love so easily, because they are willing to open their hearts patiently, fully, vulnerably and compassionately. I know those who keep finding love and keep letting it go, because there is always something wrong with it. I used to be one of those people, until I realized that I am not perfect myself. I can not expect perfection in another, when I am incapable of it. And love happens despite, not because. We simply have to choose it.
I am coming back to the many paradoxes of truth that present themselves to me each day, because I keep forgetting them and I do not want old cycles to restart. I am trying to feel wholly. I am trying to be okay with embarrassing myself. Every now and then, I practice vulnerability by allowing my ego to get hurt, by telling uncomfortable truths, by unmasking (not performing socially), by apologizing when I am wrong, by making more mistakes, and most importantly, by letting myself age. I am trying to quit fighting the inevitable and I have accepted that like everything else in life, one day, I too will die. My breath will stop. When that day comes, I want to look back and remember that I lived bravely. I do not need to be the most powerful, the most successful, the most beautiful or even the most loved. I simply want to be the one who lived fully. I want to be remembered by those who loved me as the one who showed them kindness when nobody else did, the one who inspired them and led by example, the one who would go about her life with a fearlessness and a zeal that was so very memorable that it could be written about. I want to be remembered in dinner table stories long after I’m gone for my passion for life— as the mother, the sister, the friend, the aunt, the professor, the teacher, the social worker, the colleague, or even the stranger in that one club bathroom. I want to embrace every role that I get the fortune to play in my life and complete it in the most me way that I can.
(iii.)
Before I die, I do not want to be everything, I just want to be me.
This brings me back to my very first paradox, and perhaps I’ll leave this essay here, at full circle — to live as our fullest selves, we must accept our own mortality and our own humanness.
All life will end. All life is imperfect. All life is a blessing. That’s what makes it so special.
Are you living today?
Yours,
AB