dreaming again.
i’m waking up / from the longest night of my life / it’s been years since i’ve seen the sun
- awakening
(rupi kaur, home body (2020), pg. 131)
I have a tendency to self-sabotage, and I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember. It is always a hard thing to want something you don’t ever want to lose - especially with something as tenderhearted and fragile as joy. Brené Brown puts it beautifully in her research how joy cannot exist without vulnerability, how vulnerability requires great courage, and both do not exist without each other in vacuum.
The thing with running away from joy because you are afraid of loosing it, leads us to living a life caught neither here nor there; an in-between. A life easily permeated with regret and missed opportunity. A life built like a sandcastle on the sand; a half-life, caught in the boundaries and divisions of what we refuse to let ourselves endure again. We tell ourselves that we are “protecting our hearts”, but the truth of the matter is, we are afraid of the cards that begin to tumble as the foundations are breached. A fear of reliving a trauma we have never truly overcome is a very real place, and often times our memories and feelings are so ingrained within us, that we don’t realize what we’ve unlocked until it hits us square and unexpected in the face.
The Japanese have a saying - mono no aware, and it has always been a reminder for me to hold and carry on to the relationship between grief and joy as something truly beautiful. That there is something special to be found in the cyclical nature of things, from life to death; from beginning to end. The thought that we experience joy in life wholeheartedly because sadness exists to balance and anchor the wholeness of the feeling.
In the wrestle, I’ve learnt to listen to myself and the heartbeat that endures. I still don’t get everything right (who does anyway? we are all human), but I know to call myself out when I need to. I’ve begun to ask the questions of myself, as if to challenge and say to my inner most being: “why do you tear yourself in two?”
I found myself connected deeper to my passions in the midst of isolation, and I’ve reminded myself of the wonder in dreaming big dreams as they come my way. As the year comes to a close, I smile knowing for the first time in a long time, that I have courage in me to not forsake joy when it finds me. In the striking beauty of life, where everything has a sell-by date, it’s not enough to just stay stranded and standing at the platform waiting or wanting, but that in all things, we do have the opportunity to allow ourselves to get on the trains we want to, and get off the trains we need to.