Good morning, and happy Wednesday ⛅️
I’m writing to you from my living room, where I am surrounded by half-packed boxes and half-drunk seltzers—a fitting scene, really, of a life being split into two. That’s how this last week has felt; the process of preparing documents and donating ephemera, combined with the imagined musings of a future apartment in a future neighborhood, has situated me snugly within a state of transience. I have to remind myself that slowing down and breathing in will make everything feel easier and a little more whole, but I’ve been struggling to remember this while in the midst of it all. It’s a process, this whole leaving and arriving business, and not knowing so many of the things I’ve been aching to know—my next job, my next home, my next steps—has, once again, leveled me.
In case you missed it, I am moving back to the States from Japan in August, and these last few weeks have begun what feels like an emotional unfurling of sorts. And what I’m trying to do, despite feeling the pressure from my impending departure, is to practice mindful and open awareness—something I had once prioritized several years ago, but somehow lost in all the ones since. Which is a sad truth, I suppose, and one that I feel remorseful over. So I have been taking longer walks in the park and breathing fuller breathes on my balcony. I’m taking the time to notice all of the smaller things I love about my neighborhood: the greenery, the families, the local restaurants and the several parks just minutes away. I am telling myself that this is still my home and that I am still living here and that my body’s desire to fling itself across two whole months of time is a terrible way for it to say thank you to a place that has only shown up and embraced it well—a place that I could have never known would grow entire rings of life around me, and a place that, no matter the challenge, has seen me through again and again. As I took an early-morning walk around my neighborhood park, watching as volunteers swept the footpaths and plucked the weeds, I thought back to something Richard Powers had written in his novel, The Overstory:
“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
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