Just Dreaming of a Bookshop

This weekend felt other-worldly.  I was mostly home alone and the weather was cold and raining.  I woke up before dawn on both days for some reason and had time to just take everything in.  The life that went by this past year.  The difficulties and the remaining challenges at its close.  This very moment, my mother is having an operation for incisional hernia and while I was dressing up for work I could not help but stare at my fear in the face.  What if this Christmas won't be a nice and peaceful one?  What if I will get stuck in a job that will stifle the life out of me?  What if the coming year will not bring me new opportunities to look forward to?

I looked back at the weekend that I allowed myself to revel in.  Soaked in the words of my books and spent some time looking at travel blogs that showed me a life existing in the big world out there.  I looked at all the things that have happened that felt like an exhausting train ride.  And now I am looking at the destination of which I have the feeling of arriving.

It's 6 days till Christmas and what I have in my heart is this great big longing for a different life.  A life that I've continued to deny myself of wanting.  A simple life.  A meaningful life.  And I long for my mother to enjoy this same life as well.  For most her life, she probably lived like me.  Always having to keep up with obligations and expectations.  Always having to stay strong and steer clear from being  vulnerable.  Always having to be the problem solver and the peacemaker to the point of having to sacrifice time to find peace inside herself.

I don't know how many times I'll have to watch this video to keep being inspired to move towards this kind of life.  I don't know how I'll even get to living this kind of life where I am.  But it is a life I dream about.  And I want to keep dreaming and believing that I'll live it someday.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Art and Business

Letting myself unwind for the past couple of hours after an intense dialogue with executives on business strategy and leadership philosophies.  I ran into this video.  Aside from faith, what motivates me is my passion for art or any related artistic experience.  Finding a relationship between deepening my faith and learning about how artistic experiences can help this deepening process has been an ongoing pursuit for me since I graduated from business school.   I've realized how art can help me become more grounded and reflective in anything I do which translates to almost a prayerful experience.  This helps me understand why faith is needed in pursuing any experience and in understanding the aspects that strengthen faith, I am able to keep up with my perseverance of pursuing any experience.  An elective I took up in business school called "Self-Mastery and the Arts" has convinced me how important the impact of art is in one's life.  In that study, I also learned ho
Read more

Lectio Divina | A Reflection on Yehuda Amichai's "The Amen Stone"

Image
It took me a week to finally choose a poem I resonated with among the six poems I was assigned to reflect on through the ancient practice of sacred reading called  lectio divina .  The experience of being in a writing course (albeit online) has given me the liberation to explore the power of words and unearth the gift I know I've long locked within.  The gift of realizing I have the same power as well. My writing process was a painful unraveling.  I could not write immediately.  I could not catch the thought and pin it down on paper.  I tried reading other books that would get the flow of creativity going and to no avail the anxiety caught on and forced me to take a break.  So I did.  And went back on it again this weekend.  I had to recalibrate my mind for 2 hours.  Removing the residue of the business mind that forces me to constrict my definitions of life in a less human sounding voice.  I began my  meditatio  of  Yehuda Amichai's  "The Amen Stone".  
Read more

Anxious No More

Image
There are many interesting things that have been happening to me these past 3 weeks. It's been a journey out of and into another chapter of my life.  And this chapter is the chapter that makes me face that thing I want to do the most.   Write.   The stories on this page have been slow because I've been trying to discover what it is that I want to really write about and when I ask myself this question, I begin to ask myself the most important question: what am I really about?  It doesn't feel so difficult to ask now compared to before.  I'd squirm and I'd let my gaze wander off into a blank wall or I'd stiffen up and change the subject because I don't really want to dig in too deep and ask myself that because I fear the answer to that question.  I fear having to say it out loud.  I fear having to type it out here.   What am I really about?  I don't really know.   I don't really have it all figured out just yet.  It's been a while
Read more