An Almost Palindrome
Deem something
Beautiful
And it is.
You invent something
By believing it’s there.
You invent something
And it is
Beautiful.
Dream something.
I want to tell the story of the world
By being a part of it.
If I could, I would get on a plane tomorrow and leave.
I don’t know where I would start, but it would definitely be place that was extraordinarily different then what I’m used to. I would spend a week as a tourist - seeing monuments, getting lost, taking pictures, meeting the locals and telling them I’m new and am excited to see and hear it all.
I would get lost at least once in every city I went to. When your lost, you see things as they are because you need to. I would defamiliarize myself from something that was already unfamiliar. I would see things I would’ve otherwise missed. I would remember them deeply because they were preventing my panic.
Sometimes you need to be disorient yourself to understand where you are.
After my week of tourism was up, I would spend 2 weeks immersing myself in this still-new place. This place I’d only scratched the surface of. This place I yearned to understand and be a part of.
I would sit by rivers alone with a notebook. I would take pictures of things other people missed. I would notice the different ways in which tourists reacted to the city. I would have the most interesting conversations of my life.
I would learn how to draw.I would try to learn how to draw.
I would tie a disposable camera on a park bench with instructions, then come back the next day to check the film. I would create a blog and upload the ones that weren’t nudity.
I would write out the stories of people who weren’t sure how to tell them on their own.
I would not be afraid to care. I would not be told what not to do. I would not be mocked, because to everyone I met I would be new. To a stranger, quirky is exciting. To be weird is to be set apart from the hundreds of other strangers they’ve seen today. My impression on them would be real. They would know me as I should be known - out of my element and completely okay with it.
I want to practice my sincerity on strangers.
I want to wear a dress from Italy on the streets of Brussels. I want to drink French wine in Germany. I want to learn to dance in Spain, and then practice in India. I want to discover how to say “Good Morning” in Polish, and then teach it to an Egyptian. I want to send a Brazilian postcard to my new friends in Portugal.
I want to be a part of every country, and I want every country to be a part of me.
I want to show the world itself.
I want to tell the story of the world.
And I sure as hell can’t do that from here.
Why are we always tired?
When you cannot sleep at night, and when the trail of your eyes is slow in the day, and you wonder:
Why am I always tired?
When your face is warm but your feet are cold, when your steps seem to take forever, when fractures turn to tingles…
And your body wants to give up. It wants to sleep, to start afresh, but it never can. It whisper-yells “why”. More as a statement than a question.
And your mind screams back in alert full force:
“WHY?! WHY ARE WE ALWAYS TIRED? Maybe because of you, Body. Always demanding. Always pursuing easy pleasures: running, eating, dancing, drinking. Quick at the first jump and slow at the second: Chasing, straining, finding, losing.
You feel EVERYTHING, and you feel so hard. You seek and you find and you feel it all. You get to feel it all at first glance, at first graze, at first.
You’re an enchantment expert, you can bring anything to life. What you do is beautiful and profound.
But oh the mess you leave for me, the Mind.
For once you’ve felt it, it is gone.
And it’s my job, mind you, to figure out.
To sift through and analyze. To pick up your chaos, and to decide what it means for the rest of us – for the Heart and for the Soul.
So together we can try to stop your maniac routine next time.
And your Heart is sad, Body. For its job is to sort: to treasure or to delete all that you have gathered so mindlessly. To delete sounds the horror, and for a moment it is. You’ll only have to feel a pang: a brief shattering with a glass hammer, before I sweep up the pieces and hide them away. Don’t be fooled: to treasure is a slow poison, infecting you one vein at a time. But one day it will paralyze and stop you, Body. The Heart’s job is a sad one, and I do not envy it one bit.
As for your soul: it is flickering, for it hasn’t been fed in a while.
You keep me too busy,
Body.
Leave me alone.”
Suddenly your body snaps it’s eyes back open. It forgot where it was.
It’s on a throne it built for itself.
With your mind and your heart and your soul in a box underneath.
Sometimes we forget
To imagine.
Sometimes it’s hard to see past our own problems. But somewhere out there, while we are in our minds, right now:
There’s an abandoned field with a hundred black birds, flying in a way we’ll never understand. One broken twig causing uproar.
There’s a girl taking a picture of the boy she’s in love with. A climber 15 minutes from the top of a mountain.
There’s an exam writer realizing he forgot to study for this question. A kid about to misplace his foot on a ladder.
There’s a lifeguard pulling a deadoralive body onto shore. A raindrop finally feeding the cracked ground.
There’s a boy letting go of a dream while his best friend discovers his. A girl getting married to the wrong guy.
An explosion that no one will hear.
A kid scratching his name into his desk.
There’s a kiss that never should’ve happened , and a blush that will never be seen.
Two children witness something on a playground that they will never speak of again.
There’s a boat that will sink in half an hour, and a baby about to be born on the side of a road.
There’s someone sitting by the phone hardly breathing, and someone writing a letter because they forgot to say goodbye.
There’s a bug being stepped on, and a bridge being raised.
There’s a knot being tied wrong, and a girl alone in the dark driving in the wrong direction.
In the time that you’ve read this, one million things have gone wrong in the world. And one million things have gone right.
But in some damp corner of a rainforest we’ll never see, there is the strangest most beautiful bird
Holding the secret of the universe in its undiscovered beak.
There are more things in this world that we will never see
than
the things that we think have gone wrong.
Meaning is a Matter of Perspective.
Does your perspective matter?
When you were little you had a lucky keychain. A teddy bear with a rip in it that you loved anyway. An imaginary friend. You had a favourite everything: colour, number, crossing guard, Arthur character, freezie flavour. You made things that “didn’t matter” matter.
And you were happy.
Now what do you have? Well, maybe you have a project in the back of your mind that you’re always working towards. Maybe you’re volunteering somewhere that makes you feel important. Maybe you’re studying something you’re passionate about. Maybe you’re in love. Maybe with a person, maybe with an idea, maybe with your job, maybe all three!
Are you happy?
As you as happy as you were when you were a kid?
Do you care about things that matter?
Do you care about things that “don’t”?
Imagine if you still had the capacity to feel as much as you did as a child. If you could pick a leaf off the ground and see an airplane, without feeling silly about it. If you could tell your friend a story you imagined about a dragon and a spaceship without being embarrassed. Imagine if you still imagined stories about dragons and spaceships.
Of course, in an adult world, seriousness is a necessary precaution if you’re hoping for respect. And a lot of times, in order to make a difference in the adult world, you need to have some of that.
When I was a kid, I promised myself that I was never going to become like adults. I was never going to submit to “boring” pastimes – like watching the news, or cooking stuff, or going to work. I was going to be able to find people who would listen to my stories, and build zoos with me, and find parades to march in. I was not only disappointed by adults, but disgusted by them.
Now I know the truth of the matter is that some things have to stop mattering when you get older.
Practicality reigns.
You can’t save all your ticket stubs and trinkets, because you don’t have enough drawers.
You can’t spend your life writing down stories for fun, because even paper and pens cost money. And sometimes there’s no one around to listen to you.
You can’t be friends with everyone you meet because sometimes strangers are uncomfortable with that. And sometimes they want to kidnap you.
Instead of getting upset every time we have to throw a souvenir away, we decide that they don’t matter. Instead of regretting missed opportunities, we ignore strangers. We adopt the mentality that sacrifices need to be made in favour of survival.
I know my child self would be surprised that I read the news, that I have two jobs, that I think coffee tastes good, and that I sometimes wear heels. But I think she’d also be glad. Glad that I found a way to think cooking is fun. Glad that I still have an imagination, that I still write stories, that I found people to read them. She’d be glad that I’m in school for something I care about, something I enjoy, instead of something that’s leading me towards a sturdy career.
And she’d definitely be glad that I’m trying to collect five hundred hats in five hundred days.
I wish more people appreciated the wisdom of their child-selves.
I wish more people understood how great it is to let things matter.
A Brief Peek Into My Sidewalk Imagination
This morning, on my way to a test, I missed my bus. Instead, I took to the sidewalk. Where all of my best thinking happens.
On this particular morning, I was thinking about what it means to be a poet. I thought about all the ways we repress expression, and why. I thought if I had caught the bus I would’ve had more time to study for my test. I thought about what it means to grow up. I thought about how when I was a kid I used to imagine the personalities of trees. I thought about all the reasons why children are the best poets.
I thought, as a university student, I really don’t get to see children very often anymore.
And I don’t get very many opportunities to act like one again either.
And then I thought, By golly what in the goodness gracious is that?
(or something to that effect.)
It was a wall of giddy sound and innocence.
Walking towards me on the other side of the street was a group of 50 eight-year-olds.
Giggling and yelling and hopping over sidewalk cracks.
At 9 in the morning.
I took a sip of my coffee, aging myself, and thought…what are the chances?
They were waiting to cross on the opposite side that I was. I was going to have to walk through their excitement.
Bounding across the street, they were shrieking with laughter, they were yelling jokes that were only funny because of their sheer silliness. They were expressing everything that was inside of them at that time, and everyone around them was okay with that.
It was beautiful, it was hilarious. It was contagious.
As I approached this bubbling mob of happy little people, I realized that they were embodying what I had just been thinking about. They were being shamelessly expressive. They were being poets. So I smiled. I smiled and I looked up as we passed each other in a blurry, screechy, colourful mess.
One of them caught my eye, saw my smile presumably, threw her mitted hand into the air, and screamed GOOD MORNING!
I yelled good morning!!! back. And suddenly I had an entire group of children screaming HELLO HI AHHHHHHHH HEY at me and my coffee.
I laughed out loud alone on the sidewalk after they were gone. Just because of the sheer silliness of it all.
Then I started thinking about how I sometimes pass a group of seniors at the next light. And how fantastic the juxtaposition would be if they were there again this morning.
Guess what.
They were.
(At that point, I tried imagining that my professor would forget about our test. It didn’t work quite as well.)
The juxtaposition was fantastic. Both mobs were great in different ways. The seniors gave me quiet smiles and amused nods. The kids yelled hello in a way that probably roused a few sleeper-inners.
Both treated me differently – both treated me better – than a group of people my own age would have.
Later, on campus I walked against the current of a 300+ student class being let out. Not one person acknowledged me.
And most of them wore blank faces and headphones.
The age group with the most potential to understand me, to relate to me, to make a lasting connection with me – walked past without a sideways glance.
The least poetic mob I crossed all day.
The Beautiful Intuition of a Stranger
I love going to the bank.
People who work at the bank have got to be some of the most friendly people I’ve ever spoken with.
I’m a friendly person too, when I’m being myself. And today, I was.
The teller and I were chatting and laughing away as she ran my cheques through the system. (If you treat your tellers like human beings, banking can be this comfortable.)
Suddenly she stopped me, and said, with an accent “You’re a student, aren’t you?”
I said that I was, but didn’t bother to ask how she knew. She had just seen my waning bank account.
Then she surprised me. “You’re studying art, I can tell. Something to do with art, Yes?”
I was thrown. “How do you know that?” I asked without answering.
“I just have this sense about you…Art…It’s you.”
“Wow, well I am studying English literature, actually. That’s amazing.”
“Literature - yes! - I was going to say that.”
“How did you - ?”
“It’s just you. The way you are. The way you speak and the way that you act. I could tell right away.”
She then went on to tell me about how her best friend throughout university had been an English student as well. I reminded her of her. She still receives letters from this friend and when she gets them, she put her hand on her heart, they’re written like novels.The words, the meaning, the thought. It’s beautiful. It matters.
“What you do matters” she said, without knowing how important it was that she was saying that. Without any indication from me that I needed to hear that today.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. It’s not even close to the first time, actually.I’ve been outrageously fortunate thus far to run into just the right person at just the right time, who accidentally said just the right thing. But it still catches me off guard. I still marvel at how in the world they could know to say that - how a stranger could say something so meaningful, without even realizing.
How a stranger could know more about me than most of my friends.
How a stranger can notice something that everyone else ignores.
The soft-voiced stranger added something really meaningful to my day. I hope that maybe, by noticing “the way that I speak, the way that I act, the way that I am” she added something meaningful to her day too. Maybe I reminded her of something, or triggered inspiration. Maybe she’ll finally sit down and read that book she’s had on the table for a month. Maybe she’ll tell this story to her old friend.
I think my favourite part about talking to strangers, is that I get to be a stranger too. I think sometimes when you’re a stranger, you’re more yourself than ever before.
The beautiful intuition of a stranger.
