Category Archives: On My Mind

On My Mind

A little ray of…

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Hope

is the possibility for something different, something new, something untried, unseen, unfelt. Hope is the catharsis of tropical rain.

Yesterday I had a conversation with an old friend, probably the most adaptable person I know. “I could be angry,” she said, “but that’s just not how I want to be and it doesn’t solve my problem.” A few hours later, I had a conversation with a student who is really struggling with some personal issues. We talked about life and the universe, about meaning and goals, and about what’s left in the world after a goal is accomplished. Just before the end of the day, I had a conversation with another student about the future, a young man who has confidently and quietly made choices and is looking forward to the adventure to come. In the evening I talked with another friend who is considering, as I am, choices that could go anywhere and nowhere.

There are two common threads here and both have struck a chord with me. The first is that sharing and conversing with others, and especially young people, give my life so much meaning. I may not have solved any problems today but there are doors open wide, an invitation to listen, a shoulder to cry on. These connections with other human beings are vital to my sense of personhood, which is to be part of a wider world and walk hand in hand with those I encounter.

The second thread is that all of these conversations, though vastly different in content and tone, were sparked by the hope that there is something else if we’re willing to look for it. There are possibilities if we are willing to do the hard work of asking questions, making changes, beginning again, or beginning differently. And there is the excitement of a world yet to be lived and explored. If there were not hope, none of us would be talking in the first place.

Sunshine

is the golden bubbles that arise out of nowhere and feel like childhood. Sunshine is a periwinkle sky in the evening and the delight of an unsigned thank you note.

When I was little my mum told us how, growing up, she used to wash her long, wavy hair outside in the rain. I went out with a shampoo bottle once but I don’t remember it working very well. Not too long ago I changed into my bathing suit and joined a friend outside in a downpour, one of those rainstorms that quite literally takes your breath away. During a recent and memorable bike ride, it was all we could do to keep our eyes open as we, and everyone else caught in the sudden deluge, giggled and called out to one another, strangers, recognising the shared joy that filled the air.

Last night I decorated Christmas cookies and a gingerbread house with friends and I learned that icing melts quickly in the tropics and that one should put a base layer of icing on the tree-shaped cookie before adding candy ornaments.

Moments that allow us to laugh and play with abandon, to forget our adult decorum and our worries and responsibilities, are moments of sunshine.

Magic

is elusive if you’re looking because it can’t be seen. But magic is omnipresent if you believe it’s real.

Sometimes we say the same thing at the same time. We pick up the phone just as it rings. We send the same story or recommend the same book. Once we learn a new word, we suddenly see it everywhere. If we did it on purpose it wouldn’t happen this way, but it happens all the time when we’re just willing to be.

But sometimes I think we’re afraid of magic. We’re afraid to admit that we don’t have as much control as we wanted, or that there are forces in the universe we can’t explain. And this keeps us from the opportunities to get to know ourselves and others in such a way that allows magic to happen.

And so I ask: What could the world hold if we dared let it?

St. John’s Island, Singapore – July 2020

On My Mind

Found in Fiction

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When I was fifteen and for several years thereafter, one of my summer jobs was working in my dad’s office. It was mind-numbing, repetitive, thoughtless, meaningless work and I made my opinion of it known at home. My parents looked at me and smiled. “Stay in school,” they said. Lesson learned.

Desperately browsing my dad’s bookshelves one lunchtime for anything that was not a medical journal, I came across a volume bound in green leather with gold lettering. The Chosen by Chaim Potok, a signed copy. I asked my dad about it and he told me it was a novel. “Read it,” he said. I’ve always been a reader of everything, a lover of words and stories and the truth to be found in the pages of books, and so I did.

It never returned to my dad’s bookshelf.

Over the years, I read The Chosen many, many times. Devoured it each time like it was the first time. Drank in the story of two boys who became friends in adverse circumstances, two boys who grew into men, who didn’t fit into their worlds, who asked questions, who made immense choices. I read this book over and over and over.

By the time I was a senior in high school, this was listed as my favourite book on a poster announcing students of the month. (My favourite song listed on that poster, “Hallelujah”, is still my favourite and I remain partial to the Rufus Wainwright version even though it doesn’t cut to the soul in the of way Jeff Buckley’s recording, or just about anything else about Jeff Buckley.)

Most of my best-loved books are stored in my parents’ basement. There’s only so much room in shipping containers when you’re bound by cubic metres. But The Chosen has always come along even though I haven’t read it in many, many years. Recently, that changed. And again, I devoured it. It spoke, as it always had, in my bones.

Over the years I’ve been told I’m amoral, but that I care too much; that I stand strongly, but for the wrong values; that I’m misguided and confused, steady and responsible; I’m callous and too sensitive, selfish and too giving.

As with horoscopes, if you are vague enough yet inclusive with adjectives, something’s going to fit.

But I came back to this book just recently and whatever it was that spoke to me at age fifteen spoke again, fifteen years later. I’m really not so different. Older and wiser having lived, but not so different. What I understood at fifteen still reverberates: I’ve known for a long time that something in me, the deepest part of me, is searching.

This search is not one of loss or sorrow, but one of conviction and purpose. The defining difference now is that I know what I’m looking for and I know that the right thing to do is continue voyaging.

And so when I responded to this novel in the same way that I did at fifteen, I recognised with wonder that my feet are firmly planted, even as I wander in a world that spins.

Trieste, Italy – January 2020

On My Mind

The Middle of the Night

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On three separate occasions last night, I dreamed that I was screaming. Screaming, other people around, no one looks up. No one seems to notice even when I’m looking right at them.

I woke up after the second dream, which seemed to immediately follow the first, and placed a hand over my rapidly beating heart in order to let the rhythm lull me back to sleep. I awoke after the third dream surprised to find myself on the other side of the bed.

There’s a lot on my mind.

I am reminded of that when I wake up and all is quiet with the exception of whatever happens to be going on in my head. I live near a highway and you can faintly hear it above the white noise of the fan, but you could just as easily ignore it. Sometimes the dog who lives upstairs pads around, nails scratching on the floor. It only bothers me when something else is already bothering me.

I don’t have nightmares very often, but I’m a lucid dreamer (admittedly of the self-diagnosed variety) when I do. I am clearly making decisions, thinking about something else in the background, and I make the choice to wake up. In that sense, it’s a bit like knowing you’re going to fall when lead climbing – you move towards the next clip and as you’re reaching, you know you’ll miss. It gives you just enough time to call, “Falling!” to your partner. Lucid dreaming gives me just enough time to decide to wake.

What settled me back to sleep was not having woken from the dream itself but for admitting fear, uncertainty, a sense of moving without seeing into something resembling outer space. I say resembling because it’s not the kind of space you imagine when you’re young. It’s almost like moving under water into a blackness that folds, expands, contracts, shifts in colour and form.

It is not of this world.

And I think that’s the part that my senses do not like. There is a feeling of moving within something that I don’t understand and that my brain cannot easily classify.

Yes, this is right.

And I know it because as I write this, I find myself smiling.

There’s a world out there that may or may not be real, and it’s a world that I want to know and explore. But it’s the dubiety of this that leaves my mind playing with possibilities, and these possibilities do not fit easily into boxes.

There is also, however, a desire to have a single answer to a litany of questions.

This is impossible and it’s no wonder I’m screaming.

A storm gathering over Singapore – July 2020