It is 4:39am and my creative juices are high. I have been itching to write for a while now but never seem to find the headspace to truly let it out. I have several inspirations but I just let it seat in my mind for a while. Sometimes I get so lost connecting the dots that I forget what my starting point was in the first place.
I am already doing it again! I got up to write because I realized that there are certain phrases I have encountered in recent times that are so profound I just had to pen down.
First is this: “Sending love to everybody who always feel weird—they never fit in, but they don’t stand out either…”
“when your mind becomes cluttered with the possibilities of “what if”, there is no room for faith. Living life prepared for the worst possible outcome is like living in a cage–it’s not freedom. Over time, you will recognize the difference between guarding your heart and restricting it…”
I wish I could make a collage of all the words that have inspired me this year and see clearly the trajectory of changes they made on my mind and thought process. words are powerful, potent enough to inspire and transform us but they rely on our understanding and translation. Even more beautiful is how we can see understand things differently simply because of our varying experiences.
After writing about all these seemly disjointed phrases, I think I have finally come into the awakening burgeoning inside as I sat upright to write this piece—The hero within. Actually, the fragile battered hero which seem to be my thematic preoccupation lately.
Before I proceed though, let me retell the tale of a farmer with two cans I read in a post on IG. It was said that this farmer had two cans. One was leaking and fragile, and the other was in perfect condition. Over time, the leaking can became weary because it was not producing optimally as the other can. The farmer decided to show this weary can all the paths it had watered because it was leaking and there stood flora life and many other plants that had germinated from its imperfection. This reminds me of a post that read: “you can do great things from a small place.”
There is a hero in all of us. The herald to greatness, to conquer weaknesses yet, as soldier we fight common wars in unique ways, facing inner demons belittling the very heroism we possess. For some of us, it reveals our inadequacies and breeds despondence, for others, it serves as a reminder of our humanity and this is true. What is difficult is to perceive oneself as adequate in the face of belittling oppositions.
We get so carried away by the things we have failed to accomplish that we lose track of how far we’ve come. This is a common problem because we soon forget our accomplishments in the face of the many more ambitions we acquire or that are required of us. Soon enough, we are buried in fear and doubt, we are halted by our limitations, some hand-made prisons that we warden. It is harder to be free when you are both the prisoner and the jailer.
I remember what my grandfather used to say “you learn by learning” He said this to me as a child and that stayed with me because it was a puzzling thing for my wandering mind. I figured it was equal to him saying “you do by doing or you read by reading” even now, I find these words profound because it is as easy as it is complicated.
Maybe all we need is the assurance of our greatness, the realization that we are always more than what we are per time because we are a cumulation of our past, present, and future but maybe that is the very thing that plagues us–this summation. What if we could exist in the present without the past or envision the future while being present in the present? What choices will we make without the weighted memories of our past mistakes?
This is why the hero in us lacks courage. Pitted against our ever-present fall, rising up again and again in the face of adversity, dragged down by our Hercules, living in the myopia of our shortcomings, the ever-present voice serving as a harbinger of doubt at the back of our minds, our very own critic. What if the hero’s weakness is the very strength of their existence? what if the only heroism we need is the will to try? again and again to be like Maya Angelou said: “still I rise.”
We dismiss our heroism because we want to be a hero without fragility actually we strive for divinity and immortality, we want to evade time, and maintain relevance through legacies. Yes, we know we’d die at some point but we cannot bear the thoughts that we’d be forgotten so we want to live on through memories– memories that soon become whitewashed. This subconscious truth does not deter us, we spend every waking existence carefully curating a cultured verse of our flawed consciousness. The very motive we live for is faulty because it is enough to live; but no, we want to live well, is this ambition bad? No, what is bad is that we expend so much energy on building a life where we are said to have lived well that we forget to live at all.
I am restrained to make this assertion that just living is important because I am also befuddled by this conundrum to live well and because I am not sure that focusing on just inhaling and exhaling qualifies as living or the kind of living I am trying to lay claims to here in this post but I will stop here because the interpretation is up to you.
Connoisseur of Memories 