Category: gratitude

On turning 30

Today, I turn 30. People wiser than me have created better lists about what they’ve learned thus far, and I don’t want to be too redundant. But a close friend asked me to share my thoughts, and I couldn’t refuse.

1. Respond with grace.

I’ve always felt incredibly urgent and overly reactive. To counteract this I’ve learned to read the situation and respond with a little more grace. A “thank you” instead of protesting a compliment. An acknowledgement of disagreement or agreement, with a mental note to return to the conversation later if necessary. A calm acceptance of constructive criticism.

2. Write.

Maybe it’s just a scribble, or one word. You’ll thank yourself later — we all think our memory is stronger than it actually is. For more, see Oliver Sacks on writing, via Brain Pickings.

3. It’s ok to be alone.

I’ve learned to love being alone (which is really just spending time with yourself). We contain worlds within that we never bother to explore. Yet we go gallivanting around, hungry to plunder worlds external to us before we even understand ourselves. Find excitement in the self.

4. Be open and kind.

Talk to strangers. Offer to help. Smile often. A friend told me, “Leave the world better than you found it. No matter how small the ‘better’ may be. Never give up trying to do this.”

5. Stay curious and learn as much as you can.

While half asleep the other day, I wrote down: “the ability to learn and love is what makes us human.” What a privilege it is to be able to learn. Read books and look up definitions. Ask questions, even the hard ones with possibly no answers.

6. Say what you mean. If there is something you want, ask for it.

“You don’t have to go” is not the same as “I want you to stay.”

7. Move your body.

Exercise regularly. It matters not how you look doing it, or what you do. Dance to Taylor Swift alone in your room. Lift one dumbbell. Shake your hips while brushing your teeth. Do 5 pushups. Jump on the bed. Start small, and do it daily.

8. Be reverent.

There was this moment when I got out of bed and stood up for the first time after getting hit by a car. I was filled with reverence for the feeling of standing, the ground under my toes, the weight of my body. I told myself I’d never forget it.

Stop for a moment. Look up. Watch the trees and stars as a child would. Study your mother’s hands while she works in her garden. Have reverence for this life’s moments, this earth’s beauty, this body’s incredible form and function.

9. Understand that life’s not a game of musical chairs.

Don’t settle just because you think the music has paused and you feel like everyone else has found the right chair. Find the place, person, career, and rhythm that is right and ready for you.

10. Learn to love the process.

Really, the journey is the reward. It’s daunting to learn new things because being a beginner can be frustrating. Have wonder and learn to love the process of it — cooking, meditating, exercise, foreign languages. Chopping vegetables was terrifying to me, and now it’s a source of calmness.

11. Create and believe in your personal brand of beauty.

I am absolutely still working on this one. The thousands of hours you spend 1) stressing about looking skinny 2) working out to try to be skinnier 3) worrying about what you ate in case it makes you less skinny is not worth the few hours you’ll spend wearing a bikini. Wear what makes you feel like you can be yourself, even if it’s yoga pants daily. Hold your head high. Create beauty from the inside.

12. Don’t be so careful. Be brave and act mighty.

Jump off the diving board. Lose that game of chess. Cry in front of someone. Make a first-try batch of curry that is way too spicy. When she asks you to dance, say yes. Tell him or her “I love you,” even if it terrifies you. Meet boys on subways. Be willing to be thrown off-balance — it may change your life.

13. Be comfortable with the unknown.

Almost nothing is certain except death. Which also means that most things are ephemeral, even if we create ideas of permanence or forevers. The future can be anything. We don’t have to be sure. We don’t have to create false definitions to make ourselves feel better. There’s a whole ocean out there, and the horizon beckons.

14. Remember that love is a renewable resource.

These past five years have brought a lot of heartache into my life. I remain the strangest mix of hopeless romantic and stone-cold cynic about love, but perhaps I want to be convinced that optimism is the right outlook. A friend asked, “Have you ever been deeply in love, had your heart broken, and been unable to love again?” Tears came to my eyes as I shook my head “no,” knowing that each time I least expect it, love finds me again. I marvel and think how lucky I am that each love has been even stronger than the last. Fall in love. Isn’t it beautiful that we can and have the freedom to? Forgive, and replace regret or stubbornness with love. It truly is one of the greatest secrets of life.

15. Don’t take your family for granted.

Tell your sister that you’re proud of her. When you go home and your mom makes you homemade wontons, ask for seconds. Take a minute longer to hug her. Ask questions about her garden. Tell your father you love him, though you may associate him with stoicism. Call them all more often.

***

“Never hurry, never rest,” said Goethe. And, quoting Ellison, “Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.”

This is our one life. Tell me we will never get used to it. Cheers to the next decade ahead.

Be brave, little heart.

I received a phone call one night and gazed questioningly at the phone screen, which displayed a name I hadn’t seen or heard for at least a decade.

It turns out Alex was renouncing most forms of texting and email for a period of time, and reaching out to people he hadn’t connected with in a while. To hear their voices, and to have real conversations.

He explained that he had undergone heart surgery recently. Though some time has passed since the surgeries, some complications have resurfaced and he’s been visiting the hospital often since then. He once attempted to track his exercise for 100 days as part of his recovery. People wrote and responded with similar words over and over again via Facebook and text message. He received many “Oh you’re so brave, get well soon!” responses – which, while well-meaning, didn’t seem to offer enough avenues to really reconnect. He wanted to know where life was taking me, what I was up to, and for me to ask the same of him.

There are times when technology distances us rather than fulfilling its (arguable) original purpose – to create connection, whether in business or personal context. Jonathan Safran Foer’s essay in the New York Times is still one of my favorite reflections on this topic. I battle internally with this idea, because ever since computers appeared in our home I have been curious about and enamored by almost all aspects of technology. In my daily life, I strive to help myself and others understand how technology can serve as an enhancement to our relationships, rather than a hindrance.

Alex asked me my address later, and sent me a postcard from his travels.
I sat down in my chair, touched to have received a physical postcard. I marveled at the expression on the children’s faces. It brought back memories of learning sevillanas and the beginning movements of flamenco during the heat of summer when I lived in Granada. The enunciation of the music through our floral hand movements, the emotion in our faces.

The message written on the back admitted that he didn’t know if I still dance or not. But that if I do, he hopes I allow the dance to contain as much feeling as is shown here.

Foer writes:

I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.

Alex’s heart, albeit physically strained and weary, still speaks loudly and lovingly through the ways he has touched me from across the continent. He still writes about facing death daily, and strives to make the most of each moment. He is an avid user of social media to talk about it all, and I admire the bridges he’s built between that and making old-fashioned contact with friends.

As our generation gets older, this reconciliation between two different worlds of connection and communication becomes more important to me. I am lucky enough to have time to tread sweetly on the final days of my second decade – taking this time offline to gather myself and reflect. One of my favorite people has reassured me that the next one will be the best of my life so far. Still, I purposefully stretch out the days under a different kind of sunlight. I move slowly, with a deliberate rhythm (tap tap tap, like the castanets) – and still the decade gets ever shorter. In watching or dancing flamenco you learn to release, to carry the audience and yourself through the rhythmic drumming that often mimics the heart. There was no part of us pent up, unexpressed, to be taken home to ferment.

We only get this one chance, we only get this one heart. “Be brave,” I encourage our little hearts. Don’t be so afraid to talk to someone, no matter the medium – like, really talk. Shed fear. Dance harder. Feel more, and speak now.

leaping tiger

I remember sitting on a rocky ledge overlooking the canyons of Tiger Leaping Gorge (hu tiao xia). It was immediately after a heart-rending trip down to the actual tiger leaping rock, and I was peacefully pressing foliage in my journal as I do when I’m crouched on mountainsides. I often get teased for having the added weight of a notebook in my backpack, and sometimes I never write a single word during an entire trip. But it has always given me comfort to have it there.

As I was sitting there, Old Mr. Lao (one of the two Malaysian men who saved me during my suddenly-alone travels across Yunnan) asked me if he could borrow my journal.

He disappeared for a good 45 minutes, and I clambered around the rocks until I found him, perched on another ledge, drawing quietly with an ink pen. He had reproduced the stunning view with black ink on paper, and I begged him to sign it.

I heard later of his passing away not too long after that.

I sifted through all of the bookshelves at my childhood home and found the drawing. When my fingers flipped to it, my heart jumped. While staring at the penned drawing, I at once could feel again the coldness of the river, the wildness of the Mordor-like fog, the wonder of the village children, the generosity of the farmers, the weakness in my knees.

***

During that same trip to Yunnan, I stayed at a farmer’s home for a few days. We bathed next to the roosters and donkeys, and ate eggs for breakfast by candlelight. I dropped my camera during a hike to a glacier, and mourned the loss of this inanimate thing. I felt preoccupied by this loss. I had spent my hard-earned money, and suddenly I wouldn’t be able to take photos for the rest of the trip.

I wandered into one of the tiny village plazas one night, and heard singing and guitar. I didn’t understand any of the words, but felt an unspeakable nostalgia overwhelm me. It turns out, they were singing in min nan hua, the language of my ancestors that I have never learned. The troubadours had abandoned most unnecessary material luxuries, and were living in harmony with the land. They only used what they needed, and grew everything themselves. They saw I was alone, and held me in their light and love for as long as I needed it.

I forgot about the camera, and had an ink drawing to remember by.

***

That was the year I turned twenty one, during which I struggled with many of the same questions as I am struggling with currently (almost a decade later).

Even now in my travels and movements across the world, I contemplate what drives a people. I think and write about it daily in New York City, where each individual is occupied by a myriad of dreams and struggles and trivialities. Even friends I have known since childhood will sometimes ask, “How can you be so patient with your ever-ready smile in the face of so many irate people?”

Usually I joke, “It’s because I’m from Texas,” but I know there is something deeper there.

***

My mother proclaims to people that out of all “the kids,” I keep everything from the past like a little history museum. She was laughing on the phone with me the other day, that sometimes she considers starting her own journal to remember all that has happened – but then she thinks in her head, “It’s ok. I can just ask Rose, she will have it written down, and she will tell me the whole story- she will tell me everything.”

This life is short. Maybe some of us travel to fulfill bucket lists. Maybe some of us travel to run away. Maybe some of us travel to run toward.

I worry a lot about my direction- whether I should worry more about money, or my career, or hunting down a willing husband to have a family with before I’m 37.

Shoko writes:

“Life is not about money,” my dad told me on the phone a few days ago. “Or jobs. Or things. Life is only about loving people.”

I thought about this… maybe, then, it’s also about pushing to experience as much as possible, and to let ourselves feel as much as we can, so that we’re prepared to receive —and understand, and relate to — others, no matter how well we know them or how different we appear.

The tools we pick up along the way help us speak to those around us, and hear them when they speak to us. What we learn, we use.

And so it is. I worry less about the things I have. There are no shortcuts, and this life’s love story is my bucket list.

The tools I’ve picked up (including a smile on a crowded subway ride) may be simple. But this is being human, you know? Experience as much as possible. Feel as much as we can. There isn’t much time.

Notebook in tow, the uncertain fog and canyons in front of me, the sun warm on the backs of my knees.