Island life

"No man is an island entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent
A part of the main"
- John Donne

But lately many of us have been operating from our island mode.

The fear of the virus is taming the social animal within us, and not all of us are responding well to this. But, we have all been reacting in our own ways.

For a while social media kept us connected. Together we went through the different phases of lockdown life - the kitchen experiments, the garden improvements, the zoom calls, the cool pyjama looks, the learn a new skill phase, the Netflix overloaded groggy eyes, the previous travel photo re-uploads, the hashtags of new normal...  to eventually now, when it is no longer new.

Now, after a good 6 months or more, some of us are beginning to understand what it means to live in this new world... which surprisingly looks not so different to the old. Everyday is very similar to the previous. And it is becoming a lot more difficult to whip up a new trend to remain excited or entertained by it all.

Our survival instinct tells us that we should adapt to this 'change' but to me it seems a little ironic, when everything around us seem so unchanging and static.

It is no longer an apocalyptic drama, but a cold reality which seeps into us and becomes part of us. We are no longer frazzled by the numbers, the deaths, the business and the economic losses. Although some of us are still waiting, we don't really know for what, and when.

I wanted to write a story of me embracing my island life, but it is turning out to be that of the island slowly engulfing me. I know the answer lies in my ability to change the lens with which I look at the world, but this is easier said than done.

For today, let me just focus on not sinking, I guess.

Happiness, punctuated.

Shiawase 幸せ- It's the Japanese term for happiness.

But my interpretation of this happiness is not the giddy feeling of overwhelming ecstasy. Instead it is more like a lying down in the field, looking up at the sky, watching clouds float by while being aware of your beating heart - kind of feeling. You know, the kind where your heart is filled with gratefulness towards the universe, simply because of the existence of this very moment.

It probably takes years of living, breathing, dreaming, failing, falling and restarting to get to such a moment, and will definitely take more of the same to recreate another similar instant. But when in such a moment, a smile escapes you, in spite of this understanding, I guess you can call it happiness?

I have always been a coward when it comes to this flavour of this particular emotion. Always insecure that admitting something like this would open me up to pain and hurt. I am not sure when in life I became so protective about myself and why, but it felt as if it is taboo or a vulgar state of mind.

But the fact that today I simply allowed myself - in fact I didn't even have control over it, so cannot say "I allowed it" - to feel this way, and say it out aloud without running away from it - probably means something. 

And this 'something' is probably nothing too big or small; it simply is a semicolon in the passage of my life.