Late March. Each morning began in a heightened state of emotion that, to the average person, made me appear numb, almost dreamlike. I listened to the same fast paced incantation on every early morning run, read the same book of poetry each day, and in the moments where I was not obsessively looking for some deeper truth I was transfixed by own ability to find pleasure in boredom, staring up at the sky, watching as clouds passed in silence only to realize two hours had come and gone.
By the end of each day I would realize that there is nothing to do. Slowly, it builds on itself, there is nothing to do and no one to see. There is no one to ask how I’m doing or go see a film with me, there is just me in this house staring out the window contemplating misery and passing it off as the creative process. I couldn’t accept my reality, I couldn’t lay down and accept that life could offer me so much more and yet I chose this empty gray house born of no memory and no emotion.
When I’m stressed I write lists, nothing of importance usually but every once in a while a really good one comes to me and I feel the tingling sensation that happens right before your life changes. I wrote many lists that week, one list was just addresses I had lived at, to which there were many. Paper piled up in the bin all week but the best list of all was coming, I just didn’t know it. I frantically paced around most nights unless my best friend called me, the distance between us now was growing more obvious. Neither one of us mentioned it. I asked her how her children were and she told me stories of their flute lessons and tree climbing adventures, she asked me how the writing was coming along, I shamefully replied “it’s coming”. I was lying. Nothing was coming, only the future version of myself was coming and I didn’t know her yet, had to take the time to invent her, had yet to write the list of her characteristics.
The first bullet point came to me at three am on a Monday morning. I wrote down the words “say yes”.
That was it.
For the next three days I continued to pace. I inspected fruit at the local market, walked until my feet ached, sat through uncomfortable dinner conversations, asked the same questions over and over, first in my mother tongue, then in a language that better suited who I wanted to become. Then one night, tucked away in the vast blue curtain of the world, it came to me fully formed, a whisper of revelation.
1.say yes
2.You are not above pain
3.Complexity is not difficulty
4.Uncertainty is your highest divinity
5. Begin
I looked down at the finished list, confused and wondering if any of it would soon make sense. I needed a change, but that’s always been my most fatal flaw; my lack of patience. Every piece of my life was scraping itself together to guide me further into the jungle, into the eternal, into myself.
Say Yes
Once, when I was alone on the beach at night, wading into the freezing temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean, I felt a shiver run down my spine at what it would be like to feel pure euphoric joy. Of listening to music and not thinking about grief, of eating only with my pleasure in mind and not my guilt, of spreading myself far and wide and no longer giving and receiving conditional love, but rather, loving people and places as they come to me in their rawness. All it took was a few missteps into the yes that would mark the next two years of my life.
You are not above pain
When someone dies and you are meant to look upon their body a sort of hidden interaction occurs, the mirror is held up and you are forced to confront your own mortality. When I looked upon your body I flinched back from my own solitude, your scent was missing from the air, and in its place there was only anger left. I felt myself undergo a fragmentation, a soul split into pieces by the unavoidable human condition of never truly forgetting. In a way, it forced me to confront the person that I truly am. Suspended in time, in this place between seeing and unseeing, I think of what prompted me to begin writing. The pain mixed with the fear of life brought me to an edge, and rather than turn away from that edge I decided to let myself fall, muscles relaxed, full body immersion into the world around me. To write is to bear witness to this suffering, to sit with the pain of losing you and not hide. Humanity. I could stomach it, I could eat it whole, but not if it cried out first, not if it made a noise, it’s only in the silent pain, the mute pause, that I feel nothing (everything) toward it all. But I no longer fear silence, because now, through silence, I stand right where I struck.
Uncertainty is your highest divinity
We shrink from experiences of self abandonment while the soul hungers for that very mystery, we sense the possibility of being met in that aching moment of desertion and we retreat into our comforts. We cling only to what we are able to explain, but we must relinquish our claim to full autonomy so that we may gaze upon the world as it stands, in its own ripening, to make room for awe.
Complexity is not difficulty
There is no sky unmarred by our gaze, no landscape with which meaning has not been assigned, when I look out at scenes passing me by on the train each week I do not see what is simply there in physicality, but I also, by default, see what is spiritually within myself. It’s not enough to see and to know, for the human mind it’s not even enough to just be. In both states we are taking action, enslaved to our inability to be nothing. But to oscillate between these two states is to know consciousness.
Begin
On a flight to Lisbon I watch as a rolling cart makes its way up and down the aisles. There are only twenty of us on the plane, and at least ten layers of language barriers and spiritual warfare. Up above, we have control over our own destinies because as it stands we are existing in a bubble so far removed from the rest of the world that we require no real confrontation of the self. I choked on my sentimentality as I opened the window to my left. Sky, sky, and more sky.
But meaning finds its way, even if it pours out of your haunted past and spits itself out on the floor of an aircraft. How can I explain that it might get worse, but the descent into how much worse it will get will make the ascent into the light even more cathartic.
How can I explain that this is a recipe for hope
And not crisis.
Written by Adira Al-Hilo
Adira Al-Hilo is an Iraqi American writer currently working from Lisbon, Portugal