Lessons from June

Being flows into doing

The greatest lesson that I learnt this month is that when God desires his will to be known, he yells. Gently first in prayer, as I tediously waffled through my own lack for the hundredth time, ennui sinking in, sick of life hung in passive suspension:

I am called to reside in the being, and not the doing.

Whatever that means. Annoyed with this platitude, I distracted myself by scrolling through Instagram, only to find a post emblazoned with the message:

We can fill up our time even with seemingly productive activities, but if these good things are not decided upon from listening to our inner selves, then they are obstacles to our interior journey. (@becomingmepodcast)

I thanked God for the elaboration, and quickly returned to marinating in insecurity. The messages so far were right of course. Most days, I was feeling as if a puddle rising up from the sidewalk and gasping for air, unsatisfied with this state yet choking up the wrong trees. But sometimes when you open up a can of worms, all you have are worms. And the big question of being yawned like a horrible cavity, causing me to plunge into so many other restless anxieties that, once benign under the smothering carpet of work woes, were beginning to awaken and rear their ugly heads. Who am I if not film-programmer-museum-worker-go-getter-KPI-meeter-that-artsy-fartsy-friend? Even the simple question of "So what are you doing these days?" or "What are your plans for next time?" now provoked an existential answer that my tongue had no words for.

For an instant I saw myself as one of the biblical Israelites in their exodus. The idea that Egyptian enslavement might have been a superior deal than their current wanderings through the desert after all, just skimming the corners of their thoughts. Better if I had stayed discontentedly content, arms chained to projects and head crowded with deadlines, than walk into this fog with hands and mind wrapped around a sudden emptiness in search of some promised land. Much like the Israelites too, a general distrust of the path ahead led me to the golden calves of striving to prove that I am doing something. I am writing! I am reading! I am running around the house and neighbourhood running errands! I want to take up this and that opportunity!

Perhaps God lost his patience. Or like the third crow from the rooster which awoke Peter from his stupor of denial, I visited a friend's place one afternoon where sickly warm clouds were sweating from on high, and like some moment of quenching clarity on her whiteboard it read:

Being [flows into -->] doing

I know, I know. It was the same truth in different words, but grace works in the strangest ways and I felt something in me unclench and relent. In some hidden way, I recognised also that my frantic attempts at busying myself was its own contention with being, where who I am has always been so predicated on the kinds of achievements I can peg myself to, no matter the size. As such, I had already begun this slow migration into learning what being is, that unanswered question from which what I am therefore called to do will eventually reveal itself. 

In other words, I have left the verb to occupy the noun first. Being means allowing myself to be loved by God in the most extravagant and unintuitive of ways. It means permission to take long naps, find rest in play, sink my teeth deep into watermelons and let its sweetness trickle down my throat. It means contemplating in awe, as if I am 6 years old again and everything in the world is new, as the smallest of leaves on a tree break the sunlight into a million pieces. It means counting the shadows on the ground. It also means that even when I cannot bear to sit in myself, I let myself be beside. I do not stray too far in my doing, occasionally climbing into a book and living there for awhile. Or I write, slowly but surely, feeling the texture of words intermingling with sound and silence. Being means finding softness in all things, even when it's easier to be hard on myself.

I throw my plans into the wind and for once, am happy that all I need to do really is feel the breeze.

To grandpa (or, ah gong), from a list of items

1 Toto bet slips
I visited you on Friday, at the close of day. Our days were Mondays, the beginning of the week, so I knew in my heart that this was goodbye. At least, when I was little, Mondays meant being picked up from school before making a covert detour to Singapore Pools where I would help you pick the numbers that might change the course of your week, perhaps your life. All of fate hinged on the unknowing slipping out of my mouth, your hands a faithful scribe with a short, blunt pencil on paper. Nothing ever changed so this was more ritual than rupture, more prayer than answer. But a dollar was all it took, plus another dollar for my discretion, and that to me was worth more than any riches a state subsidiary could ever promise or provide.

2 Pocket comb
We don't speak of fate, even if you have been cleaved from this side of heaven as we all will be eventually. Rather, it is faith that tells us how this life arches before us into new life, everlastingly on this same trajectory regardless of its meandering through lottery numbers, unexpected illness, departures. Regardless of habit: every reflective surface a mirror where you grasped into your pocket or later, across various hospital beds, for a comb to brush your hair aside, always neatly parted in two.

3 Soles
After some long years of Covid exigencies, it was the first time seeing you again. Gingerly propped at an angle with your mouth open and askew, eyes milky, unseeing, unmoving. All around, the room was a heavy amber, thick with the sounds of the oxygen machine heaving for you. I leaned in to find you.

That time when you would hoist your feet up on the sofa after a long day, and I would sit at its ends staring for awhile in morbid fascination, then gingerly peeling off the dead, calcified skin falling like translucent scales onto the ground. Each peel would reveal another thickened layer below; there was no end to loss and where throbbing flesh and blood began.

I think now of you being peeled from this earth, floating beyond this plane of sight. If I reached out to grab you, what would I hold on to?

After some searching, what I have found amidst the layers of losing and forgetting are your worn soles bearing the weight of food and distance, followed by sweet and sticky peng kueh tasting something like tenderness.

4 Arnold Palmer polo shirt
That colourful golf umbrella. Standing at the mouth of my primary school gates amidst a million children and a million Toyotas / helpers / frantic parents, I always knew that if I searched, I would find you - the umbrella like a lighthouse of spinning red, yellow, white and green in a sea of grey. The blue rings in your eyes meant that you sometimes could not see too well - but I see you, I see you, I see you!

5 Rosary
Days of childhood indifference spent with you and grandma meant hazy mornings with the rosary and sweltering afternoons at the Novena devotion. More ritual than rupture. More prayer than answer. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Now and at the hour of our death. At the hour of our death. When is the hour of death?

On Friday, we sat there in front of you, my mother, husband and I, reciting a decade of the rosary, each one like an intonation of repeated grief. The language of prayer is an odd place to reside in next to the realities of a hospice bed. One climbs bead by bead, litany by litany to enter into the narrow doorway of hope, as the other exits quickly into stained wounds ruptured by the clinging vines of needles and tubes. Therefore at the eve of your parting, I sat there at the foot of paradox - sorrow and joy, death and life - grasping at everything but receiving nothing. No metaphysical epiphanies, no shores to arrive at, just silence. As if to say that some things are wordless. As if to say that maybe you have always understood far better than I do that all which needs to be known, all which is important, can be found in practice, over and over.

Love is practiced. Everyday now, I light a candle and pray for you; whisper and smoke coiled together, ascending. Everyday now, I mouth the words from your funeral rites into belief,

But for those who believe in your love
death is not the end,
nor does it destroy the bonds
that you forge in our lives.

Everyday now, I think of our divinely wrought bond, golden threads festooned onto our bodies and then entangled around Love's own beating heart. And I climb and climb in all my unknowing and all your faith that on another close of day, I may find you once again.

Conclusion

I am writing a conclusion because I was taught that every piece of writing should end with a conclusion that ties everything together.

I am writing a conclusion because I was taught that you cannot end with the conclusion that your writing was a figment of a dream.

I am writing a conclusion because in this dream, I wait, cleaved from the safe arms of what I have known & learned,

thusly.