The Garden of Forking Paths
Alma on remembering that the joy lies in the journey
Lately I have been having calmer days. The stress from the impending removal-of-country has quieted, sharpened my senses and focused my mind like a bucket of cold water thrown on my head. There is no time for worrying – the buzzer has gone off, and time is ticking. For context, my visa expires in December, and the life I have spent building for the past three years will be unravelled carelessly by strangers who aren’t even realising they’re doing it, as I have probably done for others. Someone will redecorate my room, someone will sit in my office chair, and life goes on.
I once told my friend Cassandre that my biggest fear, the reason that I live my life without leaving many roots anywhere, is that I will build and build and then, like a Jenga tower, it will all fall down. And so, I thought I was in control of my fear by not cementing myself anywhere. I could control the pain if ever something did occur. It was silly of me to think I wasn’t already building something without realising it – of course I was. And now I am being asked to leave, when I was never intending to want to stay. It’s amazing how in all of human history, we still cannot accept the fact that we have no control, and we live our lives believing we do until we are, once again, reminded.
We also can’t seem to understand that the thing we fear the most, once it comes, is the thing that liberates us the most. The Jenga tower has arrived, the English wind has knocked me over, and now I am asking myself what I truly want to build, with less fear. Or at least fear that pushes rather than binds. That fear the day before the essay is due when the brain fog leaves and your ideas suddenly start to connect. I wonder if this is how people normally feel, like they’re running out of time? I imagine they’re craving to build something. I have always idly felt that I had time, idly so. Idling is one of my favourite things to do. But the most valuable, the most priceless thing we have - incapable of being changed, reversed, or recovered - is time.
A while back I asked my dad, if he could go back to any time in his life – his childhood years, his wild teens, his late 20s – which one would it be? Ever the wise man, my dad said none. He had lived each period fully and whole-heartedly, and so he felt no need to return to any period. He was currently living this one out fully.
What does it look like to live my current age fully? Am I doing it? Or is it that thing, much like happiness, that happens in the corner of your eye, and if you look straight at it it disappears? With friends buying houses, getting high promotions, entering so many forking paths, how am I meant to know if I’m doing it right? What does right even mean, right to who, for who? This is a cliched emotion over-understood by our generation, but can anyone tell me the answer to it? “Everything’s going to work out”? How do you deal with the quick tightening of your chest when that little voice responds authoritatively, “for everyone but you.”
I have been having calm weeks, however, I promise. This has been happening much in the way a mother who panics about every miniscule detail is always the calmest in an emergency. Once my heart rate has gotten going at an alarming pace, to surpass that cute choking sensation, I have begun staring at my hands. I focus my attention on my hands, feel how they hold the seat I am in, feel my legs on the seat and the pressure of my body against the wood of the chair. Feel every point where they touch and move my attention to each of them. It quiets my head and brings me back to the physical. I move my thoughts towards simply sorting whatever is in front of me – just that —and living in that singular task. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but for a thinker rather than a doer like me, I feel like I’ve cracked a code. It’s the only thing calming me down lately, but also, I think, bringing me a clarity of mind that I am trying to capture and seal in a jar.
The joy is in the doing. The joy is in feeling that I am using my present mind for the task at hand, feeling the joy of completing that and doing it well. Here, not in the vague, future self that gets the job and writes the masterpiece. Here, and being better than yesterday. My dad also said once that if you're skiing, you’re not looking at all the hurdles that are coming your way and whether you’ll be able to pass them – you’re on the skis, and you’re focused on your knees, your legs, and your path. To live in only that moment, rather than what may come of it, feels so good. Focusing on your work, your craft, your friendships, what you recognise yourself in. You finally feel in control of something, yourself. You can’t control if you’ll be hired, fired, chosen, taken care of. But placing your focus and your joy in the doing, in the present, in the journey rather than the destination – be it career, love, a trip to the supermarket – brings beauty to the mundane and makes time feel longer.
If I go skiing, I don’t want to be thinking about the end of the trail. I understand the need to know whether we will get to the end of that trail (what is this thing you’re fearing? What does not getting to the end of the trail, not succeeding, really even look like? Does it look that terrible, or are there other more important things?) I want to be feeling the whole way down. I’m focusing my gaze less on the amorphous future, but rather back on my hands, the only thing I can control. Finding pleasure and satisfaction in their work, in the feeling of the keyboard, in the notes-filled notebook, in improving and having improved. Bringing back our huge heads and far-fetching eyes looking way too far into the horizon, back down to my own two feet, and enjoy the pleasure of these steps and this ground beneath them. That’s how I think we live fully?
A previous self would not have written this for fear and sadness that it’s not perfect. My self now feels incredibly happy to have spent the afternoon writing.
Love always,
Alma
READING, LISTENING, WATCHING
Reading 📚 I read Claire Keegan's Small Things like These, a quick read I was lucky to have been recommended it by a friend. Short and surprising how it grips you, and it’s based on the real-life Laundries in Ireland, where young girls who fell pregnant were essentially imprisoned. It’s a gorgeous read.
Watching 🎧 I am devouring each episode of Lady In The Lake on Apple TV - don’t watch if you don’t like crime. It’s an incredibly well-written show, the plot is like nothing I’ve ever watched. Set in the 70s, Natalie Portman, women dealing with insufferable men while trying to emancipate themselves, murder mystery. It’s insanely good?
Reading 📺 Polyester Zine, an online publication (support independent journalism!). If you like academic but digestible analysis of media through a feminist lens, join the Dollhouse.