stillness in dust storms

in a week I will leave this japanese life to discover my italian one. and apart from this dawning of a slow, impending loss — a soft and yolky kind of grief — as it often is before leaving a place you love, I can also feel the other things piling up inside of me: errands to run, work to finish, emails to respond to, gifts to create, logistics to check, useful stuff to buy. I can feel the scarcity of time rising up in me like a dust cloud — and a sense of “busyness” about to eat me alive. and I resist it.

I resist it by ignoring it, defying it — this tyranny of busy-ness. instead of being caught up in the storm of obligations and pressures and expectations (many self-imposed) — I try something different. I lean back into the arms of my day and just do whatever I want, trusting that what I want is what I need. so this morning I made ramen soup, cold. I sat for a leisurely breakfast, listening to italian grammar structures and pronounced the singy songy words with my mouth half full of japanese milk bread. and I recognize this tyranny of busy-ness like a dictatorship of the mind, programmed into our systems, and my act of resistance is simply pausing. listening to myself enough to do that which I love, not that which I feel obligated to do. doing that which brings me joy, not because I feel like I have to do it. and I think, this is the secret to experiencing the opposite of scarcity (of time, of resources, of attention) — and that is, to relish in the abundance of a single moment. here. now. always.