a summertime prelude.
And hesitantly holding back is no longer a choice I wish to make.
As the temperature begins to rise, a gradually expanding feeling of lightness begins to inhabit my chest. It is the anticipation of summertime, a hope to occupy new space and an open-heartedness towards unforeseen possibilities. The air feels alive with rejuvenation and the daylight saturates everything with a warm afterglow, restoring one’s belief in serendipitious encounters.
My aspiration for this summer and beyond: inhabit at the center of everything that I love and contain meaning to me. In practice, it looks something like becoming a serial hobbyist. In the past, I’ve been easily ignited with enthusiasm by many things yet rarely consistently committed to anything. In the words of a Chinese saying — I have 三分钟热度 — my eagerness endures for about three minutes before faltering inevitably. It is not so much because I move on too quickly and begin allocating my passions elsewhere. Instead, I almost always continue to harbour curiosity for the same things. Yet I feel too insecure to commit wholeheartedly, thus leaving it all as unfinished instead.
But perhaps it is time to dust off the shelves that store these unrequited curiosities. I am pondering — “Why not?”. I have been habitually hesitant, aware of a thousand what-if’s. A verse from a Chinese-rap song that I was listening to declares, “I’m not fearful of failure, I’m fearful of the fear of failure.” It caught me off guard — a reminder serendipitously encountered. Failure is an imminent byproduct of trying anything new: a platitude of truth ingrained into our mind from countless motivational pieces. The fear of failure, on the other hand, drains one of the courage to occupy new space, cranking up the noise of a thousand what-if’s to a numbing volume until all hope becomes dimmed by its blaring buzz. This is the paradox: the fear of failure creates the ultimate failure — a refusal to occupy the spaces that contain meaning to you. To be fair, perhaps some of my accomplishments could be credited to a fear of failure: an anxious attempt to escape some outcome that resembles disproportionate horror in my mind. But most of the times it renders me stagnant, caught in the chasm between the desire and the will, standing distantly and motionlessly from the spaces that contain meaning to me.
Ever so gradually, I’ve come to redefine what productivity and progress means to me. Less in regards to averting what is feared, more about treading towards what brims with meaning and joy. I can almost confidently assert my values, while am still timid to reflect them in my actions — my choices often falling out of alignment of what I truly value and the dissonance creates a lingering itch. On a more specific note, take writing as an example. I write a lot less than I hope to, often fearful that what I write will only be futile. Yet time after time, I am reminded of how much I wish to document it all, to reflect on all the ordinary yet intricate unfoldings. I want to find the words — even though they are so prone to being misunderstood — to describe what I experience, and perhaps eventually converge towards the precision of understanding. I want to write more frequently and more freely, much like the streams of consciousness scribbled across my journal pages in the quietude of the morning, no longer awaiting for my fears to subside.
On a more general note, these days I’ve been pondering about what does it take to begin making choices that really matter to me. The aforementioned fear often manifests itself into a hesitancy in making choices. There is a popular idea that decision makers can classified into two types — the satisficer and the maximizer. The former is content with any option that suffices, while the latter carefully deliberates in an attempt to obtain the most out of the choice that they make. To me, the tendency to maximize is achingly familar. Every choice easily feels like a dilemma, and I cannot quite trust myself enough to decisively take the next step. But I’m beginning to wonder if the amount of mental energy dissipated is really worthwhile. What about a life lived — not maximized, merely experienced? I am beginning to wonder: maybe what matters to me is the means rather than the end. Yet in an attempt to optimize and control, anything becomes reduced to a means to an end. Maybe I do not need to await until the conditions are fine-tuned nor until my fears fully subside to just begin — I will find the meaning that I am looking for amidst the unfolding motion.
Summertime is here — I want to grow and become, hands reaching upwards into the radiant sunlight. I want to stretch beyond my comfort zones, show up in spaces that I have always hoped to to occupy but have not yet, encounter and create alongside others who are also wide-eyed about it all. So just to open-heartedly live — experience life as it is, unfiltered and unmaximized. Gatherng the courage to show up in spaces that contain meaning to me. These days when I think about our choices and their consequences, it all resembles something of a labyrinthine unfolding. It is almost terrifying, but could it not be simultaneously freeing? At the end of the day, I know that it is up to me to make choices that brims with rejuvenation and daylight. And hesitantly holding back is no longer a choice I wish to make.