tell me how to live
28 sentences on turning 28
On Monday night a 23 year-old bartender asks for my number.
On Tuesday morning I discover my first grey hair.
I think this is what people mean when they say ‘God has a sense of humour.’
Lately I’ve been craning my neck towards the sky at night because I’m desperate to feel some kind of cosmic significance, which is to say I’m desperate for belief.
In ‘Man and His Symbols,’ Carl Jung states that scientific understanding has caused our world to become dehumanised and that ‘Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena.’
If it weren’t for science I could be convinced that stars were white freckles on the face of some God.
Early in the spring I was suffering from recurring bouts of conjunctivitis and I was hungry all the time and you would not even believe it was spring because the light dissolved too quickly and the flowerbeds showed no signs of colour, but I said yes to everything in spite of myself; yes yes I will be there yes we should yes I will, until there were four of us sat in a friend’s living room one weekend and it was probably 5am because a thin shaft of light tread reluctantly across the wooden floor and the last half-mumbled attempts at conversation began to be swept up by dawn chorus, and when everyone went to bed I stepped outside and my thoughts made the same sound as trapped breath, like when something swallowed fast gets lodged in the airway and your voice becomes unrecognisable: laboured and panicked and faraway.
The next day, I deleted instagram (again) and messaged my friends to let them know I’d be implementing a self-imposed ‘vow of silence,’ which basically meant I’d be unresponsive to texts for a while.
‘Castle Park, 3:57pm. I’m finding my own existence so uncomfortable – it’s like I’m an actress in my own body and I’m constantly forgetting my lines.’
The only exposure I’d had to Quakers was that one scene in Fleabag and the smug-looking man with white hair on the boxes of porridge oats, so I had no idea what to expect when stood outside the Redland ‘Meeting House’ that Sunday morning.
I had read that belief in God was not obligatory in order to attend, but I couldn’t stop nervously tugging the sleeves of my shirt anyway; I felt wrong for using this space as a last resort after already trying the earthly things to no avail: the meditation and stretching; regular bedtimes and daylight exposure; books and poetry; no sugar and no alcohol and no men until life felt like an endless labyrinth of no’s to compensate for all those previous yeses and I had no clue what to reply to anyone anymore.
I settled quickly into the collective quiet, but when I thought about how at that very same moment my friends would be dancing at a nearby street party my own joylessness struck through me like metal poles colliding, and then came the guilt: for thinking selfishly about myself instead of The Big Things or life’s many mysteries – like luck and longing and other things beginning with L – until interrupted by the creaking of chair joints as an older man pressed down on the wooden armrests to push himself up to standing and he cleared his throat before speaking with a deep, earthy resonance that didn’t look like it belonged to him: ‘Beauty is not something that can be proven, it can only be experienced.’
When he sat back down the room filled with a silence so clean that the air took on a glass-like quality; I worried my breath would create clouds of fog on the surface.
Walking the long way home to avoid the street party whilst feeling sorry for myself, I passed my neighbour being tugged by her dog on its leash and I didn’t understand why she said in my direction ‘you’ve got nice friends’ until I climbed the dimly-lit set of stairs to find a bag of clementines waiting on my doorstep.
Above my bed is a large map of Paris and all its monuments, and I typically observe not the monuments but the roads; how they so seamlessly dovetail with specific memories of living there in my early twenties: like the time of the sprawling heat wave when we moved slowly across the open pores of the city’s streets to reach the sidelines of the canal and we breathed in sync with the heavy buildings along the way and, maybe it was just heat stroke, but I swear in the back of my mouth I could taste the colour of my own heart – the monuments were not important really, they were nothing more than decorations within the grand spectacle of youth.
Moving to a city like Paris makes you feel important by mere virtue of its cultural connotations so it is only natural to find yourself wanting to be defined by it – the city no longer a faceless vessel for thick air or hurried bodies to pass through, the city becomes as integrated as a limb.
For a long time, Paris was as good a salvation as any.
But returning back to the city for one week as the leaves were finally beginning to unfurl at the first sight of April’s blue, Paris felt like a confrontation with all its sirens and shoulders and defensive stares and I soon found myself deflated on a park bench finding beauty in nothing, and it felt like a moral failure to not want to live there anymore because this meant I had lost something important; because I have never known myself without it.
Coming back to Bristol was strange because I was happy to return – to know that I was in the process of creating a life I couldn’t bear to leave – but I also felt smaller, as though a door had closed to a past I thought I could always return to.
I’m not sure Paris is a feeling that ever goes away.
H randomly texts me a picture of the bedroom she lived in back when she worked as an au pair, with the open shutters giving way to a row of typical Haussmannian buildings and – ever so faintly – the silver outlines of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, and she writes ‘I miss this place so much.’
Just because I wouldn’t go back does not mean I don’t miss it too.
John O'Donohue says that stress is a perverse relationship to time, which perhaps explains my first grey hair.
Birthdays are a confrontation with time, with how you have measured up to your wants and wishes.
You see, I’m still struggling with self-compassion and the endless mourning of unrealised dreams and I’m getting sick of learning over and over again that satisfaction becomes starved if you don’t brave the cold air first thing in the morning and that most pleasures are active and not passive, yet I stay up till 2am searching for masters degrees and Another Life Abroad because I’m looking to be guided by something other than my own, untrustworthy voice to tell me how to live – after all, how could I possibly know how to discern the wants that are really worth wanting: wants which are fundamental to the flourishing of the soul vs wants born from that familiar feeling of lack, of misdirected and misunderstood desire?
I try to remind myself of something a lady named J said to me that first morning at Quakers when I said I wasn’t sure I believed in God: she admitted that neither did she, but that she believes value is often found in the seeking rather than the finding.
It is the edge of the afternoon and the rain has finally stopped, so I walk towards the nearest patch of green nestled between a small playground and a train station; I cross Lover’s Walk bridge to watch the waning light peek through tree branches and the leaves as they slow to a gentle breathing rhythm, bowing down before the spectacle of night draws in.
This’ll do, I repeat to myself, pretending not to look for some sign that maybe the world hears me, that maybe it is trying to find a way to reply.
(You can watch this year’s birthday video here!)
Welcome to the grey hair club—I'm trying to convince myself that each of my greys is sign of earned wisdom, but I'm not sure if I truly believe it. And beautiful post as always, such a solid mix of humor and heartful reflection!
Aside from the details of the window dressing and the much more beautiful language, this felt like it could have come from my mind. Got something akin to chills as I read it.