The Vibe Shift Was Real After All!
Part 3: 2022 in review | A year of significant firsts
As the year comes to its end, and I pore over several 2022 recap / the year that was, I’m surprised to note the pleasant memories bubbling at the top of my mind, from my year that has been, and a dramatic near-absence of bitterness.
It’s a first for me. Atleast in adulthood.
I want to remember 2022 as the year I freed my spirit.
I spent an extraordinary amount of time in nature, which is what I love to do the most. Discovered the calm of being in the present. Read books often, and read deeply. I started to write, to empty the chaos in my mind. And most importantly, this year I gave myself permission to be who I am. I stopped beating myself up.
I’ve been good this year.
& I want to celebrate the vibe shift through a Vonnegut inspired rant.
The year of communing with nature
I’ve never been outdoorsy, but have always had a keen interest in plants. This year I stepped out a lot more (nature walks), tried forest bathing (thanking WFH very much), and breathed in a lot of ocean breeze.
I also formally recognized myself as a bird-watcher, and became more systematic during “observation windows”. This helped me notice more birds, and learn more details about them. I had picked up this hobby last year.
I tended to sizeable gardens, noticed the change of seasons, the shifting of the sun’s arc, and watched the moon many nights.
I’ll always remember the zen — of standing below the thunbergia’s cascade of big, blue blooms, and staring up, from between the dark canopy, at the starry night sky.
I read what Carl Sagan had to say, and sat below the giant pines at an empty beach at night to watch the looming ocean rumble under a heavenly canopy, and mulled over what I understand about the physical truth of existence and its fortunate probability. I tried to build my persepective.
I realized that I feel Ikigai whenever am receptive to nature. This is how I found my favourite place to meditate.
Oh, to savour the joys of of a garden!
I also welcomed more numbers of birds, insects, squirrels, cats, mongooses, dogs and other wildings this year. They filled my days with joy.
Like Thoreau said, my thanksgiving is eternal.
The year of letting go
I dropped a shit ton of baggage this year. Stuff that I should not have been bothered by to begin with.
I did a serious audit of what I call “my life”, and realized that I carry loads which are not mine to bear. Soul-sucking remnants of miscalculated obligations, and carefully cultivated dumbness.
I guess the transition happened naturally as my habit of anticipating & accepting BS, and reacting like a victim died slow, deliberate deaths at the hands of my newly adopted philosophies.
2022 is the year I started to feel unnaturally hopeful.
That was step 1.
Step 2 — With the time saved, I started searching for what I am after. And realized that the thing below is true.
What you seek is seeking you.
— Rumi
I dared to have some inevitable confrontations with myself, and then charted out what’s really meaningful to me, and what works for me.
Chucked the rest in the fuck it bucket, and proudly moving on.
The year of good influences
We tend to derive (mostly incorrectly) a lot of “who I am” from the what’s and who’s around us. In doing so, we step neatly into pitfalls that can haunt us for the rest of life, like the practice of measuring our worth with yardsticks borrowed from others.
How the hell are we so sure that they know better? Just because we didn’t stop to think? Or maybe ’cause they beat their chest real LOUD?
Anyways, I learnt my lesson. I think.
Be yourself - not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.
- Thoreau
This year I’ve (gratefully and gracefully) swallowed many bitter regrets about wasting years on coping through various imagined struggles… most of which would’ve dissolved like fog in bright sunlight had I only discovered Thoreau and his Walden in my teens.
For those of you who are uninitiated, the American philosopher/yogi/naturalist’s works are a collection of revolutionary thoughts involving the thinking man and his relationship with nature and other men.
He rocked my world, and opened my eyes to the realms of possibilities in the present. Here’s my first attempt at summarising what I know of the transcendentalist.
— -
I’m obliged to share some of his hard-hitting quotes in this essay.
On self-building—
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial . . . I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
— -
On relationship with nature —
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
— -
I read Wodehouse, Vonnegut and Thoreau for good part of the year. In that order.
I also researched about the lives and works of the free-spirited juggernaut that was the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and modern art’s poster boy, the tormented, magnificent Vincent van Gogh.
Each of these trailblazers have assured me that there’s hope for me yet.
I’ll remain inspired.
Thank you for reading.
I borrowed the title from John Gorman’s The vibe shift was real after all (it’s a soul-baring, fun read).
You might enjoy two of my more controlled rants, parts of my 2022 recap series.
Photos (if not otherwise credited) © Shreyasi
