In a life where I have made a habit of stripping away what is unnecessary, I have ended up with a surprising focus.

The need to make things beautiful. The need to make things the way I have always felt they needed to be.

There is nothing else left to do.

I wake up softly to early sunlight, there are no blinds, no curtains to block my morning view of nothing but sky, silvery grey in the cold morning warming to a childish blue. Let my feet luxuriate on the ground as I walk, correcting my tendency to walk on the outside edge of my left foot.

Then I get distracted for awhile. Rude interruptions fill the world, I am a reactive piece of odd machinery, very little is under my control.

It’s all-encompassing in a way that wraps itself around both bliss and a heart breaking sadness. This is what the word equanimity feels like to me.

I keep it on my laptop desktop. White text on plain black.

Think about getting a tattoo of it. But what I really want is to have it tattooed in my mind somewhere. Don’t forget. It may be the most important word I know.

It’s written on my mirrors and my windows in white chalk marker.

I have nothing else but my limited window on the world. Limited in time, space, senses that can only perceive a limited range of sounds, smells, sights and sensations. Limited in cognition. Limited but with the ability to recognize just how limited we are.

There is a hummingbird that lives somewhere nearby. It visits my balcony occasionally, and perches on one of my red hangers. It dashes madly from corner to corner, just to make sure once again that there are no flowers for it there. I think the hangers fool it from a distance.

I feel hamfisted and stupid as I watch it, knowing that the tiny creature darting around inhabits a world I will never know. I also feel a little stupid for doing such a sappy thing as marveling at a hummingbird. What’s next? I’ve mentioned butterflies in this blog before… I might be slipping.

Or maybe I’m just regressing back to the mean. Maybe I went too far in denying myself comfort and sappiness and now I overused the part of me that coldly resisted. Maybe it’s broken, so the sappy things get to me now.

I don’t deny that I am broken.

I did not begin to strip away all comforts and indulgences because of some noble idea of things that are more important. I began because I was broken by the batterings of the world and the clumsy people around me, and I wanted to fix me.

Something about the way I broke, and eventually cobbled the pieces together with whatever crude tools could be found or made… I bend light in a strange way and people can’t see me the way I see myself. Different angles give different views, and occasionally I take a hammer to myself and then try to fix me again painstakingly unshattering myself, new but fragile.

This is true for everyone. We are all broken, and we fixed ourselves to bend light in ways that hide us, or magnify us; color or dull us. But we all know each other to the core. There is no hiding. We may tell ourselves that people are all different, but we’re all so alike that it’s scary. One of the ways in which we’re alike is how wrong we always are about each other.

We think our opinions are so important, that we’ll hold onto them in the face of being wrong, in the face of being stupid, in the face of death, and in the presence of other people breaking because we cannot let go.

But some people are less broken than others. I think they would watch hummingbirds without feeling a little stupid.

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Vanessa Surian writes. This is one such example. For more, follow her on Quora or Twitter. For less, don’t.