Looking forward to 2016
To endure whatever may come
A little while ago I walked into a Guan Yin temple and prayed. I believe in symbolic gestures despite not being religious. I didn’t pray for happiness or better health, but I prayed for strength to endure the weight of the world and myself. That will be my only hope for 2016.
I can’t control external events and forces, and it would be arrogant to assume I can exist independently of them. Hence I wish to endure all of them, for better or for worse, with the love, grace and patience to witness humanity’s journey in learning to realize herself. To understand that the process is not linear, and yet be able to sit it through with her without calling it quits. Love is easy when it is smooth-sailing, and yet it is truly demanded when we cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. That is when we bear the light ourselves.
In 2016, I don’t wish to avoid being broken. I don’t wish to be happier, nor will I wish for better. I only wish to strengthen the capacity to endure whatever comes — the fleeting joy of happiness, the weight of my light and darkness, the love I can have and cannot have, the work I can do and cannot do. I want to appreciate all of them in entirety, to be capable of living these moments for what they are: beautiful, precious fragments, strung together in an expressive, unbridled force called life. Life to me, is a manifestation of what love is. Unable to be contained, because it has to be.
2015 broke me into pieces, and yet I endured it all to discover love expands out of the places I am willing to break. I can only wish to endure more breakage in 2016, so I can be capable of loving deeper and wider.
