How to learn to bless a mess?
I’m lucky to live on a tropical island. Trees, lianas, flowers, bushes and all sorts of grassy layers create vibrant sceneries which resiliently compete with concrete and asphalt. Insects and birds are co-living with it, and humans are witnessing and sometimes cutting it down. However, in the tropics, nature always wins in the long term and comes back with more splendour.
This splendour can be very unconventional in human terms — the decay can be next to the youth, or it turns out with an excessive variety of textures on one small canvas, or it brings too many shades of the same colour creating a mess. Still, this mess is never meaningless but rather just giving space to everything.
There are a lot of things which messing up my world now. It is very much patched, unharmonized and rough, but I’m making a tremendous effort to learn to accept and bless this mess the same way I appreciate the eccentric Nature compositions. Yes, structure and predictability are important soothers to our brains but is it an illusion that the control can ever be reached? I think I should continue to learn from the weeds and bushes to navigate through my life’s endeavours.
July 2022, Singapore
