birds chirping & sun shining--the necessity of rest & nothingness

Easter bank holidays are like a microcosm of Christmas—without any of the snow nor any of the sparkly lights. People gear up to drive hours to Lake District or Cornwall or Norfolk or Suffolk, and which ever -folk or -shire that will allow you to escape via A12 and end up in a cabin, listening to birds chirp in the morning, come rain or shine.

And maybe, just maybe, one doesn’t have to think about or talk about AI and its many variations at all—agentic, generative, whatever-not. The more I think about office workers, workers of professional services and our ills, and our OOOs, and our Outlooks and Teams and virtual calls and circle backs and strategies and decks, the more I am also thinking about people doing the real things.

The farmers tending to the cows, the TfL workers keeping things running over the holidays, the builders laying on yet another layer of brick, the doctors and the nurses treating patients, the artists and the writers and the crafters, making things, carving things… And I feel an almost tangible ache to want to walk myself to a pottery studio, put my hands to clay and just mould.

Instead, I sleep and sleep and sleep after what felt like 12 months of work and change crammed into the past 4 months or so. Has it only been 4 months? Where are we? What day is it? All of this is not to say that anything I did was noble. Did I contribute to the world? What have I been doing?

*

I read books and leaf through magazines and put my feet up, resting. I watch TV and reflect on my life and go inwards, making this a far more enjoyable staycation in the city than I thought it’d be, doing the millennial thing of yes - enjoying my rent. And I keep going inwards, trying to not let the “externals” distract me—the outcomes we’re constantly driving towards: a wedding, a marriage; a car, a house; a raise, a better pay cheque, and yet another better pay cheque. To pay for more in what is an increasingly expensive life: tax 1, tax 2, tax 3, pilates classes, yoga classes, eating out, renting a car, getting a drivers license, another holiday, an Oyster card and topping that up, and on and on on, ad infinitum. Here she goes again.

And all of this is making me think again about what I want to achieve in this life, and how I want to spend my time on this earth. And I don’t know if the two things I just mentioned collide in a Venn diagram, let alone whether or not they’re the same things at all. The driven person in me hit a bit of a wall this year—I hit my 8-year work anniversary (I know, I know - that’s so little time in the bigger scheme of well, the Universe), and I just had to pause a bit. Like, really pause. I hadn’t taken a gap year so much as I’ve just hopped from grief to work to covid then to some hard work then to quitting then to wedding planning and moving countries and graduate school and again, ad infinitum…

I started to think about how I want to live my life from here on out and of course the funny thing is, nobody has the answers for the rest of their lives. If people say they do, and they have it all planned out, take that as comedy and then laugh it off.

And the more I reflect, the more I realise just how much as a society, we’ve been asked to work towards the betterment of self… in highly individualistic and more often than not, selfish ways. To get ahead. To accumulate. To measure our worths based on our pay cheques and our rewards and our LinkedIn profiles, which, in this world, what does that even mean anymore?

In his article for the Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks encapsulates this so aptly:

In other words, loquacious logophiles might have byzantine lives and find themselves in manifold precarious situations that lower their jouissance. (They talk themselves into misery.)

Hah.
When…

The smarter you are, the better equipped you should be to understand that well-being comes from faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Your intelligence is more likely to bring you happiness if you put it to use by chasing better ways to love and serve others, rather than elbowing others aside and hoarding worldly rewards.

Over piping hot miyukguk and soondubu jiggae, and an unbeatable jjajyangmeon this week, I talk to my sister about ambition. Unlike me, she is about to graduate and step into the oyster of her world. It harkens back to a time where I was a scrawny kid in New York City ready to grab the world by its bullhorns (or however the saying goes). I was SO bright-eyed. I wanted to do EVERYTHING. I thought I could do ANYTHING. We talk about imagination too, and how we enter that cliched shift from children to adults when we forget to imagine cool things, awesome things, amazing things in our lives. And we just start to feel the enclosure of bills, and tiredness, and hangovers, and yes, the reality of a shifting world order. As the Eagles so rightfully belt out in “Hotel California,”

We’re all prisoners of our own device.

I’ll try and take the drama down the notch next. And so, the point being? What is the point? Or insufferably, at work, it’s “what’s the ‘so what’”?
The points:

• Tune out the noise. Tune it out. All of the external paraphernalia creating a cacophonous distraction in your life—find what matters. If making money and building a better life for yourself and your family matters, then that’s what matters. Just don’t forget who you are in the process. If in your work, you get to forge real human connections and serve others and make a decent and respectable living, what more could anyone ask for? If you get to end your day at the dining table, sitting next to your loved ones, talking over music and delicious food, what more could one ask for?

• And then tune into your soul. Tune in. Really, what do you want to do? What are you here on earth school to practice, to experience, to live? And what you really want to do includes the umbrella of things that scare you too—things that you know you want to try but are afraid of failing at, things you know you can do, but don’t know if you deserve a big life. The answer is yes, go for it, go do it, and always, feel the fear and do it anyway.

• And the acquisition of things, of a nice life. I’m not going to lie—who doesn’t like a nice life? Why do we work hard anyhow? The point is the things cannot live your life for you. You are living the life and if you have nice things, then great. Beautiful. The acquisition is not the point, the extraction shouldn’t dominate, the showing off of all the achievements and the badges and the see me, look at me, pick me vibes—to whom? for whom? The heart, remember the heart, remember the soul. Remember the breath. Remember why you are here. Remember who you are. Remember who you love.

SO this is why we want to hear the birds chirp. To feel the sun on our faces. To smell fresh air in nature. To cut out the noise. To spend hours cooking simple, nourishing and delicious food. To remember what matters. To spend those hours talking to the people we love. That is all there is to it, really.

Happy Spring, happy renewal, and a brand new week.