dear stranger friends:
these days, my mind has felt like a minefield, but berlin is beautiful and rainy. anxiety is: living with a bomb in your heart -- or getting your foot stuck in a beartrap and thinking it will last forever. I've been writing a lot of notes-to-self on my journal. I hope some of these tools might help you too. (here's an archive of them).
this week: on loving what you can't control, and living a nomadic life that feels like rowing through the open ocean. remedies from the soothing room: take a bath. a resolution to do simple things everyday.
sending you an afternoon by a berlin lake, with a glass of campari i drank yesterday,
kening
1 | love what you can't control
love what you can't control, because what you love — you can't control. isn't that the nature of love (and loss, and life, and the ephemerality and chaos embedded in all things?) that we are transitory way-finders in this life, and all forms of control are just an illusion. places, people, passions — they each have a life and death of their own; a fluid relationship which changes with its seasons.
2 | do simple things everyday
i've returned from two months of sleeping on friends' couches in new york city back to berlin — to an unrecognizably beautiful, green summer, and it feels like becoming a newborn again — like opening my eyes at each new day, and asking myself: what do I want to do with myself? how do I wish to be?
the answer is simple. I do the same thing everyday.
3 | traveling by ferry
here, aboard a ferry, traveling by water — is when you realize slow truths: about why you're here, where you come from, and where this life might be taking you. I run around the city for two months, and then escape to its peripheries by water. the experience of sitting in the window seat of an empty boat (or plane, or train, or bus) creates a liminal space for the mind to unfold, and breathe. this is why I never watch movies while traveling. I let the movies of my own mind take a break, and just inhale the experience of moving.
4 | out in the open ocean
a year and a half into slow traveling the world and I still don’t know where I am going — if the bets that I make in this life will pay off, or if I’m just crazy and self-delusional, with enough force to try and bend reality to my will. but when you are traveling this life, the destination is never the ultimate purpose. it was — and always will be — about the journey of coming and going, and to find some magical balance between rowing the boat, and letting go to the waves.
5 | take a bath
when i don't know what to do or how to deal with life — sometimes i drop everything and take a bath. taking a bath is like the opposite of taking a walk — a walk means movement, air, earth, sun, light. a bath means stillness, settling, soaking and sinking in oneself — a retreat into physical or metaphorical darkness; the 360 degree embrace of water.
thank you from all the 8pm berlin golden hours for reading my weekly digest. write me back anytime.