I looked out of the window and thought —

Sometimes, I don’t really know what you can do except go far out into nature and just be alone with it — feel the hot gravel of the earth, both the vitality and durability of the plants but also the leaves that wither. If you look, not even that closely, everything is a reminder of cycles: beginnings and endings and in-betweens. I don’t know what you can do except get in your car and drive for a long time, before sunrise or late at night, roll down a window and listen to an old song on some station and park it by a body of water. Maybe there’s a moon encroaching on full that night and you think, curiously, about the people who have actually been there.

I do not know, except taking a train and noticing how the light reflects off the surfaces and the flickering shapes that cross the empty blue seats: all the windows and windows and windows that you pass; perhaps a shadow of someone, a room with a light left on, all these lives laid neatly inside a matchbox, the patchwork quilt of any given city. You think fuck, that there are so many cities out there and faces and scents and sounds and yes, an entire cadence of feelings that you’ll never know. 

And yet you are here, blustering through this terrible dichotomy of obligation and absurdity interrupted by beauty and grace, trying to get through the day and shop local and stop your mask from slipping (metaphorical and non-metaphorical!); donate to this and that cause, do yoga, post something political on Instagram, fend off Slack notifications and check on your mom, the dentist, your boyfriend, the bills, the leaky sink, your fucking monstera plant… all the while, grappling with the whatthefuckness of it all. What it means to be here, alive and still watching the magnificent sunrise. How a baby laughs on the street and I think: This life has to be a good life.

All I can do is that stuff, that somewhat disappearance stuff to recentre my place on this earth. I know that there isn’t really a centre though. Balance isn’t Mecca because there isn’t a destination, only a continual negotiation. This is what is difficult; this is what remains not incomprehensible, but difficult to live. It is not death, necessarily, but non-linearity.

Non-linearity? Life unfolds in cycles but we try to live it, control it, shape it into straight lines and checklists, an all-encompassing acceptance and the belief that anything can be fixed with “self care”. How do you do it? How do you really learn to love ambiguity? How do you continue to accept things, difficult and painful things, without developing a nonchalance?

We tout education as the key to not only evolution but survival. The more you know, right? Kind of wrong… knowledge isn’t power in itself: power manifests through what you do with the knowledge you acquire. True education requires a renaissance yet at the heart of everything, what I continue to circle back to is the need to cultivate and prioritise community, the renouncing of hyper-individualism, the discarding of self as business and self as brand. We are constantly clashing against the spectacle of what humanity and earth could be, shaped by the hands of technology, and the contrarian simplicity of a human life.

Quote posts and pop stars tell us that we and only we can change our lives. I don’t believe it. If I’ve learned any kind of truth in my time, it is that the mutual exchange of love is what breeds genuine and more importantly, long-lasting strength. Yes, grit. Yes, prevailing through hard times will both mould and scar you in ways that ultimately make you better. But love then — not solely as romance, but understanding. Love as compassion. Love as fighting back; love in itself has to be the purest form of resilience. Sometimes I think we get so few choices in this life, but this is undoubtedly one of them.

I’m supposed to get myself out of this whole mess but I cannot read more articles or watch more documentaries and assume that I’m becoming any more “enlightened”. Buying more things and watching other people buy them is just an exhausting charade of derivative taste and the subtle suggestion that yes, you’re hitting the right targets for your age. I can’t talk to more people about how social media is bad and yes, we all know it, and how mostly what is going on is that not enough people will leave the party.

Even so, it’s never as simple as that. The big decisions we need to make are often coerced upon us in the form of ultimatums rather than true reimaginings of systems or feelings which is to say: new possibilities. In short; how inconvenient are you willing to make your life in the service of the things you say you believe in?

Our history is a long one. We know we repeat the same mistakes over and over, that memory contrarily is short, that people don’t quit things that are bad for them and even with “the information”, many are unwilling or unbothered to make significant changes or sacrifices… so where to?

I do not feel part of some lost generation but rather a torn one — on the one hand “connected,” allured and enticed by the glimmer of opportunity and even ease that the internet and burgeoning forms of entrepreneurialism offer. On the other hand, I know that nice nails and a witty bio do not and will never make my life. I know that when Mark said “I just want to connect the world”, what he really did was conflate connection with access. Being online is not increasing connection, but access.

It’s extremely difficult to move through this world in an undistracted manner. I often think about this line in The Last Dance: That people go to ashrams and sit and meditate for ten, twenty years trying to get present, trying to be present, and yet Michael always was. That was his greatest gift; not just basketball, but his ability to be present. It helped him transcend the limitations of the game that plagued other players and if you watch enough of any sport, you cannot help but see the fundamental parallels with life.

So — is it all a game of optimisation and strategy? Should I think in terms of systems or in poetry? Systems by default are managerial. They can even be beautiful in some ways, the way I find the precision of clocks beautiful, and they are a necessary practicality but ultimately remain restrictive. Fixedness impedes growth. Perhaps the answer is to imbue more poetry into the basic system, to reach some bottom line threshold that allows chaos to function, but to use poetic thinking to enrich its texture.

Reality, it occurred to me in the shower, is basically the accepted way of things. Poetry therefore is rendered lofty, fantastical, impractical — it is smeared, but without it, who are we? Without it, what do you have left to imagine? In crisis too. It won’t be the system coming to save you.

Getting, being present is both a process (never ending) and a poetry (infinitely expansive). I do not feel the need to be present *all* the time as it’s an inherently heightened mode of being and thus unsustainable. What I do need to do sometimes however is regroup and yes, take that drive, sit by that lake and have nobody know about it, in order to be able to be present when it matters.

How do you define presence? What does that mean to you? I can feel its weight sometimes there in the room. I feel it in the silence, and again with my ear resting on your beating heart.

Presence, for me, is synonymous with many things. Attention, for example. Vitality. Gratitude. Awareness. Presence is the simultaneous act of intention and surrender: I am committing myself to being here, to looking you in the eyes, to really hearing what you are saying separate from any notion of myself. Presence is a lack of imposition. And at the same time, I allow myself to give in: to the whirr of the highway, the cold in the air, how even though I know everything ends and that this will too when we draw the curtains in the morning… I, we, are here. This is when I find presence most stark and most comforting, when I feel my whole life reduced to a singular moment.

It remains my challenge then that when I live through these moments, I place them in constellations rather than retrospective timelines. I try to believe that I will keep finding my way back to them, that even permanent things can be undone and that new formations will always arise. I try mostly to believe that I won’t always feel like I’m the only one.

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Bouquet 11 by Cho Gi Seok

Outro

I’m Emily Nabnian and Send Virtual Flowers was an attempted weekly digital bouquet from me to you about that moment the feeling strikes. It is still an experiment and therefore is undergoing some major changes, as experiments do. If someone came to mind while you were reading this, consider passing the bouquet along by sharing. If you’d like to talk to me about anything, just hit reply.