12 True Things

Today? A round-up of wisdom, some clichéd and others not, that bears repeating.*

(via My Modern Met)

The world will not end should you decide not to engage with it.

"Be different from one another, and love our differences with big, open hearts." - Sally McGraw from Already Pretty

The memories you make are all you get to keep.

"Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth." - Sugar via The Rumpus

Loving yourself is not an option - rather, it is the denial of an essential truth.

"Saying I have to suggests that we do not have a choice, and that we are not in control of our lives... For starters, you don’t have to do anything! You know that. The world will not come to an end if you don’t do something (in most cases)." - Vanessa Paxton via ThinkSimpleNow

Take care of your emotions as if they were a bath: too hot and they burn you, too cold and they make you shiver. Let them drain out when it's time and build up when you need them. Don't leave the water unchanged for too long.

"You have permission to: not ever feel the need for permission." - Danelle LaPorte on White Hot Truth

Revision to the Golden Rule: Don't treat others the way you want to be treated - ask them how they want to be treated and honor that decision.

"…What matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of colour and graphite scrawled upon a sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind becomes a light, life-charged." - Patti Smith via Nextness

Love the challenge. Love the process. Don't settle for less.

*If you're counting the picture, we have 12 True Things. Good eye! Here's a bonus:

You will become what you manifest.

Immigrant Mourning

How does one feel sadness properly?

This week opens for me with a very recent death and a very raw period of mourning. As much as I believe that death is a natural inevitable process, it still shakes you to the core when it comes close. It's almost enough to make me want to write clichéd sentences moralizing about those who have passed on and those who remain here with us. Almost.

But more than that, I feel very strongly that I must talk about the experience of being in mourning as an immigrant. I am part of the satellite family that lives several time zones away, and I am apart not only from our larger family, but from my own small family as well. Though it is never easy to drop everything and deal with a family emergency, we don't even have the option to return home. We can only orbit around, waiting for a time to return to them. We grieve alone.

I find it odd that this aspect of the immigrant experience is understated. Intellectually, I know that it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of the American dream and the opportunities of entering a new life, forging an individual path, and participating in capitalism, but my heart is focused elsewhere. It shows me the profound loss that is involved in moving halfway across the globe for so-called opportunities. The inevitable missing of births and deaths, the broken families, and the hard edge of being alone - my heart takes in these feelings and tries to blunt them so that I can be sad in a proper manner. So that I don't tie in my individual sadness with the infrastructure that contributes to it. So that I can still feel good about the place that I live in, have been adopted into, even as I yearn to be with my family and take rest.

Months back, during Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece on gratitude for Dear Sugar and I talked about returning to Bangladesh for the first time last year. I wrote:

"I am grateful for that empty place at the table. I am thankful that sometimes people need not know each other to care for them. We are contributing to the stockpile of love in the universe – whether that’s through writing advice columns or finding gratitude in the hardest moments. What we manifest is who we ultimately become."

I am caring and I am loving from afar. I cannot reach that empty place at the table, and neither can many of my family members. But it is there.

How does one feel sadness properly? I want to address this question in my posts this week. Look out for some more writing on sadness and mourning in the next few days. And thank you, as always, for reading.

Inspiration from Dear Sugar

"The particularity of our problems can only be made bearable though the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way. Not one of us made it without someone offering a firm grip." - Dear Sugar, "#84: The Distance of the Leap"

Take a moment to recognize those around you, to appreciate them for their humanity and their strength.

Caught My Eye: Dear Sugar Column at The Rumpus

As I was trying to rouse myself from a literary stupor this week, I searched around the internet for some inspiration to fill myself up until I could no longer stand the feeling of not writing. One of the articles that I came across that most inspired me was The Rumpus' column Dear Sugar.

Dear Sugar is a self-reported advice column, but it caters to those of all stripes - it is not just a love life column, nor an inspirational manifesto, but also takes care of its writers and other people in long response articles. My favorite of all such articles is Write Like a Motherfucker, which tells the unabashed truth: get writing and keep doing it until it hurts.

Check out the rest of Sugar's advice column for everything from marriage advice to alternative graduation speeches; you will not be disappointed!

Check out some more media with the rest of the Caught My Eye series.

You may also be interested in reading 3 Ways I Beat Writer's Block to a Pulp.