The gentle swaying of the slow-speed, narrow gauge train rocked me side to side like a steady pendulum. It felt like I was being lulled into a sustained meditation. The cabin was tiny and stuffy, and like me, the passengers in front of us buckled, facelessly, side-to-side. It was easy to attach the mind to the discomfort. The seats were hard, the walls were yellowed — tell-tale signs of the old and dilapidated trains. An aroma of diesel and engine permeated the atmosphere, and nausea would set in one second, and fade away the next. I shifted around momentarily, careful not to disturb those around me, and thought of peace.
Alssa was fast asleep on my shoulders, her stringy drool dribbling onto my long sleeved shirt. No matter — it was kind of a nice touch. My father sat to the side, across the narrow walkway from us. I was glad he was with us, and even more grateful for the two weeks we would be spending together around Taiwan. He too, was in his own world. An oscillating, arduous ride like this lent a lot of time for reflection.
I took a peer out the window to my right as I watched the mountainous landscape reel tape across my eyes. The train was meandering its way through the mountain passes of Chiayi (嘉義), making its descent from Alishan (阿里山) in its signature Z-style switchbacks. It was floundering at a steady pace through a maze of tunnels and shrubbery. In its conversation with the sun, the trees from the forest casted dancing shadows all around the cabin in a chaos of firecrackers. In this vast expanse of landscape, the train must have looked like a toy to the gods.
The train would at times pass through and grind to a rumbling stop along stations that had no business being there. They were isolated hubs with nary a residence or shop nearby. Just a single, lonely station, on a jutting platform overlooking into the boundless valley before it.
I took notice of the sun, which had been warming the entire cabin for the better part of the journey. It was fading into the horizon to its resting place for the night. Allowing the setting sun’s warmth seep into every pore made the ride all the more homely, comforting. It felt as if every sense was being theatrically performed to in complementary fashion.
A performance to echo in the eternity of this transient conscience.
I was once again in love with life.
During the period between 2016 to 2018 when I was saving money and teeter-tottering between an actual unplugging date for my long-haul backpacking trip, I maniacally noted down my thoughts. I was wracked with doubt over whether travelling at this point in my life was the optimal decision, and the last thing I wanted before departing on my journey was unbridled guilt. I felt an obligation to myself to jot down all my thoughts, because I needed to settle on a healthy approach for my next chapter. Loosely contemplating this in my notes was my way for working out any existential kinks. After all, writing had always been my secret salve.
I also knew I was neglecting some part of me, but I couldn’t quite concisely grasp what it was.
Recently, I went through those same notes again, and saw a curious little addendum tucked away into a corner of my phone. The only thing typed into it was:
I cannot quite recall what mood or state I was in when I wrote this message, but it was obviously directed at myself. There was no context, no further explanation. Just one solitary sentence. I can only now look back to the clues for any hint of logic.
Judging by the date stamp of this note, this was some time after I had finally booked my one-way flight out of Toronto and in between the midst of heated preparations for Burning Man, in 2018. June 21st @ 12:38 pm was also lunch time on a Thursday, which would have meant I was back at my old job in the office either eating, or on the toilet taking a shit. Pick either poison, but both would have been high time for contemplation and philosophizing.
Nevertheless, it was a time coloured by lofty expectations and high hopes for the coming few months (and year) — and I was desperately still trying to find a holistic way to connect all these events to some defined, greater mission.
If I was on an experience rocket-ship, then I was on the cusp of being hurled into outer-space with Burning Man and Travelling. Not having a North Star (i.e. a mission) to guide my coming journeys would have been similar to being aimlessly rag-dolled into the exosphere, just for shits and giggles.
I want to give myself the chance to fall in love with life again
A note like this would have been perfect fodder to noodle on, then and now.
What did I mean by giving myself the chance to fall in love with life again?
First of all, I understand how dramatic such an eye-roll inducing affirmation sounds. It wasn’t exactly that my life sucked. Far from that. But I suspected that the more I was plugged into the Matrix and on the blue pill, the less I was appreciating the tiny moments — sprinkled throughout the days — for what they should have been: beautiful, bountiful sparks of lifejoy.
How is it possible that as a child, life can seem so fruitful and exciting with so much less, yet paradoxically as an adult with so much more at my disposal, life seems so much more constrained and restricting? I recall when I was young, with my reluctance to ask for new toys, nor an ability to buy new ones, I would sketch and then cut out drawings of robots on pieces of blank paper. That was my Beast Wars, my Transformers. Everything was phenomenal while I manipulated pieces of paper around my bedroom as toys. Yet as an adult, I had been homogenized and completely neutered of my ability to enjoy genuinely the simple pleasures.
For her, everyday was the same, and when each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises—The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
You see, as an adult, I was living a preordained life. Every day, I woke up and made the same drive to work. I talked about roughly the same things as everyone else did at the water coolers in the office. Watched the same TV shows, talked about the same news. My schedule would fill up, my life would get busied. When it didn’t, I was at home on Netflix or YouTube. Day in, day out — stressing out over mostly the same recurrent themes that I suspect everyone else was also obsessed over — Money, Relationships, Career, the News, and Pop Culture. To cap it off, I was toxically comparing my achievements to my peers, and chasing this elusive and unattainable “better” for some sort of validation. The world and all its infinite worries had managed to create a dense fog of busy-ness that clouded my ability to perceive and receive.
I wasn’t giving myself a chance.
My daily life had become a mish-mash of lazy, unconcerned decisions rife with thoughtlessness. And without intention, life resembles a hazy river that gushes past and before long, I would be at the end of my line.
And so bit by bit, I lost touch with my sensitivities. I fell out of love with life — the sweetest of all fruits turned bitter.
In essence, re-learning to “fall in love with life again” would be my antidote — a new mantra I was going to deeply internalize to combat the monotony that was dulling away my lens to reality.
It would become my perennial experiment.
And for myself, it begins with spontaneity.
Impulsion, in one light, can be seen as a detrimental human behaviour. When we think of impulsive people, we think of our friends who on a whim decides to get belligerently drunk on a Wednesday night, or those that suddenly want to turn up to an after-hours for a drug-fuelled binge that same week on the Thursday night.
But when done in a conscious, wholesome manner, impulsivity makes way for the more child-like spontaneity. It is often propagated by the seeds of curiosity. It means to seize the immediate moment, spurred on by a joyful inquisitiveness and playfulness.
And as my friend World Trippin’ would say, “Just doin’ the damn thing!” So do you know what I did that summer of 2018, after I had written the note?
I signed up for a fucking Macrame class.
You have to imagine, a 29 year-old single dude partaking in a knot-tying wall art class is… suspect. I recall sitting in the classroom, the only male in a group of ten other females, feeling unbelievably out of sorts. But the itch for spontaneity had already taken hold, and macrame was just one gateway for creating a new and novel opportunity to approaching life from an orthogonal angle.
It made life feel joyfully elastic. I was at play. I was also firmly in the driver’s seat. Here I was, interacting with a bunch of [very expensive] rope making [what I would haphazardly call] art, while getting to participate with: the world, those around me, and the instructor, in such a fascinating and unique way. I was in one of the zany, innocent underbellies of life and I loved it.
I was giving myself a chance.
Look, I’m not suggesting that we need to sign up for the next crocheting session (or take any classes for that matter) to learn to appreciate how good we have it— but when was the last time we really gave ourselves the permission to do something far out in the left field? When was the last time we gave ourselves the chance to do whimsical things for the sake of a silly goose time? Since when did being an adult have to be such a serious thing?
Standard internet self-help advice like “try something new” or “be yourself” may sound like cookie-cutter aphorisms — imprecise prescriptions for the common malaise of mankind. Be that as it may, as much as they are over-simplified recommendations, there is an undeniable ring of truth to them. They tell us to go out there and surrender ourselves to our spontaneous yearnings, interfacing with the world in new and interesting ways.
We have to dig deep though, because if we already have Friday nights pegged for socializing and our idea of “left field” means trying it on Tuesday nights instead, the air will still likely be stale (although, who am I to say?).
At first, spontaneity might be a shock to the system. Our minds and bodies will not be used to the uncomfortable feelings of stepping out of line. Most people prefer the safety and comfort of what they already know. That is our nature byway of millions of years of evolution. But this is also the reason for the conundrum we find ourselves in in the first place!
Spontaneity on the other hand hones and trains our perceptive lenses. If we put ourselves out there with a genuine intention for learning, trying, and being all-around vulnerable (*gasp* such an unsexy word), the world will feel more responsive. People will gravitate towards us. The colours will start seeping back into our days. Because being spontaneous subtly loosens our vice grip on trying to fulfill any role other than just ourselves being distinctively ourselves.
We have to commit though. Half-assing it would be shortchanging ourselves to the immediacy of any given moment, any given desire. To connect to the root of who we are requires an undivided attention. But with this attention focused firmly on the present reality, we will soon find ourselves observing life’s bountiful gifts expressing itself in strange and peculiar ways.
The great thing about being more spontaneous, more often? The effects compound. We become looser and looser until we can be found aggressively head-bopping in a crowd waiting at a subway station, or dancing to 50’s swing with our loved ones in our underwear, or comfortably picking up new skills or hobbies as a being full of love and awareness, spreading this elastic joy to everyone around us.
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and: a recognition of our inner selves; the reality of those around us; participation in society; and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience. – the Immediacy principle of Burning Man
So when the desire to jive strikes you, just jive.
Intimately tied to spontaneity, we must also abolish the meticulous planning of life, down to the minute. Needless to say, I am not advocating for complete detachment from planning — lest we want to end up like the Parasite family. However, we must passionately not fear the unplanned; sometimes, we even seek it. We have to be comfortable with veering off-course, away from a set agenda. This, in effect, becomes yet another gateway to giving ourselves over to the seductions of life.
In the opening vignette to this post, I recalled the time I was sitting on a 3-hour train ride going down Alishan (阿里山), in February 2020.
Prior to the reawakening of my senses, where I was subdued into a trance by the fairy-tale train ride, I was, in actuality, in a state of undue stress. I was connected to a different reality.
I was then with my dad, Alssa, and some of his retired friends. They were for the most part lovely, entertaining folks, and had attached onto the better portion of the 2-week trip around Taiwan. However, there was this one lady in our group whom was concerned over every detail, every minute of the coming schedule. So always, thereabouts sat an airiness of unspoken stress.
If we did not know which city we were going to be in next, there would usually be some uncomfortable shifting in place followed by quiet murmurs. If we did not know the time of the next train, there would usually be an anxious comment followed by heightened heart rates. If we did not know the particulars of our accommodation for the night, it was declared a state of emergency and summarily dealt with.
On that particular day, she was up to her ways again. There was an unspoken anxiety that permeated all conversations and interactions — being that our schedule for the day was mostly loose and unsettled (admittedly, that is my preferred style of travel, through no fault of her own).
Regardless, everything became a pressing issue. When the bus to our next destination (Fen Qi Hu 奮起湖, where we were supposed to catch the train down the mountain) was a little delayed, she grated for a resolution. She then suggested taking a private taxi down the mountain (a common alternative she proposed throughout much of the trip) — a ludicrous proposal given the cost-benefit. Then, even the bus line we were queuing in seemed off to her [Narrator: it wasn’t].
Alssa and I tried hard as we can to ease her anxieties. We gave her data points on anything — exact fare costs, the departure times of public transport multiple steps ahead, and many different alternative scenarios if one didn’t work out. It was exhaustive, and exhausting.
In hindsight, I was also probably needlessly aggravated.
But why anyone would ever want to be married to an exacting schedule without any room for, you know, breathing, baffled me.
Imagine going to a play, and the curtains needing to have already been dropped and the trajectory of the plotline, including twists and surprises, well-mapped and understood beforehand. Honestly speaking, there is nothing wrong with that. But knowing everything there is to follow in the next hour, next day, next week, left little room for improvisation — little room for magic.
Most certainly, we can try to understand in detail everything that is expected to happen, but does that not also hinder our ability to remain supple to happenstance? Does that not leave zero maneuvering room for surprise conversations with strangers, or detours into an unknown yet exciting path while on our journey?
On one occasion in December 2019, a friend from Toronto had come to Taiwan on a 5-month sabbatical, and like me, wanted to immerse himself in Taiwanese culture in order to learn Mandarin. He had graciously decided to spend the first few days with Alssa and I to get the lay of the land. We went into one day anchored around seeing a Bat Cave (蝙蝠洞) in Daxi (大溪), but had nothing else planned. By the end of our anchor activity, we had detoured into an off-road, beckoned by a friendly group of strangers – an aboriginal group – into their mountain home. They had invited us to join in their birthday celebrations over Gaolian liquor (高粱酒), betel nuts (檳榔), Balut eggs, fermented fish, cigarettes, and karaoke.
We spent the next four hours as their honoured guests.
We learned of tourists who would avoid them like the plague. We learned of their culture, their way of life. We held their newborn in our arms. We exchanged pleasantries and cultures, smiles and laughter. Above all, it was off-the-cuff and unscheduled.
Life was great. It felt like a gift.
Spontaneity, improvisation, and a willingness to veer away from a rigid schedule had led into a deep experience (with a marginalized group, no less) not oft attained unless we build ourselves up to value moments like this.
I promise you that on the other side of not knowing is a sense of unbound liberation that you did not know you wanted. You just have to let go.
Experience reality as it is, not as you would like it to be.
The counterpoint to all this, is that it actually shouldn’t matter whether we are being spontaneous, on a set vs. loose schedule or not. They are just simple gateways to perceiving with a nuanced lens, just like meditation and travelling has been for me. One of the many takeaways from Vipassana (a 10-day silent meditation retreat) that I am still trying to internalize is that we need to tune ourselves into experiencing reality as it is, not as we would like it to be (much thanks to my good friend Amer Ameen for the timely reminder).
We all must develop a staying presence of the mind — a firm grasp on the sensations being stirred up in every moment, and understanding these so precisely as to be able to just exist, peacefully in balance. In contrary to that would be wallowing in discontent, desperately trying to bend an unyielding reality to match up to our expectations and desires. This is a recipe for anguish and suffering, my friends — nothing doing.
During bloodbaths in the investing space (i.e. a massive sell-off in the markets causing a crash in prices), online personalities often advocate for investors to “zoom out”. Hear me out. People get so enamoured with the price action of the minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day charts that they forget to literally zoom out to view the charts in larger time increments. While the micro-view charts might show negative sentiments, the macro-view often showed evidence for the inverse. We too, are often too zoomed-in on the flaws, the faults, the shortcomings of literally anything that might repulse us. However, when we scroll our mouse-wheel back to take a look at the larger picture, we might just find more reasons than we can count to feel blessed.
So the next time you find yourself in a less than desirable scenario, like an uncomfortable train ride during sunset, replete with its diesel-heavy troposphere, nausea-inducing buckling, and your girlfriend’s saliva caking onto your shirt… remember to just take a step back, and zoom out.
At some point in your road, a spur of spontaneity had led you to this moment. The immediacy of everything is pulling for your attention. Stop resisting the sensations. Stop obsessing over the schedule. Stop trying to be anywhere else, but here.
This is all you ever need.
You are in love with life, again.
One day, a boy in search of the secret to happiness came to a wise man’s castle.
The castle was situated on a beautiful peninsula. As the boy wandered inside in search of the wise man, he noticed the magnificent adornments of the castle and the buzzing life of the residents, servants, and bards within.
The boy came upon the wise man, whom was already busy in conversation. The wise man told the boy to go take a walk around the castle and return in two hours. He also gave the boy a spoon full of oil, and told the boy to make sure not one drop of oil spills.
So the boy walks around the castle, anxiously fixated on the spoon so that no oil drops. When he eventually makes his way back to the wise man, the wise man asks, ‘Well, did you see the Persian tapestries, and the garden that took 10 years to create, and the beautiful parchments in the library?’
Embarrassed, the boy confesses haven’t seen anything. The wise man sends the boy back out once again, telling him to go observe the marvels of his world. ‘One cannot trust a man if one does not know his house.’ This time, the boy paid careful attention to the marvels.
When the boy returns, he tells the wise man of all the things he had seen. ‘But where are the drops of oil I entrusted you?’ The boy looks down, and sees an empty spoon.
‘Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,’ said the wisest of wise men. ‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.’
— excerpt heavily paraphrased from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist
Hey! If you actually made it this far into my article, then thank you from the bottom of my heart for your consideration, patience, and love for reading so much of my work. Words cannot express how much I appreciate it.
They say ‘writing = clear thinking’, so I am on my own journey to crystallize my thinking (and thus my writing). If you enjoyed this article, you can find more of my work on Medium here. I also occasionally make long form blog-style posts on Instagram here. You can also find me blabbering on Twitter here.
Finally, what are your ways for engaging yourself so that you can ‘fall in love with life?’ Let me know in a comment! :)
