…and thus ends the first quarter of the year.
Where are you now and are you happy where you are?
I have never imagined what being twenty five is like. I think about the future a lot, but I picture it in terms of goals I’d like to achieve or things I’d like to have done. It’s the pragmatism instilled in us since young.
My newest thing is having something to look forward to each month. It can be an experience or something I want to achieve. It makes me feel like I’m growing towards something – or at the very least, having a meaningful experience to look forward to. It’s proof that life is not the same old that it was. It’s proof that I’m actively changing my tomorrow.
This April, I’ll be doing another year of Escapril, except this time I hope I won’t be playing catch-up in June (haha). Escapril is like Nanowrimo (national novel writing month), except it’s “escaping into poetry every day in April”. Every day, you’ll try to write a poem based on the prompt. This year’s prompts seem a little more abstract and existential, which excites me! >:)
I only completed half of Escapril in 2023. The surprising thing was, I could feel myself growing through attempting Escapril last year. It took less effort to get started writing poems the more I got going, and the more I wrote the more different the poems became.
It’s true that the brain is also a muscle. The more you exercise it, the easier the muscle can perform the task. That’s why we do increasingly difficult mathematics problems (even if we don’t end up practicing integration or logarithmic equations in our day-to-day lives) and push ourselves to our physical limits when we want to get stronger.
In May, I’ll attempt to catch up on my almost two years of Instagram backlog. You’ll see me graduate again, heh. And in June… well, I still have two months to figure it out.
I used to think that I would be able to recognise when I was in my comfort zone and actively push against it. Thing is, your instinct is to stay in your comfort zone, because humans are primed for survival. This new monthly experience to look forward to every month is just one of the ways I’m trying to shake things up a little.
For the most part, I’m happy where I am. I like my hobbies and wish I had more time for all of them. I am interested in what I do for my day job (though I don’t see myself doing it forever) because I feel challenged and purposeful in what I’m producing. I’m meeting old friends and making new ones slowly but surely. I’m trying to unlearn the guilt of spending and appreciating how to reasonably spend the money I’ve earned. I feel driven by what I want to accomplish (although I feel pressured to achieve it sooner rather than later).
I know the world is crazily wide out there and I have only experienced the tiniest fraction of it.
There is a video I watched that has been stuck in my head these days – when Timothée Chalamet was interviewed and asked, because of his portrayed character in Dune, as to whether he believed in fulfilling a fate or destiny. And off the cuff he said, playing off one of the most powerful poems I know:
You could be the master of your fate, you could be the captain of your soul. But you have to realise that life is from you, and not at you. And that takes time.
— Invictus by William Ernest Henley + YouTube video (bolded emphasis my own)
My life felt changed when I first came across Invictus when I was sixteen-going-on-seventeen, thanks to a sharing a teacher did. In that moment, I realised life was in my hands. And when I committed to that realisation at seventeen-going-on-eighteen for the ‘A’ Levels, it honestly shifted my worldview.
It was all up to me. The rest of my life was up to me!
And that was the power of poetry, for me. It led me to deep insights and realisations about life, in such startling intensity that novels and music come close to, but never quite the same as. No matter what, I will always have a soft spot for poetry, even when I was writing silly ones at nine trying to rhyme every line.
I am so looking forward to April, and growth, and everything I have yet to discover.
What are you looking forward to?
Daybreak and the Universe 