in praise of a normal life

I wrote these lines after binge watching all lord of the rings movies in a day. to be honest with you, I feel extraordinary. but above all, I feel this lightness of being and I sense a light within me, as I just realize that happiness happens, and it can happen more frequently than we let it be.

the concept of a normal life is something that I have thought about for a long time, but it's only until now that I can fully put it into words. it starts with me watching sister thuỷ tending her garden on her youtube channel her86m2, listening to taylor's evermore and folklore, spending winter with murakami's kafka on the shore, and summer with j.k.rowling's harry potter and dostoevsky's the brothers karamazov in between. the transition to college was full of turbulences, but as soon as I find back my rhythm, I cracked onto thoreau's walden, tom felton's beyond the wand, and now, j.r.r.tolkien's lord of the rings.

the weight of the works further amplifies when you read the authors' biographies, the darkness that they have to venture through in order to let out light: rowling and her struggle being a single mom, tolkien's numbness in world war 1, dostovevsky's exile to siberia. but it is also through the simple things in life that those people lived: tolkien's mom single-handedly raised him after his father's death and nourished his love for botany and language (which are very evident in his books and movies), anna giving her love and help in dostovesky's works in the final years of his life, the camaraderie between thoreau and emerson, the kings of transcendentalism.

emerson's "transparent eyeball," as illustrated by christopher pearse cranch, ca. 1836-1838

going through their lives after reading the marvelous that they wrote helps me realize that they are, after all, very ordinary. mundane, perhaps. but it is the simple things that we stay alive for. we all want one thing, and that is companionship on the long journey that is this life.

and it makes me reflect on things that have happened, people they have met, and how we have treated one another. honest conversations and confessions with friends and professors alike, whether in their offices or through emails, under starlit nightsky, late rides back to school, or on lab benches. during those moments, I peel off layers of my expectations and somehow become more of myself.

I am a strong advocate of happiness being a sober pursuit. however hard it is.

I will stay alive for all the conversations we will have about our childhood and our fears of growing up, for the time we run back to our dorm from the cloisters after being scared to death at midnight. I want to see the change of seasons, the psithurism in the air, until there was none. the first snowflakes of winter. the rite of spring, where I'll be playing stravinsky. and summer solstice, when you know I will have solar power on loop.

I want to live for all the possibilites. I know that I have given up on physics since middle school, but I have picked up chemistry again, and now, I want to travel back to the beginning of time, and understand ourselves and the things that build us up.

I want to go on adventures on distant lands and find home on every corner of the world. I know I will, because you always find one within yourself and with the right one. I will let the breeze and waves of the journeys we have embarked wash us clean of all prejudices and steoreotypes we have against one another. maybe, in the end, we will realize, we are not that different. we are the people of the earth.

we are quarks and atoms and molecules, organisms and humans, lovers and enemies. we are the same, just arranged in different ways. our eyes weren't made to see what we are, fundamentally.

but some day, we may

be able to let our past behind,

honor music and good bouquets of flowers,

days sunbathing on our picnic mats,

we only have a finite amoutn of time on earth,

after all.

music by antonina rzhevskaya