Hazy/Calm in the Heat

I'm leaning into myself differently. I feel calm through and through. The feeling began in the San Francisco airport at 1:00 in the morning and stayed with me throughout the plane ride, at the shockingly silent airport in Taipei waiting for our luggage to loop around the kiosk, in the car ride to our temporary housing, in this city these past few days. Perhaps I'm just romanticizing jet-lag and it's in large part this sleepy haze tempering my hyperbolic emotional and analytic tendencies. Maybe the heat miraculously melts some of my edges and I just never knew (being from Western New York...). Anyway, I only hoped to feel this good. I'm living the best-case scenario so far. It is also true that I must pat myself on the back for chasing away the bad and getting a grip on the good, but I believe Taipei has come to meet me in this calm. No doubt my sense of this place will become less warm and fuzzy as time goes on, and I'll have some more specific, developed feelings to share with you about my experience in Taipei. But for now I'll paint with wide brush strokes as that's all I have to work work just now.

This feeling reminds me of making risotto, and of scenes in Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist, a pensive man, walked around the empty ally behind his row house in search of his wife's cat. Physically, it feels like the overly anxious parts of me sit back in a rocker with a drink, letting the five senses do all the heavy lifting (living). These old traits are just sort of watching the new world pass by fast and hot and bright and crowded and overwhelmingly kind, helpful. It's a general sense of reserve that appeals to me now (and might make me lonely for home later). I don't feel pressure to "make more" of the minute/I'm not pressuring myself to "make more" of the minute (to clarify - for me, this sense of duty too often derives from negative, artificial things). I'm letting each minute be itself. It's not so much a resigned to fate attitude as a resigned to time one, or a refreshing lack of control. "We have nothing to gain. We have nothing to lose," Max tells me.

I'm hesitant to say so early on that this puts me in tandem with some kind of cultural tradition. What I'm saying is, that for whatever combination of reasons, I'm feeling good in this place. Those who know me will be glad to know this, I'm sure, and quick to remind me that I am capable of feeling so good the next time it slips through my fingers.