오후 6:42
Enjoying a chai latte while sitting cross-legged in the middle of a Starbucks takes me back to when I used to frequent a particular branch of this coffee shop as a pretentious high schooler who was so fascinated with coffee despite knowing nothing much outside of instant coffee mixes and ‘commercial’ cafés like this one. I have since learned more, that is, understood better until I eventually outgrew this overpriced establishment. And now I am back, enjoying a non-coffee drink like a giddy kid hiding under the mask of a strange connoisseur of things not many people think of much (but I think so much—too much!—of) because, again, I have since learned more and understood better.
I once professed hatred towards anything that is not plain black coffee but I find myself at this moment absolutely in love with every sip of this drink. It is not the best sort of chai; there is barely enough spice for it to be called a chai and I know I have had others more ‘authentic’ to the drink than what this tries to be, yet it is so good nonetheless. Its subtle flavours gently spins with the milk while the sugar sparkles in between them. I feel them dancing in a ballroom, heavy with glossy white ceramic, to the music of the muted city, a background of everyone’s busy minds. It is a live band in this pseudo-empty hall: empty because everyone feels alone in the middle of nowhere, but not quite so. Everyone in here is alone all together.
I have so many thoughts in mind and in particular is the idea that there are things I should be doing (whether should as want or need) and yet I have not been doing. Does it matter when I had last done them? Does it mean less that I had only skipped my morning walk today but that I have been walking everyday prior? Does it mean anything that I had not painted in so long but continued to regard myself as someone who does paint at all, based only on what all the old finished pieces from the past seemed to tell me?
The only answer I have to those and other similar questions is a hypothesis: maybe if I start today (or sometime, whenever; just start eventually) and do it as regularly as breathing with the same commitment as I do walking mornings and evenings, then it might be that I would eventually get to the point where there are less thoughts to choose from, making it easier to zone in on just one or few at a time or even that I would run out of things to work and yet still manage to create something out of nothing. Or maybe I would simply get used to creating with all these voices in my head without feeling the need to get rid of any of them. Maybe I could be friends with them.
By doing so, would I be a better friend to the one I call my ‘self’ as well? The one who wanted to write, make art, do philosophy but had done neither of those and left me only the burden of those desires.
Lucky for her, I suddenly feel like drawing though, in a funny twist of fate, I have neither my iPad nor (any of) my drawing journal(s). Still, I think I am going to make something out of nothing.
(I did make a sketch!)
As I was about to start on the thought of whether it is of significance to “put things out there” as in to publish or share to others in any way whatsoever things that one has created, the visual in my mind saw the parallel between doing that and actual creation. Both are outward movements from the same interior, only the scope of where the movement ends differs.
I got another cup of this delectable chai tea latte and with the indulgent pleasure of getting a second of something I like for no reason other than that I enjoyed it the first time came a worry of overindulgence and of being trapped into doing this all the time as a bad habit formed after one naïve decision. Maybe I should have just gotten a venti instead of a grande? I had almost forgotten that I am trying to shift my eating window to later in the day. Or actually, I have no idea what I am doing anymore.
Some things feel like they could go on forever, don’t they? Even if one is aware of the fact that they do not, that everything eventually changes and comes to pass, some situations feel like quicksand and some like a void far from the rest of the living, impermanent universe.
I wonder how I viewed the flow of life back in high school. Did I think it would last forever—the every moment I was in? I think at some point I thought I would be having Starbucks for every single day of my life, and at some point, I did (with terrible consequences as I was not having coffee! But we shall not think about that today. Still that is a good point to consider why I am and should rightfully be wary of this second drink…) but now I do not. At some point I did not step foot into a single Starbucks store and drank only coffee that I made myself from roasting to brewing. I still do the latter, but I also try drinks others make now. Doing so is an experience a lot more interesting than I had thought.
Most times my thoughts are great resources, but not always. Maybe it is all about how they are tended to.
Would it be possible that the same thing is how it goes for everything else? Everything else being good potentialities, with the actuality of those potentials depending entirely on how they are tended to. Could nothing be truly useless, but everything containing a value that is true but is not always realised?
I wrote, drew, thought, etc. I need to read.
From a journal entry, dated March 2023