live well while you can

Live well while you can. Looking around me at this courtyard filled with shades of green I'd often forget to recognise, realising that I have needed the great outside and the peace which it offers -- I wonder where from that there is the underlying concern that this is asking for too much. For I, too, recognise privilege; acknowledge that beyond the walls of this institution which I got into by a pure miracle, there are few courtyards. Few swings, few hammocks, few individuals that would stride over and give you a hug just because. And sometimes I wonder how, wonder what others do when they need a break, how they'd get there if the green, the swings, the hammocks, weren't right at their doorstep, specifically constructed as if emblems of privilege. But exactly so- with privilege comes the idea of excess, of exclusivity... I guess what I'm trying to understand is why it seems a privilege-like thing to want to live well.

Of course, part of 'living well' sways in one's perspective of what 'well' is, and thus is subject to the blessings that we've had so far. Sometimes, it feels like beautiful cafes in my best dresses, sometimes it is going for two movies in a week at The Projector. But 'living well' can, at it's most essential level, to me, simply mean to indulge in idle activity, during which your mind can ebb and flow whichever way it prefers. To sit on a swing and take many deep breaths, and to romanticise it all. To take care of oneself, to shower herself with love and gratitude, to bathe in rich soaps and smell like fresh lavender. I suppose it is a privilege. I suppose the brooding concern of asking for too much is rightly embedded in the understanding that the life I live is, even when I'm not 'living well', living well.

I suppose the tremor of conflict that I feel now is how to navigate between guilt and gratitude, rejection and embrace. How to not feel guilty for the life well lived, and yet understand it for what it is, to let gratitude loiter and not tip over the edges. Because what is the point of guilt, if it is only to add more pain to the world? For what good comes, what improvements to lives I recognise can be better, if those who can sit on swings and take deep breaths, smell like fresh lavender, do not? Not to say the foundations of such guilt is to be scraped and ignored - there is a lot to do and which we can do, for the world beyond ourselves. But I thus urge myself to embrace the daily, to acknowledge guilt but not let it fester, to rather take gratitude in its full force.


love, elle