Tag: emotions

My feet sit still

I have been sitting here for over an hour, not going home.  The semi-excuse was that I was talking with my mom, but the phone call has finished, and here I still sit.  I also had a high level (for me) of caffeine this afternoon, and so I wanted to get the jitters out as much as possible, while I still had the chance to walk around outside and all.  Now I feel the sleepy sliding into place, wishing me to bed.

And yet, here I still sit.

I do not know if I am afraid of tomorrow, and am letting that stop me from ending today, or if I am afraid of tomorrow, but have some other reason that I still sit here on my little piece of green-light-backed bench.  Either way, I can see clearly that I am afraid of tomorrow beginning.  I leave in 12 days, and the planning I didn’t want to do would be coming into effect now, if I had done the planning.  Instead, the events are all floating around, wondering if and when they will be accomplished by me.  I can almost see the Super Smash-like challenge at play around me, each item fighting happily for a place on my life this week and next.  But they all have so many lives, it is taking forever to figure out who ranks where – the current lowest position might still come through and win the whole thing in another 40 lives.

It is such a beautiful night right now, right here, I want to keep it.  I want to roll into a hammock out here in the plaza, and sleep with the cool breeze brushing and rocking me all night, clouds floating slowly by above me, and slight coty noises rumbling off and on in the nearby distance.

But, even still, I don’t want to close my eyes.  I don’t specifically have a desire to remain here on this bench. I also don’t specifically have a desire to walk the block home or to go to bed.  It is not apathy necessarily.  I just can’t figure out what feeling is there.  Because I know that there is something there…

And so I sit, writing this, and taking my time to do so, pausing so as. It to finish and have no other reason good enough to keep me here on this bench.  Here, I am intentionally on my own, alone.  Once I move onward, that will not be the case.  While I am here, there is not much of anything for me to do but to sit and to enjoy.  Once I move onward, again, that will not be the case.

…

However, the plaza decided for me just now, as it turned off its lights.  No longer is my bench wall green, and no longer are the ground lights shining.  The plaza now sleeps, and I accept that as encouragement enough to send me home.  I still do not want to go, but I certainly prefer that to being in trouble with the security guard who already stared me down earlier, when all the lights were still glowing.

Anyway… yeah…

Post-a-day 2017

Oxymorons and Dichotomies of clothes

I simultaneously want to live a simplistic, minimalistic-esque life, and one in a huge house, with lots of awesome things in it.

How do I go about making that happen?

Well, I don’t know.  However, I have a feeling that my best friend would simply say that I’ll find a way somehow – I always seem to do so with whatever comes up in life.  Don’t know how?  Well, I figure it out anyway, and make it happen.  So she claims, and I mostly agree with her.

Perhaps this is a perfect time to apply this thinking to my current state of affairs (i.e. Minimal money, needing insurance for the first time when I move to the US next month, needing a place to live, needing to find good work for after my temporary position ends around the end of September, and how to get rid of so much stuff that I know I have waiting for me in a packed room at my mom’s house.).  Yes, I think it is.

Post-a-day 2017

Why you gotta be so…?

Why are we ever mean to others?  Really, truly… why?  

Can we go Taylor Swift on the situation, and have the cycle end right now?

I see potential in this, but are we brave enough?  Is bravery even what it is that we need?  Perhaps love is all we need.  And not even in the cheesy way, but truly.  Beatles it all the way, because all we need is love.

Post-a-day 2017

Hospitality Notes

I found one of the best notes ever, when I woke up the other morning at my friend’s house.

It was on the counter of the bathroom (technically, the room with the toilet).  It read:

Hannah 1/3

Good Morning!
I have few things to tell you.

  • Please make yourself at home ! ! !  Do not stress your self to worry things.

    2/3

  • Use anything in the house.  Do not buy things you do not bring to U.S.
  • Stay as long as you want.  even after I left for U.S.  I trust you.

    3/3

  • Let S—— out from my bed room after you get up in the morning.  So she can stay at the living room. (for food and water)

I was just delighted when I reached the end of the notes.  They were incredibly southern hospitality and totally Japanese at the same time.  The hearty welcome to make myself at home, combined with the fact that the sticky note pages were labeled with page __ of __.  I loved it (and still do).  I love good friends.

Post-a-day 2017

God, bless me, please

I don’t know what it is, but something has me unconcerned on the whole.  I don’t quite have a place to live after this month.  I don’t quite have a well-enough-paying job as of this week.  I don’t have any health or dental insurance once I move back to Texas next month.  And yet, here I am, trying to get myself worked up, because I am not already concerned about these things. 

Why am I unconcerned?  I don’t know.  There is something in the air though, that tells me that everything is okay, everything will be perfect once I’m back home.  So, I am trusting.  I am keeping an open mind, and I am listening when things come up.

Let us see where this takes me next month…  🙂
Post-a-day 2017

City Surprises

Making my way through the nonsense that is the Shibuya Crossing on a holiday afternoon, I am feeling almost desperate to be on a train home.  There are just so many people in my way, with no respect for my desire to be not here. Not that I actually expect them to know I want not to be here – I am merely noting their ignorance to the matter.  I am almost to the station, when a small but clear opening appears right ahead of me in the shuffling crowd.

I hardly have to think – in fact, I think I know what it is without thinking – to recognize the colorful lettering on the page of that folded-open notebook being held just above people’s heads.

FREE HUGS

I hesitate a moment, verifying that the holder of the sign is respectable/huggable.  Despite my being in Japan, I accept that this young Japanese guy is holding the sign, and trust that he knows what it means.  Perhaps especially because I am in Japan, actually.  

He’s young and Japanese, and he looks trustworthy.  I throw open my arms, and instantly see his face light up, as he says an adorable “Sahn kyuu!” (How the average Japanese pronunciation goes for ‘Thank you.’)  We embrace, and it is solid and long and wonderfully perfect.  I return the verbal thanks, with emphasis on thanking him for the hug (as opposed to his thanking my willingness or whatever on my end), give a gloriously contended smile, and go on my merry way the last few yards to the station.

I savor the experience, and especially the loving hug, as I wander goofily through the crowds up to the tracks.  Thank you, God.  You gave me just what I needed in order to feel I was heading the right way just now.  I am in the right place right now, and it is perfect.  Thank you.

Post-a-day 2017

The Body Talks

Let’s talk about sex, baby.

Well, sort of… That’s what my body kept saying to me today.

Today was a day in which my body felt like it was in a state of panic.  In a way, it was in a state of panic (or bordering on panic, anyway).  To my body, this panic was expressed as a painful desire, né need to procreate.  

“Hannah, I need to reproduce – it is what I am designed so well to do, and I’ve waited so long already… let me go!!”  

Sigh.

Such was the sort of conversation my body and I had today.  It complained and begged and reasoned, and I sighed and just accepted the complaints.

Now, the kicker to all of this is that I am almost entirely comfortable and at ease now (despite being quite sleepy).  Why is that?  The same reason (-ish) that my body has been panicky lately – I need physical contact in my life.  Good, real, physical contact, corporal contact, person-to-person skin-to-skin touch is an absolute necessity for me.

And living in Japan has given me almost none of that.  It has quite truly driven my body into a state of panic, in fact.  

How did I go from freak-out to calm?  I hung out with friends and went dancing with them.  In this time, I leaned on them, they leaned on me, we rubbed backs, hugged (the real kind), held hands, stood with our arms draped on one another’s shoulders or around the waist or hips, touched this or that spot on someone to get his/her attention.  In short, we had a nice amount of physical contact with one another.  No, it was not anything compared to what I am accustomed to having back in the US, – we are So touchy-touchy in Texas, and especially at dance there – however it was tremendous when compared to my average day and week of zero physical contact here in Japan.

I went to a dance event in Korea just a couple weekends ago.  I danced like crazy there, and I hugged people and had lots of physical contact with people who love me and whom I love.  I think that going from a weekend jammed full of corporal contact and love, back to the solitude and non-touching life I have here right now, my body had a sort of shock.  After having gone so many months with only a bit of physical contact here and there in a month, I was accustomed to it.  But, after spending a weekend filled with physical contact, it has been difficult to go back to the zero-touching lifestyle.

And so my body cried for a while, until it at last had some loving physical contact this afternoon and tonight, at which point it is ready to take on this next week (until I head to the beach next weekend, at which point the physical contact occasions will resume). 

So, instead of listening to the crybaby body make excuses about its evolution and its original design for existence, I just get myself some physical contact, some hugs and snuggles and such, and things work out beautifully.

Cheers to loving physical contact! ❤

Post-a-day 2017

A philosopher for the moment

Today, I did some fun things including showing up my friend at children’s games, but I don’t feel like sharing about that right now.  I feel like being philosophical, ponderous… something like that.  And yet, here I lie with almost no thoughts, no words in mind or even on their way.  I am listening to the guitar upstairs, and what sounds like company sharing in the music for once (it is Saturday night, after all).  I am somewhat worried about the next couple months, specifically regarding how they will unfold.  I fear regrets, especially for after I have left this country, and am back living in my own.  I fear my being wonderful and amazingly successful in my endeavors once I’m back there.  I fear letting go of my endeavors in exchange for something safe.  I fear not becoming myself, not being myself once I am back there in a seemingly unchanged world as an incredibly changed person.  Someone told us to take a picture of ourselves before we begin this time in Japan.  I had forgotten to do that before leaving home, but I took a picture in the elevator on my way down to our very first meeting on my first day of orientation here.  I wonder what I will see different in my final photo as I say goodbye to this place.  I know that the two people in the photos are similar, however, they are in no way the same.  I loved and still do love who the former person was, and I do not want to become her again.  

These are things that are sitting in my being right now.  If you would have asked me before I wrote this, what I was thinking, I couldn’t have told you.  But now, as I have written this, I can see clearly that this is what was resting in my mind, in my heart, in my bones and flesh and breath… in fact, somewhat restricting my breath…, and that that is why I do not care to share the joys of today, but feel myself to be of a philosophical persuasion at present.  I could have lived with the greats right now.
Post-a-day 2017 

Dance Class #1

Dancing heals the soul.  I swear, it does.  Music brings up the emotions, the experiences of our lives.  And the dancing allows us to express whatever those emotions and experiences bring forth inside us.  When we are joyful, we dance it with ease and are free.  When we are sad, we might resist the dancing altogether – but that is why the dancing heals.  

In order to dance, and to dance properly (read “with the heart”), we have to allow that sadness to be free.  So long as we resist the sadness, we cannot truly dance – our heart is not in it.  As soon as we let go of being in control of the emotions, that sadness, it is as though literal bindings are removed, letting our legs and arms swing about freely to the beat.  Even if we feel that we cannot let go of the sadness, by throwing the heart into the dance, that sadness is expressed and freed.  

I could certainly put this into better words, but I really don’t feel like it right now.  So, I’ll just leave it at this:

If you can dance, and properly, with all your heart, you can express and free any state of emotion in which you currently find yourself.  And I got to do that tonight – it was really hard at first, resisting the dancing because of my emotional state, but then I reached that point of freedom from my fear-laced bindings, and I danced.  And it was wonderful.  : )
Post-a-day 2017

Soundtrack to life

Tonight, I dedicate my writing to the songs that make a soundtrack to life.  Riding home on the train this evening, exhausted, watching the lights blip on and off in the darkness as the world glided cooly by, my forehead and hand pressed against the glass of the door to block out the light inside the train, I noticed how the song in my ears was a perfect fit to the soundtrack for that scene of my life.

I truly don’t know what song it was, – something new from NoiseTrade – but I know that it was perfect.  If someone were filming my life at that moment, – what I was watching anyway, and how I was feeling – the song would have been what was playing with the clip.  That hopeful, I can make it, even though life is hard and lonesome at times feeling was so clear, I wanted to know what happened next in the movie.  Alas, it’ll be weeks before the next five minutes of that film make themselves clear (movies are such cheaters on time), but I’ll hang in there – I’m here for the long haul, anyway.  😛

It wasn’t as good as the time I was saying goodbye to the acrobats in Dallas (another time, and I’ll tell all, song included), at which point my life really was like a scene from a movie, soundtrack and all.  But it was still a good one.  It reminded me a bit of the power of music, the things it can do to the mind – give us hope when we’re hopeless, lift us when we’re down, energize us when we’re exhausted, sober us when we’re going a bit nuts-o.  Music is like love, but more easily acknowledged and with benefits more often reaped.

So, tonight, I say a hearty thank-you to music and to those who create it.  Especially to the ones that work so beautifully as soundtracks for life.  Thank you.  Thank you, all.  🙂

 

Post-a-day 2017