Splash No. 160 - Tenderness
Tenderness
A torrential tenderness has been washing over me lately — at a given moment, any small thing can push me to the verge of tears: from characters on TV giving a speech about friendship to a poem about trees to a picture of a cat that thinks she’s a dog. And more often than not, it’s all of the above.
Perhaps I should gaze up at the stars and attribute it all to Cancer Season, known for emotional intensity. With their size and motion and all that we still don’t know about them, it feels reasonable that they could be in cahoots to make me cry. Or maybe it’s the weather; San Francisco continues to confuse, with most days requiring multiple layers, except for a warm hour or two a day. Truly the dog days of summer.
This softness has felt like a superpower, helping me to engage with things I already thought important more deeply. Although I’ve already been contending with big questions of the world, my discoveries seem so much deeper when I can feel them in my bones. When I find myself moved by something, a blue energy fills my body, seeming to tug me more deeply into myself — an altered state, where the subject sometimes falls into focus and sometimes disappears entirely, as my mind sharply inscribes the moment into my memories.
I continue to be drawn to ideas around mortality, so I spent some time reading the last interview that Maurice Sendak (author of Where the Wild Things Are) gave, six months before his passing at 83:
“I'm not unhappy about becoming old. I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it's like a dream life. But, you know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging that I am in love with the world.
And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they're beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”
Near the end of one’s life, everything else must have to fall away and these emotions must be all that’s left underneath. I don’t know how I might’ve reacted to these words in the past but for now, I’m pure emotion — awestruck at the duality of pain and beauty that life offers and that love insists on. As I float in these feelings, Sendak’s words seem to transcend language, to something much more intimate — something fully known.
So, surely, this softness is a blessing, one that makes me endlessly grateful for what exists around me. I exist in a sea of love from those far and near, and only continue with support in words and thoughts and gestures — things that were always there, but I never knew how to find before. I imagine it impossible to feel this way if I were worse off — without any of these things, any of this safety.
Maybe I’d be more like my younger self, the child who used to cry about everything because everything was too much to handle and who eventually learned to hold back tears without thinking. All these years later, I wish I could guide him through the waters, show that it’s fine to feel so fully, to float through it all.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - Jamila Woods Digs Jazz - and so do I!
ARTICLE - "Why Can't We Be Friends?" by Brendan Mackie - an interesting deep dive into parasocial relationships, which I touched on ! great analysis in this article.
POEM - "As dogs" by Rachel B. Glaser - an incredible poem with a legitimate strategy for being more empathetic.
With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
Donate to Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta Mutual Aid Networks
Anti-racism resources
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Softly,
Nikhil