This Blog is in Progress

Since this is my inaugural post on this site, I think it makes the most sense to start at the beginning of it all.

I never learnt how to walk. This is a story my parents love to tell whenever I visit. In the pauses when there’s nothing else to say and they’re reminded of how quickly we’ve sprouted away from them, it’s something they repeat almost as if to ground themselves and us. To briefly remember when we were younger, and so were they, and the distance between us was not so wide. It feels almost tinged with grief. You never actually learnt to walk, you ran. Almost as if pleading with me to stop running and walk with them.

Here’s how the story goes, as I have often heard. When I was whatever age a baby is when they start learning to walk. Even back then, our personalities were evident. My brother would totter and stumble, never faltering despite a tumble. I would remain standing by the couch, hands firmly gripped as if I would collapse if I let go. I don’t know why I was so hesitant to let go and join my brother in stumbling around on the rug. I like to imagine it was some fear that the rug would open up and swallow me whole if I fell, never to be seen again. Maybe, despite watching my brother happily fall over and get back up, I thought I would not recover from such a fall. The distance to the ground was so small back then, and the rug was waiting for me with softness. My leading theory is that I was simply optimizing, gathering information. One day, I let go and, shakily but without stumbling, ran across the room to the other couch. I began to walk after that. Perhaps I wanted to prove to myself that walking was not a challenge, that I could handle things that were more difficult.

The pattern persisted well into my teenage years. I found myself interested in piano, and spent countless hours watching professionals play complex pieces on YouTube. I picked my favorites and learnt to hit the keys the way they had. Jelly Roll Morton, Chopin, Cantaloupe Island. I begged my mother to sign me up for piano lessons and she eagerly obliged. I instantly found myself irritated – why was I being given scales to practice? Where were the intricate pieces?

Since reaching the end of another decade of life, I’ve found myself battling to reconcile the part of me that wants the end state and the real aging part of me that demands relaxation. With that came a restlessness that I haven’t ran with any of the ideas I spent my 20s absorbing and incubating. Maybe I can’t run these ideas, but I hope I can use this as a place where you can walk with me as I learn to walk through them.