Disclaimer: I’m not precisely myself today. Last night was very rough. I haven’t had a cough like this for a very long time. I was coughing non-stop. There were moments when I wanted to vomit all of my organs. It was as if my body wanted to vomit my soul out. It was more than I could take. It’s been about 8-9 days since I first had symptoms, I always believe in self-healing, so I tend to leave my disease like this until it’s over or gets severe ( today, for example). I will only go to the hospital when I cannot take it anymore. Usually, that is when I’m so tired, and I don’t want to go anywhere. Anyway, I finally made it to the hospital at 2:30 PM, and it turned out I have a “vẹo vách ngăn on my left side of the nose” and some “viêm họng /mũi cấp.” It was funny because the doctor said as a statement: you drank lots of medicine already, right? I said no, I don’t have any medication at home, so I sort of live through it. He gave me a bunch of medicine ( including antibiotics, anti-inflammatory, cough medicine, anti-allergy), I mean the whole cocktail. I just took a bunch of them now ( except antibiotics), and my stomach rejects food now. Any food coming in will create a squeeze of pain in the stomach right when it’s passing through. I feel I’m an old machine that needed to replace the whole thing altogether. My heart throbs, like I, can sometimes feel the arrhythmia between the beats.
My mind is not exactly with me now. It’s with me but not with me.

So my writings today are a mixture between me, my Chinese herbal medicine, and a cocktail of Western medicine.

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If my life was to divide into the seasons of the year, I think my life started with Winter, Spring, and now I’m in the transitioning phase between Spring and Summer ( if I’m lucky) or straight down to Autumn ( if I’m less fortunate)

Winter (2010 – 2016)

What’s winter like? Winter is cold, the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate climates. The days are shorter and the nights are longer. The sun doesn’t shine as warmly on the Earth during the winter. Winter is hiding, avoiding, hibernating, hoping. Winter also means comforting, chilling, cuddling, and gathering. All of these verbs exactly describe the first 26 years of my life. I was living under a general theme of coldness, the number of good days is less than the bad days. I was escaping from my “bad” feelings – unsafe, unsecured, and sad. I was constantly lost but didn’t really do anything to get out of that stage except run away from time to time. I was operating under the assumption that “Dad’s going to rescue me no matter what”, there will be the time that “Dad is going to take Mom away from me”

We can say that I was “hiding, avoiding, hibernating” from life, hoping it would get better one day. I was comfortable hiding behind my Dad’ statue, and he loved it so much when I did so. He was the wise man that I always look up to. So the more prominent theme of this season is “IGNORANCE,” fueled by my Dad’s love and support. I could live like this and stay in this wintertime my whole life without the need to change if my Dad were to live thirty more years.

I didn’t know that I need to change and I didn’t know how to change. I could “go with the flow” for years to come if my Dad hadn’t died.

A couple of days ago, Facebook reminds me of my last trip to Japan. This was when Dad and I took the first (and the last) business trip together to Japan to learn about mushroom growing indoors and its efficiency. I still remember when we just went out for fun, he would tell me to have a coffee because he enjoys sitting out drinking his cups of coffee outdoor. I loved that moment a lot, it was as if, we were 2 old friends hanging out, sharing the same kind of interest. I was during a beautiful summer in 2016, Dad passed away that year in Winter – November 14th (only 4 months after this trip). I’m glad we made that trip together.

This picture, looking back at it, was the end of the first season of my life – Winter – 27 years in total ( but to be fair, perhaps 7 years since adulthood)

Spring (2016- 2021)

What does Spring look like? Spring is the season during which the natural world revives and reinvigorates after the colder winter months. Spring is when the weather turns warmer, trees begin to grow their leaves, plants start to flower, and young animals are born. Spring means rebirth, rejuvenation, renewal, resurrection, and regrowth. Spring means life.

In one of the recent videos Camel sent me, I can’t recall the speaker’s name, but he was talking about the future of music. He said: “ As long as springs awaken all life on earth, as long as the seasons change, there will be music.” The key elements is change, a significant change, a fundamental change. That change happened to me 6 years ago.

This Spring season of mine started with my Father’s departure from Earth. I can still picture it in my head, when my Dad casket left the house, the carrier made the gesture of saying goodbye to the alley 3 times before heading to cremation. That’s when I realized that my Dad would never return home.

Contrary to what you might think, the time when my Dad died was the time I was most alive. I was living in agony for a couple of years, tearing myself apart, mending it again. To borrow Captain Wentworth’s word: “ Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.” It felt like I was a hermit carb, looks really hard with the shell, but borrowed. But, I grew up quickly, so I quickly changed from shell to shell. I first gathered the courage to tell my mother that I would move to Hoi An ( with the support from Camel), then I moved to Thailand to study, leaving my job, come back to Vietnam, and “run” away from my mother’s house, come back to mother’s house to say that I will not come back to live with her… In that brief 5 years, I went through loss, pain, learning, and excitement twice over.

I learned that freedom is painful, and liberation is painful. And it’s only through pain that you can achieve this stage, much like Spring when plants try their best to bloom, Lambs trying their best to give birth …

Looking back, it’s only until now that I can totally immerse in Jung’s saying. I experience the loss of my Father and my child to the full extent so that I can have real liberation now. If I were to put a name to this season, I’d like to call it “Birthing and its pain”.

By now, I think it’s fair to say that I had never loved anyone wholeheartedly. I was too busy with my ignorance, my pains, and my sorrows that I could only share a small bit of my heart. I cannot tell how much, but I knew it wasn’t full on. My love was always a mixture of excitement, selfishness, fear, and compassion. My love lacked empathy. It’s paradoxical because I’m the person who lives and strives on feelings, yet, back then, I could not feel for my dearest. I can see it clearly now that it was fear. Fear got in the way of my pure love, fear stopped me from loving the person as he is.

Now that fear is gone, I would love to be in love again, to fall in love without fear sounds so exciting.

Looking back, I think this series of really painful notes, celebrate my liberation, you know, like the last battle is always the hardest one, and then freedom as we know it.

Summer (or Autumn) ( 2022 till present)

Summer means excitement. Summer means heat, activities, and summer means the height of the year where we drink and dance for days on end. Summer means love, the happy kind, the kind that, if we notice, always a spark at the corner of your eyes.

I was just at the beginning of this season, so I cannot tell if I were to enter summer or just skipped over to Autumn? But I can tell you what I really want is someone who will wake me up early, so I don’t miss a sunrise.

I don’t want a little kiss on the cheek, not like your first peck or like the time you made out with your junior high boyfriend behind the movie theater. Instead, I want throw-your-arms-around-his-neck, bury-your-fingers-in-his-hair, why-haven’t-we-done-this-before kissing.

Since I started writing again on my blog, I have thought about love a lot. Like a lot, you couldn’t imagine how noisy my mind is. I’m sick and homebound, which gives me even more time to think about love.

I started to hear my heartbeat from time to time. At first, I was confused about this constant bumping in my ears, but then I realized it was my heartbeat. My teacher said that the fact that you can hear your own heartbeat without trying meaning life is the most important thing to you now. It means you love life, and therefore, you are ready for love.

For a while, I stopped traveling, perhaps I stopped traveling altogether after that last trip to Japan with Dad. Nah, I took another hiking trip with Camel, that was my last fun travel trip. I stopped because I found no interest in it. My statement in the last couple of years was: I’ve seen it all, I’ve done it all, and whatever I’m doing right now is just a repeat of what I’ve done before, so I’m not exactly interested in traveling anymore.

What I want to do is to see the world again, the world might not change much, but I changed quite a bit. I feel like I was reborn – more like an upgrade from iPhone 3 to iPhone 13 Promax, with a better set of eyes, a more loving heart, and a very, very positive view of life. If the world is a TV, I can say that I was upgraded from an LCD to OLED (the good quality kind) with a much more in-depth look. I feel like, within me, there’s this energy of pure joy, so pure that even if you drop a bottle of black ink into it, it will not change color. I’m so excited about life, I want to be able to live as long as I can, perhaps 100 years, because there is so much more thing that I want to learn, see, and experience.

If I was punctuation in writing, I’d be an exclamation mark (!) in human form. Because I love excitement so much. I do hope that I’m in my summer season, and I’m very hopeful that love will come to me.