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22102024, to tears, you say?

there is no better place to be writing this other than my beloved North East Corridor amtrak line. specifically, the 186, which always catches a beautiful sunset no matter what season it is. during the autumn, you are taken through multitudes of auburn foliage and it is everything to me!

i have found myself moved to tears more occurrences in the last few months than in the last few years. easy does it happen, slowly does it creep up on me, and i laugh at the obscurity of the places i’ve shed tears in. these are not tears of mourning, of sadness, but rather a not-so-secret third thing. i’ve been crying at the beauty of the everyday.

there’s a bit of gratitude embedded into it; to feel so lucky to be alive. but moreso it’s this feeling of humility and awe of the wondrous, grandiose scale of earth and feeling so miniscule. in an instance, i’m reminded of how fleeting my time is and yet, i love so hard, i live on the backs of others before me, and my existence is futile if not only to love the future of what may come. i’m in tears for music notes that come together oh-so-perfectly, for these shared moments in time with people i have come to intertwine my existence with, and most heavily, for a deep sense of empathy towards strangers i likely will never see again.

my older sister visited me in boston a few weeks ago. although i was deep in a work crunch, i still wanted to carve out meaningful time for us to go explore the city on the weekend. we got walk-in seating at carmelina’s, went to the MFA on a free day (so lucky?!), and watched shrek the musical. i also attempted to get beabadoobee concert tickets for us and i got scammed. it wasn’t a lot of money at all, but the act of trusting someone online followed by the sinking feeling of “oh, it was too good to be true,” and the realization that i was taken for a fool made me think… was i really a fool, though?

i thought about the person on the other side of the screen and what could have motivated them to be so hostile to scam strangers for a living. then i burst into tears -- not for the act of being scammed, but for the sheer amount of empathy i had for someone who did me unbelievably wrong and who would feel zero remorse. i was just another person that fell for their trick and they would continue each day taking advantage of random strangers’ trust. what could provoke someone to do this? what cruelty must they have faced in order to end up in this situation? people are born good. if this was not true, civilization would not exist as we know it today. the goodness of humans and our care for one another is testament to our survival thus far.

we ended up finding a concert ticket for my sister (i am not much of a fan to begin with) and i made my way home in tears. on my walk to the T through the boston downtown night, a guy in an ice-cream-taco-fusion(?) food truck stopped me and gave me tissues to wipe my tears and snot with. i then burst into tears yet again, for i was reminded of the kindness that strangers do still have each for each other despite the few occurrences that try to dispel it; that empathy is one of our greatest traits. that you can be so moved by your love for others to dedicate your life to serving people beyond yourself. i tried to leave a google review but couldn’t find them. and for that, i cried again.

at the MFA, there were 50 different benches to sit on in this exhibit and they all displayed some form of signage that exclaimed “i am art, but you can sit on me!”. i read this exhibit description printed on a scroll hung up on the wall while sitting in a beanbag chair that mimicked a grassy hill:

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and in the past few months, it has felt like my thresholds have transformed far lower. is this a sign of aging? or a reflection of being around more spiritual best friends? or maybe this is what life is truly about?

last week, i sat in the halifax airport for much longer than i should’ve. i thought i could standby for an earlier flight but the stars did not align and i was left doing practice GRE questions in the waiting area of my gate. a few geometry questions in, a 75 year old man with an english accent asked me if he could join me for a few questions. i have never been one to say no to collaborative math!

i share my textbook with him and he chooses a question at random, beginning to talk through his reasoning with me. he remarks that he got his engineering degree from the university of cambridge in 1970. i tell him that was a year after my dad was born. he quips, “don’t say that!”

he does a question in a few seconds that took me a whole minute. then, he pulls out his phone and shows me restored pictures from his graduation ceremony. one after another, he scrolls through this photo library and occasionally stops at photos of the same woman — his wife, he says, and he corrects himself. my beautiful wife! look how beautiful she is! and i look up from his phone to see him in tears, smiling at her photo.

what brings you to halifax? i ask, and in the same incantation of solving a basic high school geometry problem, he shares how his wife of 58 years had passed last year. how she had, on her death bed, told him to keep on living. how his grandchildren played blackbird at her funeral. how they started dating at 16. how they had spent over 600 days on cruise ships together, hundreds of days travelling in a caravan across europe, and he had counted every single day they spent together. and lastly, how he was returning from a coast-to-coast canada train trip to an empty home he had never seen empty before.

and i’m in tears of course, but i could not cry in front of him - not if he wasn’t. i ask him about the secret sauce of being with one person for his whole life and if the love they shared ever diminished. he responds that he never even had a second thought about it. love was second nature to his life with her. everyday was meaningful when they were together.

pre-boarding began and he said his goodbye to me. i sat at the tarmac in shambles.

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when michael and i first reconnected, both of us in depressive post-breakup-graduation slumps, he sent me a graph of the activation energy of a substrate, and explained that talking to me was his catalyst on getting out of his hole.

our first date was the first time michael left guelph that summer. he woke up at 6am to catch the morning Go Train into toronto to spend a few hours eating grapes and playing cards with me.

life is better, together. whether we understand it subconsciously or not, i find myself becoming more earnest when i’m with him. and whether i can attribute this to our relationship is unknown, but i have come to care for the world far more than i have ever thought to before, or thought to even be capable of. through the lens of love, life is more beautiful than i could have ever known. daft punk and paul williams say it best: if love is the answer, we’re home.

our love has been the catalyst to my thresholds lowering. a life prior to love is a life of blindness. a loveless life inhibits the opportunity to have a reaction, let alone a chance to accelerate it. it is a grand thing to care about anything and everything, and a humbling one at that.

i think about these thresholds and whether they are there to protect me, or to form these ‘unforgiving boundaries’, and pose yet another third thing. they form the lines that i had never known to exist, to urge me to cross. they show me how much more there is to experience in the world. they represent opportunity for those who reach for it, to continue pressing on forward despite the uncomfortable nature of being moved past unknown directions. i shed tears because i care, and to care is a wonderful luxury that we must treasure in itself.

whenever i find myself in tears — this time, out of sadness — it is a sadness that has a source beyond my internal being. the thoughts in my head are always around my own shortcomings, but not about how i wished they did not exist. no, my sadness is stemmed from how i think my shortcomings affect those around me and consequently, how i must solve them in order to be the person i want to be for others. it is less, “i am not the person i want to be” and more “i must improve for the people i love so dearly.” selflessness is a guiding star through my life and there is an accountability brainworm that cannot be quashed inside of me. i have grown to care so hard that i feel like i must dedicate my entire being to serving everything i care for. despite this, i must remember that i am still me.

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i’ve been thinking about death’s end (the book) a lot, specifically cheng xin (the protagonist of the third book) and the quote “給歲月以文明,而不是給文明以歲月”, which roughly translates to “make time for civilization instead of giving up on civilization to make time.” motherhood, empathy, innocence, and utmost care for the world. a willingness to sacrifice anything to preserve what makes humanity, humanity. in many ways i have been grappling with these dilemmas while working and thinking around more intense natural system climate interventions; how much do you alter the earth in order to save the earth?

and the worst part is that i feel so deeply empathetic towards cheng xin, whose decision making draws a lot of parallels to mine with extremely uncertain endings. audiences have perceived her to be weak, to have been blinded by her love for humanity to not be able to make the right choices despite it being sound.

in an interview, liu cixin says: “写这个人就没想过让读者喜欢，这不是读者会喜欢的人。她其实很自私，但这种自私和普通的自私不一样，因为她自己觉察不到。遵循道德的人其实很自私，因为他们除了道德和良心什么都不管，程心恰恰就是一个这样的人。她会认为自己很崇高，认为自己不自私，认为自己的价值观和道德准则是普世的、正确的。至于遵循它会带来什么后果，她只考虑能不能让自己的良心得到平安。这种人有牺牲精神，能够为自己的价值观和道德准则牺牲生命，但这也不能改变他们自私的本质。在小说里，真正做到“大爱无仁”不自私的人，会从人类的整体去考虑，因为牺牲良心是最难的事情，比牺牲生命要难得多。”

Which roughly translates (thank you to a random reddit comment for this): “it is meant to write this way so that readers will dislike Cheng Xin. She is actually a selfish figure, but unlike the normal selfishness since she is not aware of it. People who abide by some moral standards are selfish as they care nothing else than moral and conscience, and Cheng Xin is one of such. She deems that she is of good cause and without self interest, and that her ethical principles are universal, but pay no attention to the consequences of abiding them. She only cares about her inner peace out of her conscience (being fulfilled). Cheng can sacrifice for her ethical principles, but this does not change her selfish nature. In my novel, people who truly are unselfish, “with the ultimate love so that it appears without compassion and empathy”, will think from the perspective of human beings as a whole, for sacrificing conscience is the hardest, way harder than sacrificing lives.”

unfiltered, open compassion is so core to who i am that i simply cannot fathom a world where i have this “ultimate love” that cixin refers to. this is logic-pilled and rationality-maxing to the extreme. there must be some line between being someone who cares while making optimal decisions! because of this, the way i have begun thinking about the ways i take action for the world have been deeply altered out of respect for humanity. i must be compassionate, but not be stuck at an impasse when it comes to difficult decisions that affect a population i cannot fully 100% understand beforehand. that must be the hardest part around explicit leadership.

implicit leadership, ie. speaking on behalf of people without being given permission to do so, is another crossroad i find myself in. what gives me the right to alter earth? what are the sacrifices i’m willing to make for what i may personally think is best for humanity, even if scientifically/empirically backed? is this moral? if not, how do i conduct my actions in a way that can mitigate much of this risk? theseus’ paradox; is our earth the same earth after all these years? after all these changes? (see: climatevalues.html for some, somewhat unrelated but specific zoomed in thinking).

there are lessons to be learned about being steadfast and having these contrarian, overthought convictions about the world. but there are also lessons and proof that time after time, our civilization has only come to be through love. we must not forget these roots, nor ever stray from this idealism. life and humanity is nothing without love — so we must make time for civilization; 給歲月以文明。

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