If Loneliness Was A Flower: On Self-Integrity and the Art of Personal Tradition

A poem and essay about honouring our invisible winters in a world that chases prescribed festivity and performative joy

Feb 16, 2024

The poem that follows is —

〰️ a resistance manifesto against the things that subtly, and not so subtly, take from us our breathing space to truly be and to live — the things that emphasize quantity over quality, and form and appearance over substance, the tangible and intangible pressures against individual departures from socially prescribed relational constructs, traditions, celebrations and festivities

〰️ a tribute to winter — the winter around us, the winter in the ties that bind as well as break, and all of our inner winters

〰️ in celebration of the invisible threads that matter, and that bring value and meaning to our lives (even if no one else can see them)

If you follow the poem on her walk, you’ll go on to find an essay out on an exploration of self-integrity and the art of creating and honouring our own personal traditions.

If Loneliness Was A Flower

If loneliness was a flower

she would bloom in frost

an icicle of thorns, un/broken —

an igloo for a bud, un/crushed —

a curling of leaves

into a winter-origamied roll

shaken, not stirred

〰️

If loneliness was a city

she would be a city

of countless millions of people

in the middle of whom

I walk

and get seen — through —

a countless million times

she would be a city

that initially beckons

by speaking my language

but then fails to understand

a single word

I say

〰️

If loneliness was my body

she would be my feet

walking away

from the first place

I had known as home

but then, slowly

began

to stop

recognizing

she would be my blood

following the course

of art~~ill~~eries and veins

to meet, and leave

a heart

that has changed

and been changed

by other hearts

she would be my mouth

after my heart

has jumped inside it

〰️

If loneliness was a letter

she would be the letter

I filled, with tears as my pen,

and then burned,

to a recipient

missed forever

in a different world

whose response

I could never

receive

〰️

If loneliness was a tradition

she would be watching me

cut up

the ties // that bind

trying my hardest

to forge

/ new ties of

/ my own /

〰️

If loneliness was water

she would be an iceberg

her invisible depths

my frozen inner world

lying silent in the night

unheard, most of all,

by you

〰️

If loneliness was a word in the dictionary

she would be the word “misunderstood”

as, for example

being misunderstood

by the woman

who bled, to bring me into this world

to the same extent

(more or less) as she

was misunderstood

by the woman

who bled, to bring her into this world

〰️

If loneliness was a tangerine

she would be the peel

forgotten, in the table corner

still sharing

her gentle fragrance

noticed

by no one

in the absence of

her flesh

she would be the one

you never offered

to peel for me

〰️

If loneliness was a character

she would be the Chinese character for lonesome 孤

representing the seed 子

apart from, and outside of, the melon 瓜

〰️

If loneliness was a home

she would be a house

lost from her memories

empty in her rooms, except

for the lasting cobwebs

spun out

from her soul

she would be a teacher

of the difference

between a house and a home

〰️

If loneliness was a table

she would be round

the better to enforce reunions

with,

that empty seat

demanding to be filled, lightly

by someone laden, full

of the emptiness carried

, within

〰️

If loneliness was a birthday

she would be mine, sometimes

and sometimes, yours

an exchange of breaths

wishes for happiness

overheard

in the whisper of

a flickering flame

On Self-Integrity

When the camellia blooms © 2022 Suyin Tan

The poem above came to me late in the most silent depths of the night, a few days after February had rolled in.

In writing it, I realized that the words had arrived wanting to honour the different layers of grief that have touched my life, and that get awakened during particular personal and social occasions that have been socially designated to be festive.

The words are my witness to that strange dissonance between the space that this grief fills in my life, and the prescribed standards of joy and festivity for specific occasions of celebration in my country of origin that, in my personal experiences of them, leave no breathing space to be — neither for grief nor for me.

These prescriptions have challenged my ability to show up fully as myself, in assertion of my personal values and what I actually care about.

These prescriptions have demanded that I erase my grief and perform a role that makes a fiction out of my lived reality.

In conversations with friends in recent years, we’ve explored our experiences of the dichotomy between personal interpretations and honouring of birthdays, festive seasons, relationships, associations and connections versus the pressure to live up to the prescribed norms and standards that have been socially constructed around them.

On the other side of these celebratory types of social constructs, there’s also the general lack of acknowledgment of the fundamental nature of grief as being, in fact, unceasing.

Societies and cultures prescribe the “correct” ways to grieve a loss, the “appropriate” amount of time to feel grief, and even what types of losses we are led to believe are “permitted” to be grieved and spoken about.

Growing up in Singapore, and later returning to visit annually as an adult who’s spent more than half my life living abroad, I’ve encountered these challenges in my personal experiences of the form of Singaporean Chinese New Year festivities that have been prescribed for me within my default social and relational circles.

Those forms of prescription potently distilled for me aspects of the societal culture which, on looking back, remind me of some of the biggest reasons I’d felt compelled to uproot and to try and make my home somewhere else in the world.

Through a number of years of obligatory participation in those festivities, I began to recognize that forcing myself to show up in those prescribed ways brought about strong and exhausting internal battles within me.

Those battles were the result of my instinctive reaction to the fact that what was being prescribed was based on a prioritization of values very different to my own:

— Prescription #1: There is an overt and dominant emphasis on material accumulation and excess, and on corresponding external markers of achievement, as reflected in the nature of the celebratory wishes, greetings and symbols that are selected and designated as customary for this period. More is more (applying also to number of members of a family), and less is really-not-so-good.

Implicitly or otherwise, there is a corresponding amplification of feelings of “less than” and fears of scarcity, and a corresponding diminishment of the value (self- and externally perceived) of any person whose life reflects a different order of priorities.

As a close friend shared with me, it also creates a paradox, already prevalent in modern living, where people staggering under the persistent mental burden of being “not enough” are demanded to show up here brimming even more than usual with (specific types of) “abundance”, in words and appearance.

In the imbalance of this equation, something needs to be used to fill the gap. This invites the question of, what have we been scrambling to use (consciously or unconsciously) to plug this existential gap?

— Prescription #2: While family reunion is emphasized, how this unfolds in reality reflects the clear delineation between the significance of daughters versus sons in a traditional Chinese family.

The Chinese language itself refers to daughters and a daughter’s side of the family (if she has started her own) as “external” to the family of origin, in the sense of no longer being regarded as an actual part of the family following a daughter’s marriage. This is in contrast to the linguistic reference to sons and a son’s side of the family as “internal”, in the sense of being fundamental and integral to the family and blood lineage.

Beyond the language, this delineation is socially enforced by the Chinese New Year tradition of mothers and their children being obliged to prioritise celebrating with the father’s family of origin over the mother’s family of origin, with no regard to the individual conflicts (inner or outer) this stirs up.

This delineation also filters through to the creation of a hierarchy (spoken or unspoken) of status attributed to different members of the family, that shows itself distinctly at all nature of family events, be they festive occasions, weddings or funerals.

— Prescription #3: There is an avoidance of acknowledging or speaking of death, the cessation of existence on the material plane, and those who are no longer present in tangible form.

By extension, this dismisses and displaces the grief felt by those who can’t simply forget or ignore the presence of this loss in their lives.

— Prescription #4: There is an avoidance of acknowledging or speaking about relationships and connections that have broken and ended, about the messy, inconvenient truth of what lies beneath the form and appearance of the hastily assembled semblance of as-close-to-normal-as-possible.

By extension, this seals the unwritten agreement that the maintenance of harmonious appearances is more important than individual integrity and wellbeing.

To the extent that the substance of my reality and the realities of those I love(d) and care(d) about have diverged from, or fallen on the wrong side of, these prescriptions, the hard obligation to show up each time, without fail, not just as a performer, but as a believable performer of these prescriptions, had the effect of making these occasions some of the loneliest and most depleting ones for me.

Not to mention the loneliness of living the paradox that sometimes, the people I love(d) the most deeply or who I’m meant to be bound to the most tightly, are the people I find most difficult to be in reunion with, because of the resulting pressures on my sense of self.

I’ve reflected on how it would make sense that if I struggle ordinarily to live within a particular social and cultural construct, that the dominant (and most highly commercialized) festive period, with its amplification of the norms of that construct, would correspondingly amplify the sense of utter dislocation and alienation I feel.

But making sense of this doesn’t make the sense of it more bearable.

The sense of dislocation grows stronger with the innate expectation to find belonging in the place and among the community into which I was born, because, well — if not here, then where?

On writing this, I think of the Welsh word, hiraeth, a longing pull on the heart in response to the distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.

Either because it no longer is, or because, in fact, it never was.

〰️ 〰️ 〰️

Even as I’ve been writing this essay, the deluge of pictures on social media over this Lunar New Year period showing countless examples of people and their extended families appearing to have successfully pulled off the festivities “as prescribed”, in a way that I’ve never been able to do, gave me pause.

— Who are you to be questioning and resisting what everyone else looks like they’re thoroughly enjoying and finding thoroughly meaningful?

— Why is it only you who sees a problem with this?

— Why would you take that so seriously? It’s No Big Deal.

— Why do you always have to overreact / be so sensitive?

— Are you sure it’s not you who is weird or wrong?

And on and on goes the voice in my head.

After a week of being torn (as in, feeling visceral pain, fear and all other manner of emotions and physiological reactions) between the admonishments of this voice, and the fire I’m feeling to assert my self-integrity and personal values (vis-à-vis that of the “tribe”) in a way I’ve never dared to, the fire has burned away the inner critic and I’ve pressed “publish” on this essay.

(This is thanks in no small part to the precious community of friends and mentors mentioned in my Love Notes at the end of this essay, where I also share about how moving out of the comfort zone of self-censorship that’s motivated by a primal instinct to fit in can actually lead to finding true belonging.)

Together with publishing this essay, I’m finally voicing my (years of suppressed) disagreement with social constructs of traditions, celebrations and festivities that deny me the acknowledgment and the space and freedom to show up as someone with lived experiences that aren’t accommodated by the enforced narrative of a tradition.

I’m asserting my choice to stop participating, “as prescribed”, in them.

I’m acknowledging that this is important to me because it’s part of what self-integrity means to me. And I’m acting on my acknowledgement that self-integrity is far more precious to me, on an existential level, than appearing loyal to inherited social and relational circles.

Acting on this choice has been anything but easy, and one way I have helped myself provide what I need is by locating myself in a different geographical space and time from the holders of expectations of how I should exist, especially during occasions of socially prescribed festivity.

〰️ 〰️ 〰️

And yet, I haven’t stopped feeling the individual longing to be part of a tradition in some way, the individual longing to establish their sense of place in the past, present and future, and to feel connected to others who inhabit the past, present and future.

Traditions contribute to the shaping of self-concept, identity, connections with others and expressions of shared values — an anchoring of the individual in a sense of belonging and meaning within, and across, space and time.

At the same time, as I change and evolve in self-awareness and self-identity, I need my traditions to change with me. What are traditions if not something that represents the values of the people who create them?

So I’ve been pondering what it could mean for me as an individual to create my own personal traditions, rituals and ceremonies relating to rites of passage and initiations in life.

Various dictionary definitions of the word “tradition” emphasize these common strands:

— the passing down or inheritance

— of established thoughts, patterns of behaviour, beliefs or stories

— between one generation to another, of a particular society or group

Implicit in this definition is the passing of time and of generations of people.

Implicit in that is the conundrum faced by the individual who chooses to create personal traditions of their own — the practical impossibility in their single lifetime of satisfying this definition of a “tradition”, given the absence of time or people on their side.

Implicit in that is the suggestion that loneliness is inevitable, for those who find themselves in the liminal space between breaking free from traditions that have been stiflingly imposed on them, without yet having roots to sink into new traditions of their own.

It struck me that this definition of tradition also conceives of a uni-directional passing of behaviours, beliefs, and stories.

And, it pre-supposes a linear passing of time.

But, I woke up this morning thinking, how would this all change if there is more than one definition of time?

The Art of Personal Tradition

Como agua para el tiempo — Like water for time © 2022 Suyin Tan

The ancient Greeks used the term, chronos, to describe one conception of time. This is the one that most of us living today have been taught — it is clock and calendar time, a quantitative concept objectively measured in years, months, hours, days, minutes, seconds, ticking towards “the end” in chronological fashion.

At the same time, they perceived a second type of time, kairos. This is a qualitative concept of time that emphasizes its subjective perception and experience, as captured in the essence of the Right moment.

The Right moment is a moment of ripeness, of perfection for its intended purpose, of fullness in its lived experience.

It is a concept of time that I understand and have experienced as a perception of time stopping, when I step into a time and space that feels as natural to me as breathing, and that connects me to all that matters to me.

A moment where I cannot imagine anything more precious and meaningful to me than living life in the way offered to me by that moment.

A moment where time stops, except for the tears rolling down my face and the blossoming open of my heart.

It is a concept of time where I experience the end also as a beginning, where I experience being changed permanently by my encounters with nature, life and beauty.

It is a concept of time where time is marked by the moment before I’ve lived an experience, and the moment after I’ve lived it, and how differently time feels to me in the before and after of this experience.

To borrow the words of those who have, in other times and spaces, made similar observations about the type of time and space I’m speaking of here, and who have expressed this in subliminal ways I’ve not been able to forget —

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
[…]
I gazed— and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
— from Daffodils, by William Wordsworth

〰️ 〰️

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
— from Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake

Because there’s more than one definition of time, the space correspondingly opens up for us to conceive of a different definition of tradition.

My experiences of kairos, of infinity in the palm of my hand and eternity in an hour, become a part of me that I naturally always carry with me wherever I go.

Each of these experiences are the seeds of a personal tradition.

Even if I’ve tasted an experience just once and haven’t yet been able to repeat it in chronological time, the essence of that encounter, and how it made me feel, lives on in me.

One encounter is all it takes for it to teach me how I want to fill my days and time, and who and what I love having around me.

These experiences become the seeds of stories about the meaning of life that I choose to nurture and find a resting place for within me.

Just as the Romantic poets, like Wordsworth and Blake, perceived that they were irreversibly changed by each encounter with nature so that they could never again be the same person encountering the same manifestation of nature, I think about my self-created tradition as being passed down, in kairos time, by one version of me to another, as I journey through life’s encounters.

Years ago, I was struck by an indescribable sense of wonderment and beauty (again, creating a perception of kairos through a moment before, and a moment after) when I encountered how this idea was put into words by Durian Sukegawa in the book Sweet Bean Paste —

I can’t tell you how many times I wished I were dead.
Deep down, I believed that a life has no value if a person is not a useful member of society. I was convinced that humans are born in order to be of service to the world and to others.
But there came a time when that changed, because I changed.
I remember it clearly. It was a night of the full moon […]
While I was alone on that path in the woods, I came face-to-face with the moon. And oh! What a beautiful moon it was. I was enchanted. It made me forget everything I had suffered […], being shut up in here and never going out.
Then next thing, I thought I heard a voice that sounded very much like the moon whispering to me:
I wanted you to see me.
That’s why I shine like this.
From then on, I began to see everything differently. If I were not here, this full moon would not be here. Neither would the trees. Or the wind. If my view of the world disappears, then everything that I see disappears too. It’s as simple as that.
And then I thought, what if this didn’t apply to just me, what if there were no other human beings in this world? What about all the different forms of life that have the ability to be aware of the presence of others — what would happen if none of them existed either?
The answer is that this world in all its infinity would disappear.
You might think I’m deluded, but this idea changed me. I began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. And that’s all this world wants of us.
— from Sweet Bean Paste, by Durian Sukegawa

And so I have created intentional personal traditions in substitution for the inherited traditions that had demanded that I show up in specific types of ways, and put on specific types of performances with specific types of people, that went against how I wish to do things.

I’ve created my own traditions in order to honour aspects of my life and human existence that are deeply personal and precious to me, and to honour my personal values and my personal interpretation of, and evolving relationship with, my heritage and my roots.

Some ways I have started to create my own traditions, in honour of the lessons from my lived experiences and encounters with beauty, people, nature and events, are —

〰️ solo visits to secret gardens on the anniversaries of my maternal grandmother’s passing — they are secret because no know else but me carries the secret garden landscape of memories and emotions I have within me as I sit in that garden. In that garden, I am wholly and simply my grandmother’s granddaughter, as she sees me (even today, even now), not as a patrilineal tradition tries to categorize me

〰️ focusing on elevating and honouring the features of Chinese lunar calendar festivals which receive less attention, but have personal meaning to me, such as the emphasis on reunions. I create space for my kind of reunions, with those who truly matter to me — loved ones, friends and strangers with whom I share a genuine heartfelt connection, those who are physically present with me and those who aren’t and can no longer be, and also, all the versions of myself I carry in me from different times and spaces

〰️ cultivating my own relationship with the moon and the lunar cycles, re-creating in my personal life their connections with art, literature, ceremony, beauty and community in the history of Chinese civilization — these are all aspects of my heritage and culture that have been drowned out by the fixations of modern consumerist and productivist societies

〰️ opening up space for the flowing of kairos in my life — one important way this happens for me is in my cultivation of a personal practice of tea ceremony and meditation, sitting with tea when I need a clear mirror, to see and hear myself, and for reunion with all that matters to me

〰️ wherever possible, spending birthdays lived as a normal day in an out-of-the-ordinary-for-me place, soaking up the memories of previous birthdays lived in this way that were filled with more beauty and connection in a single day than entire extended periods of time I’ve passed through

I know I’ll be inspired to keep adding to this list.

Porque te ouço melhor de dentro do coração do jardim secreto — Because I hear you best from inside the heart of the secret garden © 2022 Suyin Tan

〰️ 〰️ 〰️

And in your heart

a secret garden blooms

where you can always go

to find

the ones you love

and

the ones you miss

— written on the tenth anniversary of my grandmother’s passing, sitting far away from anyone I knew, deep in the heart of a jardim secreto in Porto, Portugal (the city I would find myself moving to, 21 months later)

〰️ 〰️ 〰️

My own traditions are my way of deeply honouring the humans and non-humans, past and present, in my life who have made me feel most alive and taught me the meaning of life, who live on in me, and without whom celebrations and traditions have no meaning.

My truest and most precious reunions have happened while I’ve been far away from my physical home of origin and sometimes even without other people around me.

They’ve happened when I’ve been able to, in a way that’s deeply true and personal to me, honour and recognise how the spirit and essence of my maternal grandparents live on in me, following the moments in time that sifted us into different planes of existence.

I recognize that, paradoxically, this is precisely what I couldn’t make happen when I was in my physical home of origin, surrounded by people who I had expected to understand.

My own traditions show me that time and space can be bent in a way that connects us so intimately to life, that interconnectedness is what I feel in my being and not what someone asks me to perform, that time is not eating my life away, but is rather embracing and wrapping me up in its flow.

I can be my own living tradition with the way I see the world, and the way that I choose to move through and dance with life.

At the heart of my personal traditions is honouring all of myself, and all of the people on whose shoulders I stand.

As I was deep in my internal struggle with writing and publishing this piece, I came across this poignant reminder from Thich Nhat Hanh that we are, after all, made from the history of Earth —

“In the past I have been a cloud, a river, and the air. And I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on Earth.”

At the heart of my personal traditions is the art of alchemy, of finding the beauty and preciousness I had with and within me all along, whether because of, or despite, what I faced and encountered, and finding my sense of inner peace with it all.

Which I feel is what I’ve managed to give myself in the writing of this piece.

Thank you for receiving these words and being part of the personal tradition I am watering.

Happy Seventh Day of the Lunar New Year (also celebrated in the Chinese lunar calendar as Everybody’s Birthday)1, in my personal way, from me to you.

〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️ 〰️

Do you have your own personal traditions you’ve created in memory and honour of personally meaningful encounters and experiences in life? Or have you been inspired to create any? Please share on this, or anything else that resonated for you, in the comments below ♡

A Tangerine Moon

Discussion about this post